By Sinclair Adams
Earlier this year, I reviewed Mike Chen’s science fiction book Light Years From Home. Chen’s immersive worldbuilding and aptitude for down-to-earth character voice is once again on display in his more recent book, Star Wars: Brotherhood. This book is a Star Wars story that takes place shortly after the 2002 film Attack of the Clones, and shortly before the 2008 animated cartoon, The Clone Wars. I had the pleasure of speaking with Chen about this exciting opportunity to contribute to the Star Wars universe, as well as his wonderfully nerdy and thoughtful approach to writing genre fiction.
Sinclair Adams: How does writing your own original work compare to the writing of an established intellectual property like Star Wars: Brotherhood?
Mike Chen: Writing my own stuff feels like work and writing Star Wars is not that different from when I would write fanfiction as a kid or as a teen. The biggest differences are that I get paid, there’s a deadline, and the amount of people who have to review it and nudge it and say, “yes you can do this,” or “no you can’t do that.” I knew several other authors who already wrote for Star Wars and they said that you can pitch your own idea within the parameters that they [the Lucasfilm Story Group] would give you. They basically said they want to take the line [spoken between Obi Wan and Anakin in Revenge of the Sith (2005)] of “that business on Cato Nemoidia” and extrapolate that out. They told me to pitch them a story and I had one ready in like a week, because I was very enthusiastic about it.
But on a practical level, when I do my own work, if you’re doing any original work, you have to do the world building, you have to figure out what the voices are going to sound like. You have to figure out what the character quirks are. And in this case, it’s all done.
SA: So what was the timeline of the actual writing like?
MC: It was really intense. I had from May of 2021 to August to do the whole outline process, so that would be the initial pitch to the completed outline. Then the first draft was August to early December, which was about half the time I would normally take to write the first draft and then two rounds of revision in over 6 weeks at the start of January. So it was half the time I would normally get for an original novel. My editor for my Harper Collins contract was very generous and gave me a 5-month slip on my schedule for the book that came out January of this year, called Vampire Weekend. It helps them on a publicity level because Star Wars has an impact in publishing that no other IP [intellectual property] book can sell to the same level.
SA: About the Star Wars fanbase, many academics of the IP have noticed that a lot of Star Wars stories often reflect real-world history here on planet Earth. I was wondering if there was any history or recent event that you might have been channeling through the writing of Brotherhood?
MC: Yeah, definitely. I would say that all of my books are subtly political. Some of it is a little bit more overt and some of it is through the worldbuilding. In this case, one of the goals of this book was to – I think it’s funny to use the word “humanize” when talking about an alien species – but the verb “humanize” as it applies to an alien species with the Neimoidians, because the Neimoidians are generally these one-note, kind of racist caricatures, especially in The Phantom Menace. So it came at a really interesting time. This was at the peak of recent anti-Asian hate crimes so it was really on my mind.
So in this case, when I was building out this story and thinking about humanizing the Neimoidians, I wanted to be really, really explicit. When Ketar gives his big speech about how the Republic destroyed his family and has always treated the Neimoidians as “others,” and the Nemoidian officials even say that the Republic just see them as brokers of money, and you look at their inherit characters as being greedy, you don’t realize that there’s a practicality, a culture and all this stuff behind it. I mean, that basically lines up with any form of prejudice and cultural prejudice that you see.
I really wanted to lean into that and put it up front and I wanted to give Obi-Wan Kenobi in particular – because Obi-Wan is our eyes for this, he is the core Republic person and he’s the person that as fans and as an audience, we trust him. I wanted to show that this is so broken systemically, that even he is noticing, “Wait a minute. I didn’t know it could be like this because I have faith in this system, but this system is not treating everyone equally.” A fundamental break in the system is the only thing that might actually change for these people. I wanted to take that sort of real-world-view of prejudice and put it into someone who is intelligent and empathetic to this situation, but is in way over his head.
The other thing that I tried to do is because my wife deals with her own set of disabilities and we often talk about how when we see that portrayal of disability in media. So many characters in Star Wars get their limbs replaced and it’s no big deal. So we had talked about how it was an opportunity to show with a character like Anakin Skywalker – who literally had his arm cut off and replaced with a robot arm two weeks before this story starts – having the transition that disabled people have to go through in accepting their disabilities and acknowledging that their lives have changed and learning to work with it instead of fight it.
SA: You do cover a lot with that. I noticed that every now and again Anakin would just have to remind himself that his arm was cut off and replaced, but he has that moment of reconciliation.
MC: It’s funny because the most negative reviews I have seen about the book say, “not a lot happens.” And that’s on purpose. It’s a character book; it’s about transition. We have 7 seasons of The Clone Wars [cartoon] to see them kicking ass together, so instead, let’s see how they emotionally went from bickering at each other in Attack of the Clones to being buddies at the start of The Clone Wars [2008 animated] movie.
SA: Those were some of my favorite moments in the book, where it’s just Anakin and Padme on a date.
MC: Yeah, people love the Anakin and Padmé date, which I really appreciate.
SA: Speaking of returning characters like Obi-Wan and Anakin and even the scenes with Dex Jettster. How did you approach writing returning characters?
MC: I’ve found that since I’ve started writing fiction that I write voice really well. A shortcut that I found in the creative process is I cast an actor in the role. It’s someone that I’ve seen their face, I’ve seen their physical reactions, I hear the cadence of their words, it allows me to adapt them into a character really fast. So instead of having to make it up myself, I just kind of base it on an actor. So in this case, all of that was done. I already have this deep fundamental knowledge of Star Wars. I’ve already done the prep work.
