## Chapter 14

1 Also echoes the phrase beck and call. Karrde isn’t the only one who likes puns.

—TZ

2 The Katana fleet isn’t going to become important until Dark Force Rising. But again, it’s important to start setting things up as soon as possible.

—TZ

3 The beckon call was originally nothing more than a plot device, something to get Luke to Lando’s in time for all of them to have this conversation together. The suggestion that the call had belonged to the Dark Jedi was supposed to be the complete explanation, and so I moved on to other matters and forgot about it.

But not all of the readers bought my explanation. Speculation arose that there was a plot thread lurking in there that I was planning to use somewhere down the line.

The more I thought about that, the more I liked the idea of coming up with a more interesting history for this particular piece of jetsam.

So when I was contracted for the book The Hand of Thrawn (which was subsequently split into Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future), that’s exactly what I did.

—TZ

4 The name of the Wookiee home world has always bothered me—from what I’ve heard of Wookiee speech, I’m not convinced they can actually pronounce the word.

In fact, before I knew the world had already been named, I had planned to call it Rwookrrorro.

When I learned that Kashyyyk was already on the books, I suggested that could be the name the Republic and Empire knew it by, while Rwookrrorro was the local Wookiee name.

I was turned down, probably on the grounds that a planet with two different and completely unconnected names would be confusing.

So instead, we used Rwookrrorro as the name of the specific village Leia would be traveling to.

Interestingly, the name Rwook was later used to denote the subspecies that Chewie and some of the other Wookiees belong to.

—TZ

5 I got at least one letter from a reader who took me to task for using borg, which he informed me was a Star Trek word.

I wrote back and explained that borg comes from cyborg, which is a contraction of cybernetic organism and was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960.

On top of that, the term borg was first used in Star Wars in 1978 in one of the Marvel Comics adventures, thus predating Star Trek’s borg concept by about eleven years.

Not that anyone’s counting. Just thought you’d like to know.

—TZ

6 When Episode IV came out, Vader was described as “Dark Lord of the Sith,” but at the time no one knew what that meant. The explanation of Sith was far in the future.

Or should that be far in the past? It’s so hard to keep track of these things sometimes.…

—TZ