The Star Wars franchise famously includes a wide range of mediums beyond just the films — numerous books, comics, and games fill in the untold corners of the galaxy, and have set up the world for the coming installments. Lucasfilm just unveiled its publishing slate that will lead to the next film, The Rise of Skywalker, and it includes a novel that will bridge the gap from The Last Jedi, written by author Rebecca Roanhorse.

The new adult novel is Resistance Reborn, set to be released on November 12th, just before the The Rise of Skywalker premieres in December. The bare-bones description says that it will follow General Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rey as they “struggle to rebuild the Resistance after their defeat at the hands of the First Order.” Excitingly, the book will be written by Rebecca Roanhorse, who earned a Hugo and Nebula nomination for her fantastic debut novel Trail of Lightning, and a Nebula win for her short story Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience TM. Her latest book, Storm of Locus, just hit stores.

Image: Lucasfilm

That isn’t the only book that Lucasfilm will release under the “Journey to Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker” label. November will also bring Force Collector, a YA novel authored by Kevin Shinick, about teenager who “sets out to discover what connection his mysterious Force powers have to the fabled Jedi, and what the Force has in store for him.” Marvel Comics will also release a 4-issue miniseries called Allegiance, about the surviving Resistance fighters and Leia’s efforts to “reach out to her former allies, the Mon Calamari, whose shipyards once powered the Rebel Alliance.” That’ll be written by Ethan Sacks and illustrated by Luke Ross.

The publishing slate will also include a number of kid-oriented books, picture books, and comics, as well as some non-fiction tie-ins like The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary, and others. What’s missing out of all that is an official novelization of the film, although Lucasfilm has opted to publish the novelizations for The Last Jedi and Solo: A Star Wars Story months after the films came out.

These new books add on to the already-busy publishing slate that Lucasfilm is overseeing this year. June will bring Alphabet Squadron from Alexander Freed, the first of a new trilogy about the New Republic’s starfighter pilots, Timothy Zahn will release a new Thrawn novel in July, and Delilah S. Dawson’s Black Spire is due out on September 3rd, 2019 and will tie in with Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge theme park.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529370/lucasfilm-star-wars-books-the-rise-of-skywalker-resistance-reborn-rebecca-roanhorse-tie-in-novels