Star Wars

By Charlie Jane Anders Sean Williams, author of the Astropolis books, The Broken Land novels, The Books Of The Cataclysm and Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novels:

By Graeme McMillan At 9pm, you can choose between Medium on CBS, wherein Allison develops a strange sensitivity to light, or Syfy's Stargate Universe, wherein everyone catches their breath and uses those weird psychic projection stone things to talk to those they've left behind. Alternatively, you coul...

By Charlie Jane Anders Joe Schreiber published two novels recently: the Star Wars zombie novel Death Troopers and No Doors, No Windows, the tale of a sinister house in the middle of the woods. In No Doors, Scott Mast returns to his hometown in New England for his father's funeral, and discovers that his dad was wor...

By Graeme McMillan Maybe you're looking for something you've already seen in major motion pictures? That's okay; not only is there a preview issue of the new series of Wall-E, but there's also Star Wars Purge: Seconds To Die, which follows a young Darth Vader killing off as many Jedi as possible, post Reveng...

By Graeme McMillan Still, Friday evening starts the weekend off right with the double bill of Batman: The Brave and The Bold ("The Fate of Equinox!" Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (following last week's surprisingly brutal, "Are Jedi really advocating using f...

By Graeme McMillan In the end, then, there's something in The Complete Season One for almost everyone: Complete nerds like me get to geek out over the evolution of the show and peeks behind the scenes, casual fans who liked the series on television can enjoy the Director's Cut episodes and watching the arcs i...

By Graeme McMillan Boba Fett Does It Count As Death?: If you believe Dark Empire, not in the slightest. George Lucas apparently disagrees, however; it's said that he edited Fett's last appearance in the special edition of Return Of The Jedi to make it clearer that it's meant to be the end of the character.

By Charlie Jane Anders And like I said, Star Wars sits at the center of the movie's themes. At one point, Clooney says that the Jedi program flourished in the 1980s because Ronald Reagan was such a big Star Wars fan. Reagan's Star Wars, of course, was a missile defense program that many scientists claimed was imprac...

By Lauren Davis Our sister site Jalopnik has a stellar collection of movie cars — both official and replicas. These are mostly fan-made, drivable replicas of cars and bikes from science fiction. And this last one — which is a bit heavier on the wheels — comes from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and annual Star War...

By Charlie Jane Anders Our love for science fiction is so vivid and soars so far into space, regular art just won't convey it. To display our favorite science-fiction characters and creatures properly, you need something special. You need... the black velvet painting. Behold!

By Charlie Jane Anders Manhood For Amateurs isn't just notable for the honestly with which Chabon deals with every aspect of his life, including his insecurities and his relationships with women and his own children — it's also a more revelatory look at fan culture, and science fiction, through the lens of the...

By bonniegrrl Vintage Star Wars masksRevenge of the Sith MasksClone Wars MasksStar Wars Lucha Libre Masks Bonnie Burton is a Senior Editor for Starwars.com. She is also the author of the books "Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and "You Can Draw: Star Wars." You can find her 24/7 on Twitter & on Grrl.com.

By Charlie Jane Anders The main problem with the novel is a slightly convenient, almost Deus Ex Machina ending. Apart from that, though, it's pretty much exactly what you want from a Star Wars zombie novel: monstrous evil, unspeakable horror, the grinding cruelty of the Empire, and a handful of petty criminals...

By Charlie Jane Anders The clunky backgrounds, blaring Midi sound files, and ugly ads... there's a lot we won't miss about Geocities when it shuts down today. But it was home to tons of fan sites and science-fiction resources: here are some we'll miss. Is there another fansite for science-fiction disco wizard Meco o...

By Meredith Woerner Every year we see the same old superheroes, Star Wars characters and sexy cats. Give those tired old costumes a new life, by revamping them or adding new elements. Check out our quick and easy Halloween costume update guide. Instead of Darth Vader: Sexy Vader Instead of Leia: Zombie Leia

By Sarah Hope Williams At the tender age of thirteen I was handed a copy of the first novel in the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy. This became a life-long love affair with not only all of Adams' work, but with speculative fiction as a genre. For the uninitiated, Adams' comically misnamed trilogy is a series of five books...

By Charlie Jane Anders When you're a brain in a tank, you've got a lot of time to think about stuff. And one of the things you ponder is: how many kinds of disembodied brains does science fiction have? The answer: six! Star Wars features the B'omarr monks, whose brains live in jars, but sometimes spider droids carry...

By Graeme McMillan It's a week of big names at your local comic store: Star Wars! Star Trek! Spider-Man! Iron Man! But don't let that distract you from fine webcomics-in-print, vampires, spooky holiday tales and all those other Comics We Crave. If you'd rather read some George Lucas-inspired comics, Dark H...

By Charlie Jane Anders These parasitic alien life forms create bodies for themselves out of the recently deceased, creating a quasi-zombie army that sprouts tentacles instead of human limbs or sensory arrays instead of heads. They alter the host organism's DNA by digesting, creating weird parodies of the hu...

