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I read a few of the books by Timothy Zahn, which were supposedly endorsed by Lucas as the follow-ups to the orginal film series.


Zahn is a legitimate SF writer, too good really for this sort of thing, especially for a control freak like Lucas. Worse, Zahn writes hard SF and Star Wars is not hard SF.

I haven't read Zahn's SW stuff but I imagine you're seeing why "real writers" shouldn't do novelizations.

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 is about the only case I can think of where a professional author got involved in a movie novelization and succeeded. But that was a unique case - nobody else does the process like Kubrick & Clarke did.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock