【France】

You watch the original 40-year-old Star Warsagain and Francestill, after all this time, you have new questions. Why in the Force did that Imperial Officer tell his gunner not to fire on the escape pod containing Threepio and R2-D2? What was on the mind of the red astromech with the bad motivator, or the mouse droid that skittered away from Chewbacca?

You watch Rogue Oneand then Star Wars, and you have even more questions. Why wasn't Mon Mothma at the Yavin IV base by the time the Death Star attacked? Did anyone on the Death Star miss its white-caped architect, Director Krennic?

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The list goes on.Empire Strikes Backviewers may wonder whether Yoda felt anything when Obi-Wan died at his former padawan's hands, or whether Lando knew his ship, the Millennium Falcon, was involved when he learned about the Death Star's destruction. And if you're one of the happy few who can make sense of the prequels, you may wonder if Ewan MacGregor saw Liam Neeson's Force Ghost once he'd turned into Alec Guinness.

Askers of these fascinating, obsessive, geeky questions are rewarded with the answers in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, a stellar collection of 40 stories published this week to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars. (The anniversary was back in May, but who's counting, kid? You?)

This is all for a good cause; all 43 authors are donating their royalties to a reading nonprofit called First Book. Nevertheless, this is no merely worthy charity collection. These are serious, and often seriously funny tales, each one intersecting with the story of the original movie in some way small or large.

It isn't entirely a new approach. Some 20 years before the first written canon of Star Wars books was wiped out in 2014, there was a collection called Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina, which offered the backstory of everyone in that particular hive of scum and villainy.

Naturally, there's some overlap between that book and this; I could probably happily go for the rest of my life without reading yet another backstory for Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, that swinging Cantina house band. Luckily, the scope of this tome is far wider, more inventive, and more canonical.

The most successful stories are either hilarious or heartbreaking. Indeed, From A Certain Point of Viewis proof that Star Wars thrives at these emotional extremes: it is comedy as much as it is myth.

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Office drones will chuckle with recognition reading Ken Liu's "The Sith of Datawork," which explains how a hidden master of forms helped that hapless Imperial Officer cover up not shooting the escape pod. Similarly, Mallory Ortberg's "An Incident Report" is Admiral Motti's official written complaint about being Force-choked by Darth Vader. There's little as funny as Imperial bureaucrats, apparently -- unless it's Boba Fett, a self-assured jackass in "Added Muscle." (You can hear Jon Hamm reading the story here.)

But when it comes to tears, this collection has them aplenty. On one level I despised the emotional manipulation of "The Red One," Rae Carlson's story of R5-D4, the red droid that Uncle Owen and Luke Skywalker nearly bought. And yet I still sobbed for his dreams of going to a good home and getting a good oil bath, his final noble self-sacrifice.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Star Wars makes you care desperately about droids, and there's no way around it.

You should also have some tissues on hand for "Eclipse" by Madeleine Roux, which gives us the last few minutes of Princess Leia's adopted parents on Alderaan, frightened by the not-a-moon in the sky. And the surprisingly affecting "Of MSE-6 and Men" by Glen Weldon reveals that the Mouse Droid that earned Chewie's wrath was actually facilitating a clandestine gay affair aboard the Death Star. One participant, the only named Stormtrooper character in the movie, is someone you suddenly mourn.

Obi-Wan Kenobi shows up in a trio of excellent tales that dig deeper into what it's like to become a Force Ghost. "Master and Apprentice" by Claudia Gray, probably the best Star Wars writer working today, reunites Obi-Wan with Qui-Gon Jinn; turns out they had a heart-to-heart while Luke ran off in his speeder to witness his aunt and uncle's charred corpses. "Time of Death" by Cavan Smith covers the mysterious moment Kenobi was struck down and grew even stronger.

Then there's "There is Another," where Obi-Wan appears to Yoda for the first time shortly after his death. Hunted and lonely on Dagobah, the 900-year-old former Jedi Master has already been following Luke's adventures from a distance -- and prefers the idea of training Princess Leia.

If you don't sob when Yoda describes himself as "old and ugly" only for Obi-Wan to assure him that he sees a "luminous being," you may be made of metal.

Generally speaking, the less successful stories tend to be the ones that replicate large chunks of movie dialogue (although I didn't care much for the tales of Jawas or Tusken Raiders, either; sorry, Jawas and Tuskens). Writing out everything Greedo says to Han Solo, as one story with only the thinnest layer of plot does, barely advances our understanding of Star Wars; it's basically a cheap nostalgia ploy.

You can almost see a Disney executive standing over the writer's shoulder encouraging this sort of thing: that's good, they'll get that!

Still, at least the couple of Greedo stories serve to clear up one important question of Star Wars canon. In the confines of this book, at least, Han most definitely shot first.

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