Shadows of the Empire: Interview with Steve Perry

The creative process for Shadows of the Empire, the first significant spin-off adventure set within the original trilogy between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, began at Skywalker Ranch in November of 1994 with a key meeting involving Lucasfilm executives and the various licensees. On behalf of Bantam Books, author Steve Perry, who was brought into the project by both Bantam editor Tom Dupree and Dark Horse editor Mike Richardson via Lucasfilm Director of Publishing Lucy Wilson, recalls the incredible experience of visiting the Ranch and what would be the origins of “the movie without the movie”.

“We set a date, I caught a plane to San Francisco, rented a car at the airport (a Mustang convertible, put the top down driving across the bridge … Ah, this is great!) and went out to Skywalker Ranch, which was very impressive. We formed a big group of people around a giant round table. There were probably 20 of us there, pretty much everybody from publishing to video gaming to toys, even the people working on the music. They had done a little promo video using stock footage, and we went from there,” Steve Perry said in an interview with TatooineTimes.com.

Prior to the meeting, Shadows of the Empire merely had a title and a few plot points defined—including the new villain of the story, Prince Xizor. The planning day at Skywalker Ranch came to fruition as Steve Perry returned home with a notebook full of ideas, which were then transcribed by the author into an extensive outline. The outline became the basis for the entire project.

“Everything was going to be based on it, so you couldn’t get too far away from it. When I was writing the book, I stuck to the outline. When they were writing the comics, they stuck to the outline, and we had already parsed up the different characters everybody wanted to use. We had Continuity Editor Allan Kausch reading the whole thing,” Perry recalled.

The conception of the story for Shadows of the Empire didn’t come without challenges. Being set between such two iconic movies, Steve Perry had to keep it interesting and exciting since knowing the events of Return of the Jedi could lead to no real jeopardy. The author reflects on the weight of Han Solo’s absence within the plot: “Han brings a lot of energy to the table; he is the heart and soul of the action adventure aspect of Star Wars. Since he is going to be on ice, we can’t use him. That’s where Dash Rendar came from. I always sort of viewed him as Han Solo’s younger brother with the same devil-may-care characteristics. He wasn’t Han, but he was what we had.”

Shadows of the Empire’s greatest addition to the Star Wars universe was without a doubt Prince Xizor, criminal overlord of the Black Sun syndicate and formidable opponent to Darth Vader. To this day, Steve Perry still gets questions about the pronunciation of the exotic character—Xizor’s name, an idea by Lucy Wilson of combining Xico (her old Portuguese boyfriend’s name, with the ‘x’ sound pronounced ‘sh’) with ‘zor’ ending of ‘razor’. “Nobody’s gonna know how to pronounce this, so I put it in the book in such a way that you know how to pronounce it. There’s a malfunctioning chair where he sits that slurs his name ‘Prince Sheeezor’, but people still missed it,” Perry said.

The interplay between Prince Xizor and Darth Vader is fascinating to say the least—with the former finding ways to come up the top in a constant battle of wits to earn the place of second, most powerful being in the galaxy next to the Emperor.

“Vader is pretty bulletproof. There isn’t really anybody in the Star Wars galaxy at that point that could stand against him, except the Emperor. And so we came up with Xizor as our main villain. He had to be relatively adept if he’s going to be sparring with Vader verbally along the way. When push comes to shove in a fight, you put your money on Vader, but Xizor is a sneaky guy, and he’s a criminal,” Perry noted. “It’s more of a guerilla warfare thing with Xizor. He’s smart enough to realize, ‘Well, I don’t want to go in there and kick Vader in the shins. That would be a bad idea, but I could perhaps work around him.’”

