Something Something Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye
Article by Jordan S.
People complain a lot about canon and canonicity, especially with Star Wars, and I’m not sure why. Star Wars didn’t create the idea of an expanded universe where you have to read, watch, or consume all the parts to understand each individual story. That’s been around since the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are a lot of continuities that are far more complicated and ad hoc than Star Wars, which has always made the culture warrior arguments against the new Star Wars materials feel especially weak. If you think losing the old Expanded Universe is bad, let me tell you about the canon wars that happened before, after, and during the Council of Rome in 382.
I decided we should start this new column by leaning right into the fact that, prior to the House of Mickey purchasing Star Wars, there was a huge expanded universe that was sorta slid sideways (in the same way the New 52 sorta slid the DC canon sideways at the same cultural moment, but also really didn’t). With twelve years separating us from that merger, we can now see that things like Thrawn, Plagueis, and KOTOR weren’t completely removed from the board. They were just sort of reworked.
Thus, we are starting this Something Something Star Wars journey by going all the way back to the first expanded universe Star Wars story, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster. Written during the filming of A New Hope, this story offers us a weird vision of a world in which Empire Strikes Back isn’t a given, and a canon is only just being put together. It’s also a book emblematic of the way the old canon is influencing the new.
The Story
Set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back (both in story and in its writing), this tale follows Luke and Leia on a mission to rally support for the Rebellion from various planets when they are caught in a cosmic storm that strands them on the swamp planet of Mimban. Unfortunately for them, Mimban has a top-secret Imperial base, and in the process of trying to hide their identities from Imperial forces, Luke slaps Leia, and then they mud wrestle—only to get arrested anyway. During all this, they meet an elderly woman named Halla who tells them about the Kaiburr Crystal, a crystal that magnifies the Force.
Ultimately, they escape Imperial custody and set out in search of the Kaiburr Crystal. On their adventures through the swamps of Mimban, they encounter the Wandrella, a giant swamp worm, and an underground city that protects the Temple of Pomojema, where the Kaiburr Crystal is housed.
Oh, and Darth Vader shows up!
Luke, Leia, and company arrive at the Temple and confront Vader. Leia is seriously injured, and they’re on the verge of losing when Luke, using both the advice of the spectral Obi-Wan and the power of the Kaiburr Crystal, attacks Vader and severs his arm. Vader then falls into a pit, and our heroes escape to live another day!
Gnome Thoughts
Welcome to the section of this article series where you’ll learn what I thought about each volume of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The specifics of what I'll talk about will probably change from book to book, but in this installment, I’ll offer my review of the book (unfortunately, it’s not glowing), talk about a giant monster, and then discuss the planet Mimban itself.
A Swampy Story
Ooof, this book is something.
Similar to how I think Ed felt about Quag Keep when he reviewed it last year, this book is only really notable as the first of something that grew to be far greater than the author probably imagined. Where Quag Keep was the first DnD book, this is not only the first Star Wars expanded universe story but also envisions a world in which maybe Empire Strikes Back never happens. George Lucas and Alan Dean Foster knew Empire was at best several years away and created this book as a continuation of the story in case a film sequel never materialized. In fact, it was written during the filming of A New Hope, so a lot of the things we take for granted in Star Wars today (Darth Vader being Luke’s father, Luke and Leia being siblings, HAN freaking SOLO) aren’t anywhere in the DNA of this book.
Which is just one reason why the weird Luke/Leia mud-wrestling scene is so YUCK in hindsight. We know they are siblings because—GESTURES TO ENTIRE STAR WARS CANON FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS—but Alan Dean Foster didn’t, so he includes this scene that ends with them getting arrested. It’s made even more unnecessary and disgusting because it incorporates the most gross recurring element of the sci-fi/fantasy genre: the threat of sexual violence to the female main character as a tool to raise the stakes of a story. It’s gross, and even if that violence is never realized, it’s still used in a way that is all too common in fantasy and science fiction books. There are other ways to raise stakes that don’t involve depicting sexual assault, both today and back in 1978. For that alone, I can hardly recommend this book, even as a relic of a world in which maybe Empire Strikes Back never happens.
Even without the gross mud-wrestling, there isn’t a lot to praise in this book. Alan Dean Foster is one of the genre’s most long-standing authors, but this book isn’t his best work by far. It’s a journeyman installment with only a few moments that elevated it for me. The first paragraph is a pretty fantastic summing-up of the whole ideal of Star Wars in a few sentences:
“How beautiful was the universe, Luke thought. How beautifully flowing, glorious and aglow like the robe of a queen. Ice-black clean in its emptiness and solitude, so unlike the motley collage of spinning dust motes men called their worlds, where the human bacteria thrived and multiplied and slaughtered one another. All so that one might say he stood a little higher than his fellows.”
