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Star Wars ends a years-long publishing program this summer with a story with a story that's "big on all levels"
June's Trials of the Jedi brings the four-year-long High Republic publishing program to an end, and Star Wars veteran Charles Soule is responsible
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With Star Wars preparing all manner of new adventures on the big screen, it’s worth noting that a four-year element of the larger saga will be coming to an end in 2025, with June’s Star Wars: The High Republic - Trials of the Jedi — the final installment of the extended publishing program known as The High Republic.
Spanning prose and comic books — and even spilling into TV with elements feeding into 2024’s The Acolyte on Disney+ — The High Republic was an ambitious undertaking for Lucasfilm’s publishing program that harkened back to the 1990s “expanded universe” era where Star Wars was kept alive not on the screen, but by books, comics, and other ancillary material. Set in a period before any story ever told on screen, The High Republic was a saga of the Jedi in their prime, and the threats that arrived that no-one was expecting.
Trials of the Jedi is written by one of the core group of authors on the High Republic project, Charles Soule — and in the latest installment of his newsletter, he not only shared the cover art for the new book (by Grant Griffin; you can see it elsewhere in this post), but he also shared some thoughts on what it means to end the story after four years.
“How does this feel, having Trials rapidly approaching the moment it's out in the world?” Soule wrote. “I don't even know if I can say. It feels big, on all levels. The book is about 125,000 words, and while I haven't seen a layout yet, I think that means it'll land around 500+ pages, which is (I think?) the longest novel in the High Republic. It needs to be, though - there's a lot of story to get through, a lot of plot threads to tie up. I'm very proud of it, but I suspect there will be some of you out there who don't love every choice I've made, or wish things might end differently, or that they wouldn't end at all. That's the price I pay as the person who gets to write the ending, and I wouldn't change it. So, how do I feel? Well, I can say this: starting the story with [2021 novel] Light of the Jedi was hard, but finishing it is harder, and not just because endings are tough. I will miss the High Republic very much, and I'm not just talking about the stories. There will be much more to be said about this in June, but we really made something here. We really did.”
Star Wars: The High Republic - Trials of the Jedi will be released June 17, and is available for pre-order now.
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