The author explained that in order to form Xizor into an interestingly enough character that runs alongside Darth Vader himself while also being a threat to the other characters, there had to be some sort of an edge: the pheromones, giving the Falleen the ability to sway people to his way of thinking, in this case Leia. “I blame it on Lucy Wilson [laughs]. I was probably as responsible as she was because I had come up with a pheromone idea. Xizor’s power could’ve been shown working with the other underground criminals, but I actually pitched to show it with Leia. What I don’t take credit for was that Lucy wanted to go ahead and have it happen. I didn’t want to be hunted down by mad Star Wars fans with pitchforks and torches because I led Leia down that path. That made perfect sense to me that she was swayed, feeling the pull, but that she resisted. And of course, Chewie shows up at the same time to bail her out. But the idea was, almost, but not quite …” Perry shared. “I think it’s insofar as Leia, it just demonstrated her strength of spirit. At this point, she’s in love with Han and everybody knows it, so she’s gonna resist whatever, even if you’re on drugs, which is what being next to him is. And as for Xizor that probably was the first time he had been rejected.”

Xizor’s provocative secret ability is not just a tool of deception, but actually a natural biological feat of the Falleen species—the exuding of pheromones making them all but irresistible to both sexes. The Prince’s sexuality and his insurmountable amount of wealth and power lead him to purchase a custom made Human Replica Droid to do his bidding.

“At that point, he wasn’t really actively doing a lot of time and energy with other people. His love life was kind of reduced to, and I don’t know if I ever mentioned it graphically or not, but Guri. She was a slave that did whatever he wanted to do. That whole aspect runs through Star Wars. There are several different kinds of slavery, especially with droids. There is Threepio and Artoo, then you have a character who is basically handmade and owned by the villain. And of course, she’s gorgeous. I think the comic books actually captured pretty much the essence of what I thought she should look like, which [Ron Randall] told me was kind of like a young Brigitte Bardot,” Perry shared.

Because the novel had so many moving parts and protagonists, Guri did not get the spotlight she deserved. But once Prince Xizor was defeated, her chains were somewhat broken—although her programmed-to-kill existence never allowed her to make a choice. Steve Perry had the opportunity to write Guri’s redemption arc with his very first comic series, Shadows of the Empire: Evolution.

“Guri was too interesting a character just to let go. The idea was that she was a character who was constrained because of her programming. She was a stone killer, basically a guided missile that you pointed in the direction you wanted to go, and she just took care of business. But the idea that she could redeem herself was there. She wants to not be a slave anymore,” Perry said. “It was great fun to be able to play with the psyche of someone who was born and trained a certain way and couldn’t get past it on their own. She was smart, strong, adept and she had a goal. She wanted to be free.”

One of the novel’s strongest points is its cinematic feel. The author shared his favorite scene he wrote in Shadows of the Empire: Threepio and Artoo flying the Millennium Falcon. “It’s always the problem when you have viewpoint characters; you have to show that the story is going on through somebody’s eyes and Artoo and Threepio are not viewpoint characters. You see them acting and talking, but never get inside their heads,” Perry said. “How do you show them flying a ship when they’re the only ones on it? And so I figured out a way to do it … it all happened over the radio. It’s basically a comedy sequence … they’re not flying very well and banging into things. Han would be screaming, ‘My ship!’”

At the end of the novel, the three new characters—Xizor, Guri, and Dash Rendar perish without trace. We see Guri and Rendar return in Shadows of the Empire: Evolution, but what of Xizor? Is he truly gone?

“The thing in science fiction and fantasy is that nobody really dies if you don’t want them to. I thought Xizor was dead, but it was done ambiguously enough. You didn’t see his head explode,” Perry reflected. “You can always bring somebody back, but I think Xizor is gone. I thought about it, but instead I introduced his niece in Evolution. She’s a female version of Xizor, which I thought was kind of fun, because then she could go and take over Black Sun and become a criminal overlord.”

With Shadows of the Empire currently not being considered as part of the Star Wars official canon timeline, the chances of Xizor, Guri, and Dash Rendar coming back with more stories are thin. However, as we have seen with Thrawn making the jump from Legends to a myriad of new tales, Steve Perry hopes that one day we will get to hear the story of young Xizor, or perhaps even see Dash Rendar and Guri going off on a new adventure (the idea of another five-issue mini series was pitched to Dark Horse, but never came to fruition after the comic license was handed back to Marvel).