Oh, wow.

It was the first time I had really had a sense of size in a movie.

Uh, the, the, um, ship in 2001, big, but somehow it didn't work the same way.

This just thing, by the time the engines appeared, I knew I was going to like this movie.

And the second real kind of kick for me was the cantina, when Obi-Wan suddenly stops being an old man and becomes a warrior, like three slashes of the lightsaber and he's done, and that was, that was totally unexpected.

"Okay, you fought with my father in the Clone Wars, whatever.

Okay.

Um, like the tall tales of the Star Wars universe now is where a lot of that stuff lives, but how, I mean, how do you feel about that?

What was your first contact with that whole franchise?

That was one of those silver plate from the blue type of things back in 1988 sometime.

Lou Aronica, who was head of Bantam Spectra, wrote to Lucasfilm, suggesting that since George Lucas didn't seem to be doing anything with Star Wars these days, that Bantam undertake a three-book continuation of the saga, going after Return of the Jedi, where other authors hadn't been permitted to go before.

It took Lucasfilm, or Lucas himself, about a year to decide it sounded like a decent idea.

They contacted Bantam, said, let's talk contract, find us an author, Bantam sent a short list of authors to Lucasfilm, with my name apparently on top.

Lucasfilm checked off the top name.

And I got a Monday afternoon 4 p.m. call from my agent saying, Tim, we have a very interesting offer here.

Are you just working on the Conqueror series now? I've