Review: The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View

Three years ago, while looking around the Docking Bay in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, I came across the anthology book Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. The book had multiple writers craft short stories encompassing characters and moments at least tangentially connected to A New Hope for the movie’s 40th anniversary. It was a very fun book, and I was really hoping it would remain a series for a movie as rich as The Empire Strikes Back (although I’m kind of dreading the treatment for Return of the Jedi). Well, my wishes were answered, as we now have The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View.

There are a ton of great, imaginative, and relatively short stories in this collection, from the point of view of subjects such as the Rebel in charge of tending to the tauntauns, a wampaa, the part of Dagobah that’s filled with the dark side (!), a space slug, Obi Wan Kenobi’s Force ghost, Ugnaughts, the writer of the Journal of the Whills (!!), and, for those hard-core fans…Jaxxon (!!!).

Probably the best portion of the book – after the various descriptions of the Battle of Hoth – is when it gets to the bounty hunters (sidebar: Are bounty hunters as important in the Star Wars universe as we make them out to be, or do we overvalue them? And is anyone else disappointed that real-life bounty hunters don’t wear full-body armor or have clawed feet?). Among other stories we get a Dengaar and IG-88 story, a tale about how Boba Fett was the only one able to track the Millennium Falcon, and most importantly for me a solo Bossk story (note: Bossk was one of my favorite action figures as a kid).

The standout story from my point of view (see what I did there?!?!) was about what exactly the Emperor meant when he said “There is a great disturbance in the Force”. Don’t want to give much away because it’s a visually compelling story well worth reading – let’s just say it wasn’t Luke doing the disturbing.

Are these stories canon? Well…probably not. There are even a few stories that seem to contradict each other (although, if the stories are truly from a certain point of view, they’re all equally right and wrong). Are they all good? Nope, not all of them – some of them (like the space slug story) don’t seem to go anywhere, and a few others (like the one about Lando’s second in command at Cloud City) are too confusing for their own good. But collectively, this is a very strong collection.

Look, I love short stories and I love Star Wars, so this was always going to be an easy sell to me. But I definitely think the book lives up to my expectations, and there are many fascinating and intriguing ideas living in this book. Recommended – eight out of ten hot dogs!