With Star Wars: Episode 7 less than a year away, Disney and Lucasfilm are facing a conundrum: just how many billions do they want to make from ancillary merchandise? Get ready for Star Wars bedsheets and Star Wars lunch boxes and, of course, countless new Star Wars action figures. You will be able to fight other adults in the toy aisle at Target like never before! However, Star Wars aficionados hoping to celebrate their fandom in a quieter way will also have their fair share of options, namely 20 new books bridging the 30-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

Although the news was officially revealed on Entertainment Weekly, we’ve been talking about these new books over in WookieeLeaks, our own Star Wars column, for quite some time now. We’re happy to report that just about everything that has been officially revealed lines up with what we have been hearing. Sure, the old expanded universe is dead and buried, but the vacuum is being filled with impressive speed. We hope everyone is ready to do their homework and learn the brand new canon. This is serious business.

The 20 books will be released as part of an initiative called “Journey to The Force Awakens”, which will involve several different publishers putting out everything from novels for adults, YA fiction, and children’s storybooks. So don’t fret about finding time to read every single new Star Wars book. A couple of them will be sticker books that will literally take 30 seconds to burn through.

In addition to filling the fans in on what transpired since we last saw Luke, Han, Leia and the rest of the original trilogy gang, these books also have the monumentally important job of introducing kids raised on the prequels to the first three films. New books will retell the events of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi from new perspectives, giving younger viewers reasons to care about the old people co-starring in the new movie. This will be part of an initiative that we just made up called Journey to Making Kids Care About the Actually Good Movies in the Star Wars Saga, AKA, doing the good Lord’s work.

Like with the new comics being published by Marvel, Disney and Lucasfilm seem to be pursuing genuine quality with these latest offerings, recruiting acclaimed genre writers to take a stab at the Star Wars universe. Writers like Greg Rucka, Cecil Castellucci and Claudia Gray have been quietly writing novels set in the new canon for awhile now, secretly collaborating with the screenwriters of the newest films so they can include all of the necessary easter eggs and references. Forget about a series new Star Wars books! We want a book examining the meetings where everyone sat in a room and hammered out a newly revised universe.

There is no official schedule set for the “Journey to The Force Awakens” books quite yet, but most of them are expected to hit shelves this Fall.

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