By Caitlin Petrakovitz On FOX at 9 PM the team started decoding dreams when people are being turned into monsters via what sounds like a backdoor in their brains. And Broyles meets with Nina Sharp — whoa, is more lip-locking action in store? Star Wars: The Clone Wars -

By Charlie Jane Anders Star Wars Celebration hotel costs: Hard to say. A few cities are bidding to be the location for this event, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back — including Orlando, which has tons and tons of cheap hotels.

By Charlie Jane Anders Starships, battlecruisers and starfighters are part of the iconic imagery of our favorite space epics. So when classic space sagas like Star Wars or BSG get rebooted, concept artists must reimagine legendary vessels. Here's our favorite reimagined space concept art.

By Caitlin Petrakovitz Monday: Movies: Tuesday: Movies: Wednesday: Movies: Thursday: Movies: Friday: Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Cad Bane's new mission, on Cartoon Network at 8 PM, is to kidnap kids who are force-sensitive and bring them to Mustafar for Sith training.

By Graeme McMillan The Set-Up: The Old West becomes the New West as mankind moves off-planet and colonizes the universe, reverting to cowboy style in the process. The concept behind Galaxy Rangers offered a chance to mix-and-match moments of American history as the Rangers themselves - essentially cybor...

By Lauren Davis Star Wars: A handful of Force users, notably those related to Anakin Skywalker, have Force Visions of possible futures. While the Sith tend to see the visions as true or try to make them come to pass, the Jedi tend to view the future as ever-shifting. Of course, Anakin Skywalker was prodded do...

By Caitlin Petrakovitz Thursday: Movies: Friday: Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The second season begins tonight with two episodes, as Cad Bane attempts to steal a Jedi Holocron and Anakin and Ahsoka hunt him down. Cartoon Network delivers the Star Wars we never even knew we wanted, but now can't live without, at 8 PM.

By Annalee Newitz A MacGuffin is the inanimate object that drives plot into motion. It could be Green Lantern's ring or the Death Star. Often reviled as a lazy genre convention, the MacGuffin is nevertheless crucial to great science fiction. Here's why.

By Lauren Davis Lucasfilm gave us a peek at the background and lighting concepts for Clone Wars, offering a glimpse into what the second season has in store, including spaceships, strange battlegrounds, and an epic duel between General Grievous and Obi Wan Kenobi.

By Charlie Jane Anders One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing ar...

By Charlie Jane Anders Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not g...

By Graeme McMillan It's extremely unlikely that Lucas would sell Lucasfilm, especially as he seems to have become interested in the possibilities television offers to him and the company. But everyone has their price, as the saying goes. The question is just how high Lucas' price would be - and whether anyon...

By Lauren Davis Leaving aside characters with alphanumeric names (like Star Wars' R2-D2 and C-3PO), characters who also have serials number imparted to them by their governments but are not generally addressed as such (as in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Giver), and characters whose first names happ...

By Graeme McMillan Lucas and Star Wars is another interesting example. He created an amazing universe and some fantastic movies, and there were periods in the development of the expanded universe where some amazing collaborators came in and were allowed to expand on it. I think some of the novels are such an a...

By Graeme McMillan This week, we've been celebrating the best of science fiction television, but there's a dark underside to the genre that we don't like to talk about... Shows that, quite simply, don't deserve to live again for many reasons - most of which are related to their stunning lack of quality. Come with...

By Meredith Woerner We've all seen the big spoofs of scifi classics. Family Guy just recreated Star Wars and the Simpsons' Prisoner tribute was perfection. But nobody salutes science fiction better than 30 Rock's sly one-liners, which just slip it in there.

By Jesse Alexander I like that stuff. I like it a lot in fact. I read Cinefex every month. But CGI just doesn't freak me out or put me on the edge of my seat like it once did. I think one of the great things about science fiction movies that don't have a gazillion dollars to spend is that they need to make choices. They need t...

By Charlie Jane Anders Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Venture Bros. These are two of the most vivid and fascinating animated shows on TV right now — so what would happen if you turned the Lucasfilm writers loose on the Venture Bros., and let the Venture staff have a crack at the Clone Wars?

By Meredith Woerner It's Back: Sept. 17 on FOX at 9 PM Friday: Star Wars: The Clone Wars – The evilest of evil bounty hunters, gets a giant, epic premiere on the new season of Clone Wars, where we see him killing and torturing at will. Bring on the CG alien bloodshed! Dollhouse It's Back: Sept. 25 on FOX @ 9 PM Begins

By Charlie Jane Anders Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jad...

