From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars)

Eyes of the Empire

Kiersten White

Pick any of the last ten transmissions you ve looked at. You have to live there for the rest of your life. Where are you? Lorem said, her voice ringing through the small processing room where they all worked.

Maela admired how Lorem could multitask, sorting through data while keeping up a steady stream of chatter.

Dirjo Harch did not admire it. Just do your job. He deleted whatever he was looking at on his screen and pulled up the next data packet. Maela wished they could work individually. Or better yet, in small groups. She d pick Lorem for her group. And Azier. So really, she d make a group that was everyone except Dirjo, with his sour expressions and his pinched personality.

I am doing my job, Lorem said, chipper as always. Sometimes she wore her cap at a jaunty angle over her dark curls. Just enough to be off dress code, but not enough to give Dirjo an excuse to report her. Maela liked the uniform, liked what it meant. That she was here. That she did it.

A light flashed near Maela s face and she flipped the switch, accepting an incoming transmission and adding it to the ever-growing queue. She had spent so long with the Vipers, infinite rows of them, round domes and legs like jointed tentacles. She used to stare into their blank black eyes and wonder where they would go. What they would see.

Now she saw everything.

But while I m doing my job, Lorem continued, and Dirjo s shoulders tensed, I don t see why we can t have some fun. We re going to be looking through a hundred thousand of these transmissions.

Azier leaned back, stretching. He rubbed his hands down his pale face, clean-shaven, wrinkled. Maela suspected working on the Swarm transmission recovery and processing unit was a demotion for him, though she didn t know why. Dirjo and Lorem were just starting their Imperial service, like her.

Lorem, my young friend, Azier said in the clipped, polished tones of the Empire, the

Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, the forthcoming Exordia, and many short stories. Seth has also written lore for Destiny and Godfall and designed the open-source space opera Blue Planet. The use of the Force to interfere in the secular universe is inevitably corrupting, so all light-side Force users either become petty police or withdraw into Taoist meditation in search of absolute truth. This leaves the use of the Force as a political power to malevolent dark-side adepts, who can only be resisted by their light-side counterparts. The attempt to find a just yet enlightened resolution to this paradox is the heart of Star Wars. Seth dreams of becoming a muscular yet small-brained deepwater fish.

Hank Green is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. He s also the CEO of Complexly, a production company that creates educational content, including Crash Course and SciShow, prompting The Washington Post to name him one of America s most popular science teachers. Complexly s videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. Hank and his brother, John, are also raising money to dramatically and systematically improve maternal health care in Sierra Leone, where, if trends continue, one in seventeen women will die in childbirth. 

R. F. Kuang is the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy award nominated author of The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic (HarperVoyager). She has an MPhil in Chinese studies from the University of Cambridge and is currently pursuing an MSc in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship. She also translates Chinese science fiction to English. Her debut The Poppy War was listed by Time and The Guardian as one of the best books of 2018 and has won the Crawford Award and Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel.

Martha Wells has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel

An A+ list of today s best sf/f writers explore the inner reaches of a galaxy far, far away, which is sure to appeal to sf readers and Star Wars fans alike. Booklist