Universe is cool, check. Space is dark, check. People fight each other, check. Alan, you nailed Star Wars in your very first paragraph. Other than that and a few cool prose moments, there isn’t much to be impressed by in this book.
Something Something Space Kaiju
I was so excited that this book offered me the opportunity to introduce the inaugural subcolumn “Something Something Space Kaiju” for our very first Something Something Star Wars! In honor of my dear friend and co-writer, Ed, I want to offer the occasional space to talk about the giant monsters of Star Wars, and we get a fun one in the shape of the Wandrella in this installment of the Expanded Universe.
We’re introduced to the monster in the way that so many kaiju are introduced: seismic activity. When the ground quakes under their feet while crossing the swampy lands of the planet, it turns out it isn’t an earthquake or volcano but instead the erupting of the Wandrella!
Foster gives us this description of the monster:
“Pale cream in color, with streaks of brown, the colossus possessed nothing resembling a normal eye. Instead, the blunt end which was curling back toward them boasted a score of haphazardly spaced, dull, black spots like the eyes of a spider…Thick sucking sounds issued from beneath the huge body plates as the creature humped along after them. It traveled slowly, but each time it moved it covered meters. And it moved in an inexorable straight line, whereas the crawlers had to dodge trees and pools of bottomless ooze. It drew so close that Luke and the others gathered desperately in front of the crawler.”
Classic giant monster and a pretty solid start for the quest to find the largest monsters in Star Wars. Honestly, the Wandrella might be one of the only other cool moments from this book, in my opinion. I don’t think the Wandrella is a match for any of the Earth-based giant monsters, like Godzilla, but as the first example of a giant monster in Star Wars, I think it’ll do fine. In future installments, we’ll see if we can find even bigger monsters elsewhere in the Star Wars universe.
Remember Mimban!
My favorite part of Star Wars has always been the various worlds of that galaxy far, far away. I grew up loving Tatooine, Hoth, and Bespin and how different they were from the world around me in Midwestville, USA. When we were little, my brother and I kept a list of all the planet names from the movies as we played with our action figures. I can only speak for myself, but the future in which there were multiple databases filled with all the names of all the planets mentioned in Star Wars was unimaginable back in the ’90s. Mimban would have definitely been on that list growing up. It’s one of my favorite planets in Star Wars, and despite my mixed feelings about this book, I did really enjoy seeing it through another point of view.
Mimban is the perfect example to return to the issue of canonicity I talked about at the beginning of this article. As mentioned, there was a lot of anger at the idea of the old canon being wiped away and replaced with something new. We’ve since seen that the new creators of the Star Wars canon will use elements of the old to inspire the new. Darth Plagueis has now made a visual appearance in Star Wars: Acolyte, Thrawn is being set up as the Big Bad of an entire generation of Disney+ TV shows (and maybe the upcoming film, The Mandalorian and Grogu), and humble Mimban was resurrected in the movie Solo.
There’s something funny about a planet created in a Star Wars book where Han isn’t even mentioned being resurrected for the new canon in a movie where he’s the only character from the original movies to make an appearance. Mimban owes its canonical place to a character its original creators weren’t even sure would be in Empire Strikes Back.
I love Mimban’s portrayal in Solo. It’s one of my favorite sequences in that movie. Han leaves Corellia with the hope of being a pilot, and we are immediately flung into him deep in the swamps of Mimban, seeking any possible opportunity to go AWOL and flee Imperial service. Honestly, this scene single-handedly made Splinter of the Mind’s Eye more readable for me. It gave my brain something to imagine while reading the book, and despite the differences between the book’s portrayal of Mimban (far more trees) and the film’s, I could see how they fit together.
Conclusion
Overall, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is far from my favorite Star Wars book. It’s weird and has some very gross moments, and I don’t foresee a world in which I’ll ever want to reread this one. It’s a one-and-done for me, and that’s okay. On the other hand, it did offer me the opportunity to talk about canon and my love for the planet of Mimban. It also gave us a pretty cool giant worm thing. We’ll now leave Mimban and head far, far away from it to see what else awaits us in that wonderful galaxy of Star Wars.
Thanks for reading this installment of Something Something Star Wars. Let me know your thoughts either in the comments below or on Bluesky, where my handle is @roamingbookgnome.bsky.social. Come back next time when we’ll read a Timothy Zahn installment of the Star Wars canon, specifically Chaos Rising, the first book in the Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogy. (Hey, I’ll do Heir to the Empire when Ed does a Drizzt book in Read for Initiative – so don’t be mad at me.)1
THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN THRAWN!!!
Nicely done.