Via Unboundworlds.com:

I came to Star Wars as a bright-eyed nine-year-old. I still remember seeing Episode IV at the drive-in. The picture might not have been great. The sound, if I’m being honest, was pretty crappy (playing as it was on one of those tinny speakers you hang from the driver’s side window). But did I care? Hell no. From the moment that John Williams score starting blasting into the car, from the moment the opening crawl started drifting up that forty-foot screen, I was in…

On the car ride home, I was in a daze. I don’t think I stopped dreaming about wielding a light saber or flying an X-Wing for weeks. I was too young to understand what I was seeing at the time, but I started to get how special it was by the time “The Empire Strikes Back” hit screens. I experienced that mind-blowing sense of wonder all over again. From the tauntauns to Luke in the recovery tank (that silver-eyed medical droid remains one of my strongest memories of that first viewing) to the AT-ATs to the Millennium Falcon and the space slug to… well, you get the idea.

I went Star Wars crazy for a while. I collected the toys. I collected the cards. My neighbors were just as into it as I was, leading to many (many) mock battles and adventures across our yards or in the sunken copse of trees between our houses (race through the forests of Endor, anyone?).

I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but what struck me most, and still does to this day, are the polar extremes that coexist in the Star Wars universe. There’s advanced weaponry and yet the Buddhist-like Jedi and the Force exist. They live in a high-tech society and yet things are imperfect and in a constant state of disrepair. We’re introduced to dozens of languages yet rarely does anyone have problems communicating. (I still adore the effortless nature of human-droid communication.)

It was a bit of a wake-up call, proof that societies don’t have to be monolithic, a concept I began folding into the adventures I was creating as a budding gamemaster—anything from pan-galactic civilizations to remote villages to tightly knit groups of friends. It later influenced my writing without me even realizing it, and I’m grateful for it.

Now that I’m older, I can appreciate more. Like inclusivity. Here we have this vast array of characters with wildly diverse backgrounds, and yet they treat each other like … people. Just simple people, divorced from their species, their races, their religions, their sexes, and so on. Yes, some biases crept into the story (it’s impossible to be completely divorced from such things), but I always felt as though the story was rooted less in inherited bias than it was on other stuff. Like personalities: Luke’s callow impatience vs. Yoda’s initial feigned curiosity, for example. Or ideology, as in the case of the Empire as it fought to root out and defeat the Rebels. Or base commerce, as in the case of Han and Greedo, or Han and Jabba, or Han and Lando, or… well, again, you get the idea.

Pulling all that together into a cohesive whole was no mean feat. It’s part of why Star Wars became the phenomenon it is today. I think many of the universe’s fans (this writer included) look to a day where we can move beyond the ingrained, backward thinking that hamstrings our progress as a species. Star Wars provides that: a glimpse into an imperfect world, true, but a world that has overcome some of the problems that arise when people different from one another meet. Star Wars isn’t about that, per se, but it’s ingrained in the mythos. It’s part of why I fell in love it, why I continue to revisit it, and why I look forward to more stories set in the universe.

So, new trilogy? Yeah. Rogue Force One? Hell, yeah.

Young Han and Lando? Bring ‘em on.

Bring ‘em all on!