User:Menkooro/R2-D2

Conception
In the late 1970's, James Luceno was traveling the world with his friend Brian Daley, who was plotting the storyline of The Han Solo Adventures, three Star Wars novels that he was writing for Del Rey Books. Daley used Luceno as a sounding board while crafting the plot, and later consulted Luceno when writing the radio dramatizations of the original Star Wars trilogy. Luceno's official involvement in the Star Wars Expanded Universe began in the late 1990's when he was hired by Del Rey and Lucasfilm Ltd. as a consultant during the planning of The New Jedi Order book series. The New Jedi Order was a multi-author series that would take several years to publish, and Luceno was brought in to help coordinate the project due to his experience overseeing and co-writing a multibook saga in the Robotech universe.

Luceno attended several planning meetings for the series at Skywalker Ranch, and joined a continuity team that also included author Dan Wallace. The two expanded a map of the Star Wars galaxy, and Luceno wrote a "series bible" to coordinate all of the story arcs. He also helped draft and refine the original outline of the series that was submitted to George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars. At the time, it was undecided if Luceno would be contributing any books to the series. Eventually, he was contracted to write a duology in 2000, comprised of the fourth and fifth books of the series. It was set to take place after Michael A. Stackpole's Dark Tide Duology, which had been reduced from a proposed trilogy.

Luceno's duology would focus heavily on the character of Han Solo, who had first appeared in the original Star Wars film in 1977. Solo had played a major role in Star Wars novels published by Bantam Spectra throughout the 1990's, but Shelly Shapiro, Del Rey Editor and one of the primary planners of The New Jedi Order, felt that many of Bantam's authors hadn't known what to do with him. In Dark Tide, Stackpole wrote Solo as slipping into depression and alcoholism after the death of his long-time friend and copilot, Chewbacca, and regretted not being able to do more with him. However, he took comfort in the fact that Luceno would "come roaring back" with a pair of Solo-centric novels immediately thereafter.

Production
Having been directly involved in creating the storyline of the series, Luceno didn't find it difficult to step into a writing role. He did, however, spend a good deal of time learning the rules and regulations of the Star Wars franchise, even after having read many of the Bantam-issued novels in the 1990's. His idea to focus heavily on Solo came about fortuitously as an homage to Brian Daley, who had passed away in 1996. Feeling that Daley had captured Solo's character excellently in The Han Solo Adventures, Luceno was able to pay tribute to his friend. Citing Daley as a mentor of his, Luceno claimed to have felt his friend's presence on his shoulder while writing Agents of Chaos, and was glad for the opportunity to honor him.

Luceno's aim was to approach Solo's grief in a very adult way, and pushed the character away from his wife Leia Organa Solo so that he could find himself. He found writing Solo as older, isolated and grief-stricken challenging, but has identified Solo as one of his favorite characters to write, citing the humanness of the character and the fact that he hasn't been able to grow and evolve in the same way as his Force-using family. Luceno hoped for the duology's first installment, Hero's Trial, to be a "Han Solo, this is your life" novel. Several characters from Daley's novels reappeared within the pages of the book.

Many of the characters in the duology were of Luceno's own creation, however, including the character of Droma. Droma became Chewbacca's replacement as copilot of Solo's starship, the Millennium Falcon, in the duology's second installment, Jedi Eclipse. Luceno also created Droma's species, the Ryn, and modeled them after Earth's Romany people after seeing a documentary on the Romani.

Hero's Trial was released in paperback and audio cassette on August 1, 2000. Jedi Eclipse was released in the same formats on October 1 and October 3 of the same year.

Reception
Luceno indicated in an interview that he received mixed fan reception on Agents of Chaos. Reviews on Amazon.com for both entries are generally positive, with Hero's Trial receiving more favorable reviews than Jedi Eclipse. On the website GalaxyFarAway.com, reviewer DevanJedi gave the duology a rating of four stars, praising the characterization of Han Solo and claiming that the books displayed a glimmer of the energy and suspense that the best Expanded Universe novels before it had similarly shown.

Sue Rostoni, Executive Editor of Lucas Licensing, has stated that all nineteen books of The New Jedi Order sold fairly equally, surprising the planning team with their consistently strong showing. Although she was unable to reveal specific sales figures, other novels of the series have had strong showings on the New York Times Best Seller list.