Fantasy writer Django Wexler is a lifelong Star Wars fan and has usually needed to publish a story set in that universe. He got his want very last year when his short story “Amara Kel’s Policies for TIE Fighter Pilot Survival (Almost certainly)” appeared in the anthology The Empire Strikes Back again: From a Selected Issue of Perspective.
“The concept is to show the factors of watch of people in these movies who are not the major people,” Wexler states in Episode 474 of the Geek’s Manual to the Galaxy podcast. “I was genuinely happy to be a section of it. It was a genuinely exciting problem.”
Wexler’s story focuses on the life of TIE fighter pilots, who are frequently treated as faceless cannon fodder in the Star Wars films. “I had gotten genuinely into the X-Wing Miniatures Sport—which is just an X-wings vs. TIE fighters video game you participate in on a tabletop—and that had expanded on the lore a minimal bit, so I needed to dive into that in a short story,” Wexler states. “So when they told me to do 1 from Empire Strikes Back again, this is what I came up with as a TIE fighter pilot story.”
The films depict TIE fighters as unbelievably reckless, commonly diving into slim areas and colliding with asteroids, cruisers, and just about every other, which helps make Wexler think that TIE fighter pilots should be topic to extreme propaganda. “I genuinely needed to do the viewpoint of an individual who had kind of noticed by way of that and was carried out with this bullshit,” he states. “And so her regulations are all incredibly a great deal about, ‘Let the other men be the kinds who fly into the asteroids, if you want to dwell by way of a tour of obligation.’”
Wexler hopes his story helps make viewers think about the actuality that most TIE fighter pilots are likely unfortunate conscripts with families who really like them. “Nobody genuinely wants to be reminded that all the men who get shot or punched or thrown off a bridge throughout these action movies are folks,” he states. “That’s the rationale that when the rebels are attacking the Loss of life Star, we can see all the rebels’ faces, and the TIE fighter men are all wearing masks. It is so that we can have this fantasy of consequence-totally free violence.”
Hear to the complete interview with Django Wexler in Episode 474 of Geek’s Manual to the Galaxy (above). And verify out some highlights from the dialogue underneath.
Django Wexler on novellas:
“Tor.com has carried out astounding function in the novella place, and it’s genuinely been 1 of my ambitions to publish a novella for them sometime, mainly because there have just been so many—Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Small children sequence there is a great 1 named Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, which I love—and just on and on. There are all these great novellas that they’ve carried out. … It is ebooks, mainly. The difficulty is that you simply cannot value a serious book at $2.ninety nine and have bookstores stock it—it’s just not worthy of their time. And conversely you simply cannot value a novella at $12 and anticipate to provide all that lots of copies. And so the availability of ebooks has just kind of altered the essential economics of it to make this possible.”
Django Wexler on magic:
“A good deal of the magic units in the harder fantasy stuff—and most of what I publish is a ‘hard’ magic procedure style of thing—does have a kind of computer system-y bent, at times additional explicitly than some others. … In my very first fantasy sequence, The Shadow Campaigns, 1 of the factors that it explores is that there is the fundamental fact of the magic procedure, which I worked out in a kind of vague way, but then all the various cultures who are uncovered to it, and study to manipulate it, do so with various ideas about what it basically is and how it is effective. And for whatsoever rationale, that feels like a incredibly computer system-y notion to me, that you have this fundamental actuality, but actuality is also outlined by how folks use it.”
Django Wexler on Asimov’s journal:
“The very first story I at any time wrote—which I wrote when I was 15—I wrote it and I confirmed it to my dad, and he imagined it was genuinely very good. What he said to me was, ‘You know how when you do something, we frequently inform you that it’s very good mainly because we really like you and we want to assist you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I recognize that.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, this is not that. I think this is genuinely very good.’ Anyway, we sent it to Asimov’s but they didn’t consider it, which in retrospect is likely for the finest. But it cemented Asimov’s as the marketplace for science fiction for me—no slight to the other publications, but that was the 1 I study. So lastly having to provide something to them was absolutely an achievement.”
Django Wexler on his short story “REAL”:
“That 1 commenced daily life as Sailor Moon fan fiction. It was a story that I wrote back again in my fan fiction times, and I ought to say none of the real words and phrases in the fan fiction turned into this story, mainly because I just sat down and wrote it all over again. … It was about a person in the serious planet who sees what he thinks is a video game/Tv show bleeding into the serious planet. But the essential notion and the ending stinger is all from that previous story. I kind of genericized it a minimal bit, so it’s not basically primarily based on any certain function of fiction any more. So that was a very good example of repurposing an previous story, and not even copying any of the words and phrases from 1 doc to one more but just having one more crack at a notion and executing it superior, I hope.”
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