The thing with Anakin, I knew I wanted to start with Hayden Christensen [the actor who portrayed the character in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith] and I wanted to end with Matt Lanter [the voice actor who portrayed the character in The Clone Wars cartoon]. To go from a voice but also an attitude, and so I very consciously wrote based on my own strength of adapting voice that it starts off with Hayden Christensen, and then changes at about the midway point, because I feel like a lot of Anakin’s looseness is based on how he carries himself around Obi-Wan. He’s always kind of tensed up and afraid of being lectured by Obi-Wan and the Jedi, but now that they are on equal footing, he realizes that he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. It becomes this gradual thing as he becomes more comfortable within himself.
SA: You have such a great understanding of the returning characters. What was it like developing your own original characters for this story?
MC: Ruug and Ketar were intentionally supposed to be a mirror for Anakin and Obi-Wan. With Ruug in particular – in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine there is a character named Kira Nerys, she is a resistance fighter, some people called her a terrorist, and now she is in Starfleet to maintain peace in this difficult area on the space station realm from her home planet that was just freed from occupation. I basically copied and pasted the actress’ voice, her physicality, her mannerisms, and a lot of the way that Kira reacts to stuff. That is Ruug, just in a Nemoidian body.
And then Ketar, to kind of push that forward…you have someone who’s been radicalized by extreme speech to whether it’s like, either far left or far right – like the horseshoe theory that they are basically the same except expressed differently. They are just taking their emotions completely and not basing it in any sort of practical action. And so I wanted Ketar to represent that. The actor that I had cast for Ketar is named Josh Keaton, and he is a voice actor primarily and his role in Metal Gear Solid 3 where he plays the younger version of Revolver Ocelot, that’s the voice that I used for him.
And then with Mill, I knew she was going to pair with Anakin and I wanted Mill to have an ability to see Anakin past his fronts that he puts up to everyone. So with Mill, the idea came from when I had just shown my daughter the Miyazaki film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is my favorite Miyazaki film. Nausicaa is this super badass pacifist who is an empath to nature. She can commune with massive creatures and plant life, and as people are fighting over resources, she is constantly taking the pacifist path and she will fight but she will fight to disarm. And so I wanted Mill to kind of be like that, where she is questioning the idea of “Why are we just rushing into this? This doesn’t make any sense.” Mill sees all the way deep down in there and what she sees is equal parts caring and fear. I think one of my goals with this was that I wanted to write a book that makes you love Anakin Skywalker. We are going to look deep into his soul, and I needed a character who basically acted as the surrogate for that.
SA: I’ve heard from other people who write Star Wars books that they leave their own little inside jokes or references in the stories to make them their own. I was wondering if there are ways that you yourself have imprinted something into this book to kind of leave something in the Star Wars universe.
MC: There’s a lot, because you have to name so much stuff when you’re writing Star Wars. I basically reached out to all of my friends who are really into Star Wars and because I live a very nerdy life, that was a lot of people. And so I tried to name things after them. My wife is a big food person, and so the underground market that Anakin and Padmé go to is named after her.
My friend Sierra Godfrey is my main critique partner that I’ve known for about 15 years. Her kid loves The Clone Wars. He got to name the main clone squadron in the story and choose the colors for them. So, it’s like he has his own clone battalion now.
SA: It sounds like you had a lot of fun writing for Star Wars, and the end result was a very enjoyable read for fans of the series. Could you talk about your most recent book, Vampire Weekend?
MC: This book is a lot about identity, both directly and indirectly in terms of the experience of being a child of immigrants. When I discovered music myself – I didn’t know why I did this when I was a teen, I just knew that when I discovered punk rock and post-punk, new wave, indie all the subgenres and offshoots of it, I leaned into that really hard. My parents didn’t understand it at all. At the time, I also started reading Anne Rice books, along with getting into goth culture. I realized after decades of therapy (laughs) that the reason for getting into this type of music and literature is because, even now my parents are a little bit better about it, they were not great about talking about feelings, and there were all these times I can think back to my own childhood where I felt confused or scared or hurt or whatever. And I would try to bring it up to them, and they wouldn’t have the tools to do that as immigrants who came over from a much harsher environment. No one talked about their feelings in 1950s Taiwan. So I realized that all these subcultures and the expression through art was my internal reaction to all this.
When I got to college, I started writing and in my 20s, I played in bands and I DJed and I did the responsible thing where I got an engineering degree, but I was always stacking these other creative outlets on top of that. And so Vampire Weekend is in conversation with a few things: it’s with the immigrant experience, but with the vampire stuff what I really wanted to do was play with what we know of vampire tropes. They can fly, they can glamor, they have super muscle powers, and all that stuff. There’s all these tropes and one of the things that I do in my books is I take these genre tropes and I ground them in reality and I ask, “How would you feel going through that and is that how it would really work?”
Vampirism has been used as a metaphor before. I remember it blew my mind when I took a class in college and reread Dracula for the first time through the lens of comparative literature. The teacher said that this is about class and immigration, and I realized, oh my god it is. So for me, I kind of wanted to take it as the metaphor for being othered as a child of an immigrant, but then also taking some of the tropes that come with the usual metaphor and just turning them on their head a little bit.
Star Wars: Brotherhood is available from Bookshop, East Bay Books, Kinokuniya, Massy Books, Powell’s City of Books, and Skylight Books.
Sinclair Adams is a writer interested in speculative and science fiction narratives. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Las Vegas and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She was an editor for Ouroboros Magazine, Chapman’s journal of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other speculative fiction. Follow her on Instagram @sinclairwrites.