By Lauren Davis Erechthias beeblebroxi (Zaphod Beeblebrox - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Han solo (Han Solo) Agathidium vaderi (Darth Vader) Darthvaderum (Darth Vader) Polemistus chewbacca, P. vaderi, and P. yoda (Chewbacca, Darth Vader, and Yoda)

By Charlie Jane Anders Heroes who go to the dark side. In terms of Star Wars, maybe anger doesn't lead to the Dark Side after all, because it's hard to show anger being sustained for a long time. Sure, fear turns to anger, but then anger turns to remorse, or maybe confusion.

By Lauren Davis Clone Troopers (Star Wars): Slavery runs rampant in the Galactic Empire, with the Empire itself enslaving species like the Wookiees and the Mon Calamari wholesale, and some races, like the Twi'leks, would sell their own children into slavery in hopes of offering them a better life. And b...

By Charlie Jane Anders Nothing says "geek pride" than a laptop covered with cool, colorful stickers. And nothing's better than stickers which display your love for Star Trek, Firefly or superheroes. Here are 100+ science-fiction stickers that will make your laptop hum with awesomeness. Star Wars stickers:

By Caitlin Petrakovitz Movies: The beginning of the middle — Star Wars Episode IV — is on Spike at 6 PM. Or you can watch the second coming of the Ice Age in The Day After Tomorrow on FX at 5:30 PM. Tuesday: Movies: Spike continues the saga with Star Wars Episode V at 6 PM.

By Graeme McMillan If it's not one superhero going wrong, it's another - Or, at least, that's the take-away from this week's two competing "dark side of superheroics" books. Plus, Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator... and gorillas going up against the Green Goblin.

By Charlie Jane Anders The two volumes of the New Space Opera anthology left many unsatisfied: Where were the humans in interstellar space? If posthuman spaceploits turned you off, then another new anthology, Federations, will thrill you with human-sized adventures in a vast cosmos.

By Annalee Newitz Inevitably, as factionalism increased, apocryphal books and idol worship ran rampant. No longer were fans satisfied with the stories given to them from on high. Instead they had to write their own. Slash fiction featuring the romantic adventures of Kirk and Spock spread like blasphemy th...

By Charlie Jane Anders Greedo almost gets away with it, too — except the Emperor has felt a disturbance in the Dark Side. His counterpart, the only other Sith lord and the most promising apprentice of them all, has died. Darth Sidious knows this as well as he knows that Force Lighting stings. Greedo doesn't even get b...

By Charlie Jane Anders Blade Runner Why can't they let an old soldier rest? Fellow "Blade Runner" Holden got shot, administering a Voight-Kampff test to a Replicant, so Deckard has to step back in. If he doesn't agree to play along, he'll just be one of the "little people," and we all know what happens to them. And do...

By Lauren Davis The Simpsons "Mayored to the Mob": Generally, the worst thing to hit Springfield fan conventions is the Comic Book Guy and his perpetually superior attitude. But during one ""Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con," a riot sparks, threatening to kill Star Wars actor Mark Hamill. And in, a first for celebrit...

By Graeme McMillan Blame it on publishers focusing on con announcements and con exclusive releases, but this week's haul at your local store seems surprisingly light. (DC only really has the hardcover release of Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge to recommend, while Dark Horse offers up the prequel-era Star W...

By Alexis Brown 1999's Galaxy Quest was a whole movie built around the premise of teasing the Star Trek and Star Wars cultures. What made that film great wasn't merely the laughs (or Rainn Wilson's role) — it was the fact that it could make fun of itself while respecting the genre fans who would inevitably go...

By Charlie Jane Anders Some of the hottest hot-shot pilots in space opera are women. It's a longstanding tradition in science fiction to show women taking the controls of starships, space fighters and star-cruisers, and here are our favorite badass female cockpit jockeys.

By Charlie Jane Anders He will, once he runs out of money. It's just a matter of time. Those life-size solid-gold Yoda bidets don't pay for themselves, you know. (With the proximity activation, and the voice that says, "Wash your bottom, you will." That's expensive stuff.) All it'll take is another few insane Star Wa...

 CA - Feb 14, 2009 This week's double-bill of Star Wars: The Clone Wars was another wonderful example of everything that's good and bad about the series so far. ... Review: Clone Wars - Episodes 17 and 18 Examiner.com all 2 news articles

By Charlie Jane Anders Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie is out on DVD, and if you've been a skeptic about this new animated version, it might just win you over. The movie itself looks lovely and sharp, and is probably best watched in bed with cocoa anyway. And there are some great special features which give you a sense...

By Charlie Jane Anders When the Comedian is killed, the fight is intercut with images from his TV screen, a version of the McLaughlin Group talk show, with an actor playing Pat Buchanan. (I bet the real Pat would have done it.) [Hollywood Newsroom] Star Wars: Clone Wars: SpoilerTV] Lost: Heroes: TV Guide]

By Kevin Kelly In Star Wars and Star Trek, the main way to get around the galaxy is to use warp speed or flip on your hyperdrive, which is a bit like hitting the gas pedal as hard as you can so you'll get there a bit quicker. There's more science to it than that, involving subspace fields and hyperspace and all th...