Might Be and Might Have Been

In 1981 Larry Niven and Steven Barnes teamed up for a book called Dream Park, in which mid-21st century technology allowed for realistic live-action fantasy role-playing games. A company called Cowles Industries has built an amusement park featuring different exhibits and attractions along those lines, with the ultimate "ride" being a full-scale adventure game mockup which is recorded and marketed like a movie.

In short, Niven and Barnes created the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, in which the games are not only "real," but have crossed over into pop culture entertainment. The next novel in the series came out in 1989, as technology had started overtaking the vision that Niven and Barnes dreamed up. They tweaked their use of holography and other tecnhiques for The Barsoom Project, a novel in which an important ambassador's niece, playing a game modeled on Inuit mythology, may be the target of an assassin. A former player, her mind unbalanced after an earlier gaming disaster, is back in the same game where the disaster happened. How did she get past the screening process? Is she the assassin? Is it someone else? What kind of corporate shenanigans is the Middle Eastern billionaire up to against Cowles Industries, and is he involved?

Like Dream Park, Project is more of a mystery hybrid than a straight sci-fi novel. One plot thread concerns the characters in the game attempting to win it, another concerns the players portraying the characters and their interactions and another follows the mystery of who's behind the criminal activities in the corporate arena. Security chief Alex Griffin has to unravel the third thread while keeping an eye on the second one, balancing that with the interests of the paying customers running the first.

Niven and Barnes created a very interesting world with the Dream Park series, and most of the fascination in the novels hangs on how the "games" interact with the technology that creates them. Their characters are interesting as a group, but not so much as individuals and fleshing them out is perfunctory at best. But the pair create a fast-moving, fun "what-if" yarn that marries its fiction elements well to its science and is a fun afternoon of reading.

The only real problem is the title -- it refers to a Cowles Industries proposal for testing different kinds of surface-to-space transport systems on Mars to avoid catastrophic accidents on Earth, and has nothing to do with the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs' imagination. A significant letdown indeed.

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It's sort of an open secret by now that the original Star Wars novel, published a few months before the movie came out, was not written by George Lucas even though the cover said so. Sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster, with a trio of his own novels and some well-received adaptations of the animated Star Trek episodes under his belt, was contracted to write the movie novelization, as well as one for a potential sequel.

Lucas had no idea if his homage to old-timey spaceship serials and mythology would succeed at the box office or not. If it didn't, whatever sequel might come out of the studio would need to be low-key and low-budget, and would probably have looked a lot like 1978's stripped-down Splinter of the Mind's Eye. When it was written, Harrison Ford hadn't been signed yet for a second movie, so Han Solo's not in the book. Low potential budget, so no space battles.

But since Star Wars blew the box-office wide-open, Lucas was able to command quite a few more resources and we wound up with The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and, unfortunately, the prequels. Del Rey books published Splinter anyway, and it's generally seen by fans as something in between Star Wars and Empire.

A number of its tweaks to the so-called "canon" of Star Wars history, though, prompt other groups of fans to set it outside the official timeline. Luke Skywalker seems a lot better with his lightsaber than he will be in Empire, for one. Luke and Leia Organa, later revealed to be siblings, are most definitely un-sibling-ish about some of the feelings for each other. The Force is somehow amplified by a jewel called the Kaiburr Crystal, instead of being more connected to an individual's own abilities.

Some fans suggest elaborate workarounds to explain the differences, but others just chalk it up to the fact that Lucas had never really thought out his whole Luke-Leia-Darth Vader storyline until he was making Empire. When he furnished Foster the rough drafts and early scripts the author used, the possibility of Luke and Leia as a romantic couple still existed in his mind. Lucas has always claimed otherwise, but he's shown himself more and more to be a hack who had a handful of good ideas, got lucky a couple of times with them and has coasted on that rep ever since.

Splinter itself is not a bad book; Foster was hitting his stride with his own stories of Flinx, a young man trying to find himself in a wide-open galaxy and so he moved over to Luke Skywalker pretty easily. The narrative and dialogue match his customarily wry tone. In the story itself, Luke escorts Leia to a secret rebel conference but damage to Leia's spacecraft forces a landing at a hidden Imperial mining colony and in trying to make their way off-planet, the pair are forced to get help from a local who tells them about the Kaiburr Crystal. The pair resolve to recover it before the Imperial forces -- including a certain man in black with a deep voice and a well-known breathing pattern -- get their hands on it. Even though Foster has his usual problems with writing female characters (he really can't), he still gives Leia the ability to pilot a spacecraft and fight a lightsaber duel of her own -- a lot more than Lucas did in three whole movies.

Splinter is interesting mostly to Star Wars completists and Foster fans, but offers some appeal as a window into a Star Wars universe somewhat different than the one we came to know. The furry aborigines who battle Imperial troops sort of hint at the Ewoks -- although they're not nearly as annoying -- swampy Mimban presages Dagobah, and a creature called a "wandrella" might have given rise to the space-worm that nearly ate the Millennium Falcon.  And playing "spot the reference" is at least more fun than watching that stinkin' pod-race, finding out about midichlorians or listening to Natalie Portman say, "Hold me, Ani."