First New Star Wars Expanded Universe Novels Announced

In the wake of Lucasfilm's official announcement about the state of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the first batch of new, canonical Star Warsnovels have been announced. For those who don't know, the entirety of the published Star Warscontinuity, from comics to novels to video games, other than what we've seen in the films and The Clone Wars animated series, has effectively been discarded. The previous Expanded Universe will live on under the banner of Star Wars: Legends, and those characters and concepts may be reintroduced in the future. 

The GOOD news is that all future Star Wars Expanded Universe publications will now be official Star Wars canon. Lucasfilm is wasting no time, releasing the first new Star Wars novel, a prequel to the upcoming Star Wars: Rebelsanimated series, on September 2nd. That would be Star Wars: A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller, familiar to Star Wars fans as the writer of the Knights of the Old Republic comics from Dark Horse.  

"With the establishment of the Lucasfilm Story Group and our even greater focus on unified storytelling, we expect our entire publishing program to be stronger and more meaningful than ever before," said Jeanne Mosure, senior vice president and group publisher, Disney Publishing Worldwide. "We're extremely excited to kick off this new strategy with Del Rey Books."

"We're extremely proud of the hundreds of amazing Star Wars books we've published at Del Rey," said Scott Shannon, SVP, publisher, Del Rey and Digital Content, "And now we're excited to finally be able to call our upcoming novels true canon -- a single, cohesive Star Wars storyline -- all while keeping the amazing backlist of Star Wars Legends content in print."

Star Wars: A New Dawn will be followed by Star Wars: Tarkin by James Luceno on November 4th 2014, Star Wars: Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne in January 2015 and Star Wars: Lords of the Sithby Paul Kemp in March of 2015.

Statements courtesy of Lucasfilm. Images via io9.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that's your thing!