## Chapter 9

1 The third quality of a good commander: the ability to see what is most valuable in his troops. Competence and the ability to learn are more important than the trappings of pomp and pageantry.

Though Pellaeon clearly still misses that pomp, at least a little.

—TZ

2 I have another double planet, Poln Major and Poln Minor, as the center-piece of my latest Star Wars book, Choices of One. There must be something about double planets I really like.

—TZ

3 Once again one would think, from this description of tactics, that Tim has a military background. He does not!

—BM

4 The fourth quality of a good commander: he plans ahead as much as possible.

—TZ

5 I was just a couple of weeks into Heir when I received a big box containing some of the sourcebooks and game modules that West End Games had created over the years for the Star Wars role-playing game. Along with the books came instructions from Lucasfilm that I was to coordinate Heir with the WEG material.

As usual, I groused a little about that. But once I actually started digging into the books I realized the WEG folks had put together a boatload of really awesome stuff, including lists of aliens, equipment, ground vehicles, and ship types.

So as it turned out, not only was the WEG material easy to coordinate with, but it saved me the work of having to invent all my own technology as I went along.

—TZ

6 Another of the challenges of writing Heir was to come up with phrases that are familiar and are properly descriptive, but aren’t quite the way we would normally say them. Thus hit-and-run becomes hit-and-fade.

—TZ

7 All of Karrde’s ship names involve puns or some other kind of wordplay-Wild Karrde (wild card), Starry Ice (starry eyes), Etherway (either way), and so on.

—TZ

8 Like Karrde, Mara has an ethical core that doesn’t take kindly to broken promises or bent loyalty.

—TZ

9 Over the years I’ve slowly gotten better at the art of teaching, but I can strongly identify with Luke’s concerns over his own ability in that area. Especially when all I had to do was teach elementary physics, and he has to train a Jedi.

—TZ

10 For some reason, Han not lumping Bpfassh in with the “unpronounceable” ones strikes me as both funny and very Han.

—TZ

11 Rogue Squadron was half convenience and half a throwaway line—a unit I could move around wherever I needed it, with Wedge in command because anyone who can survive three Star Wars movies is welcome in my book any day.

I would never in my wildest dreams have guessed how well and how far Mike Stackpole and, later, Aaron Allston would run with the whole idea.

—TZ

12 One of the more subtle goofs in Heir is in the dating. At the time, George hadn’t settled on the final time line, and we were told that the Clone Wars took place thirty-five years before A New Hope.

However, from the prequels we now know that the Clone Wars ended only nineteen years before ANH. All the dates in Heir are therefore off by those sixteen years.

Personally, I put it down to the chaos of information loss during the Empire, and sloppy work on the part of post-Empire historians. These things happen…

—TZ