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Star Wars: The Force Awakens and A Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder

I admit it. I did not go to see the new Star Wars movie, Episode 7: The Force Awakens, on December 18. I thought it would be insane to see the movie on the opening weekend, because everybody in the world seemed to have bought tickets to see it that weekend. There was a record-breaking number of advance ticket sales. By the estimates I saw, it was more than fifty million dollars worth. FIFTY MILLION BUCKS!

And why not? This was the first new Star Wars film to come out in a decade. It looked really good. And everywhere you turned there was some kind of advertising, promotion, or publicity for it. An appearance by the cast and the director J. J. Abrams at San Diego Comicon was the least of it. There are more The Force Awakens products than I could have imagined: jewelry—not cheap, plastic stuff, but real jewelry; name-brand makeup; cars, canned soup—really, canned soup?—a Han Solo-in-Carbonite refrigerator, a smartphone-controlled BB-8 droid (a miniature droid, of course!), a bed modeled on the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, and those are just some of the more unusual items. There are, of course, action figures (including really BIG, 48-inch-high action figures), all sorts of food and food-related products, including (you can’t make this stuff up!) a Star Wars toaster with options for the light side or, of course, the dark. Clothing and other fabric goods, like shirts, pants (including “men’s lounging pants”), comforters, rain boots, etc. And we haven’t even gotten to fast-food choices. All of it, or at least most of it, is expected to sell like crazy—billions of dollars worth of crazy. And all because of a movie about people far, far away, a long time ago, in a story that transported everyone I know to another place.

My wife and I both theoretically were adults when we saw the very first Star Wars film, during the Memorial Day weekend, 1977, she in San Diego, me in Washington, D.C. I can still conjure up the excitement I felt when the film started and the John Williams score began. I had been reading science fiction and fantasy since I was eight, and there simply hadn’t been a whole lot of really good, engaging SF or fantasy films when I was growing up. Yes, there was the original (and by far still the best) The Day the Earth Stood Still, in glorious black and white, which was fine by me, since I first saw it years after it was in theaters, on our black-and-white TV. There was the awe-inspiring Forbidden Planet, featuring the straight-shooting Leslie Nielsen as a ship’s commander in the United Planets space navy, on a distant colony planet with only two survivors: the less-than-candid “science officer of the colony,” Dr. Morbius and his beautiful young daughter, who has grown up without ever meeting anyone but her father. Movies like that entranced me. I was a total geek—though in those days, nobody would have called me a geek. Just a nerd. But there weren’t a whole lot of movies like those two classics.

I loved The Twilight Zone, and Disney films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I read all the fantasy and SF I could get my hands on, and I sat through a lot of really bad monster movies in the fifties and sixties. I read comic books, too, much to my mom’s chagrin. And I knew that I was . . . different, because most of the kids in school, and all of the grownups in my life, didn’t like the weird stuff that I loved. It was just us freaks, kids who spent way too much reading, kids with over-active imaginations, who went for this far out, clearly anti-social material.

When I grew up, went to college and started working in publishing, I was the guy who everybody in the company knew edited the SF and fantasy books. Which still marked me as . . . different. Because everybody knew that if it was SF or fantasy it couldn’t be good. And if it was good, it couldn’t be SF or fantasy.

That probably sounds strange now. The Force Awakens has been hugely successful because it’s a terrific film. Yes, it isn’t perfect. But it does have the same sense of wonder and excitement that helped make that very first Star Wars film so popular. And between the Harry Potter and the Tolkien-inspired films of the past fifteen years, good fantasy films have proven to be as popular as good science fiction films.

But it’s not just that Hollywood is making better SF and fantasy films. These genres, including the enormous franchises based on creations from the once-despised realm of comic books, have become an integral part of twenty-first century culture worldwide. And not just in films, but also books, and comics and graphic novels. Along with better film and TV technology, there has been a great flowering of talented people creating works of high imagination for all media.

When Cherry Wilder’s epic adventure fantasy novel A Princess of the Chameln was first published in 1984, fantasy had already claimed space on bookshelves because of the many entertaining fantasies, ranging from the swords-and-sorcery adventure typified by Conan the Barbarian to the mythic, magical works of Peter S. Beagle; from the Newbery Award-winning works of Lloyd Alexander to the laugh-out-loud comedy of Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures novels, and a myriad of other diverse works.

A Princess of the Chameln, the first novel of Wilder’s Rulers of Hylor trilogy, was unique, different from all of them. Heroic, but not a quest; it was about Aidris, a singular hero, a determined, empowered woman in a land where that wasn’t so easy. There are no dragons, and no particularly cute magical creatures, but there is magic, though not the kind of magic wielded by powerful magicians in some fantasies. Aidris’s story is set in a richly imagined world that has an undeniably Western European feel to it, with traditions that have roots in folklore and legend going back thousands of years.

So what, you may ask, is the connection between Star Wars: The Force Awakens and A Princess of the Chameln? Very simply, it’s the times. In 1984, fantasy, even with its acceptance by readers of the fantastic, was still considered a limited genre. Today, fantasy, like science fiction—and there are many who would argue quite cogently that the Star Wars films are fantasy and not science fiction—is an integral part of our shared culture. Archetypal stories like the one Cherry Wilder created in A Princess of the Chameln and in the stand-alone novels that complete the Rulers of Hylor, have become part and parcel of mainstream culture throughout the world, with the exception of those cultures that find elements like magic and female empowerment threatening. Aidris, the eponymous princess, is very much like the hero of The Force Awakens. Rey is in trouble from the first and noticed by people with great power but also feisty, self-reliant, and determined to achieve what she sets out to do.

She’d be right at home in the twenty-first century.

And if you’re curious to meet Aidris, you should enter our New Year’s contest. Tell us what you think are the most important qualities a young woman needs to survive in a hostile environment—fantasy, science fiction, or real-world. We’ll send a free e-book copy of A Princess of the Chameln to people who submit the five best answers by 11:59 PM (E.S.T.), Thursday, January 28. Submit your entry to cherrywildercontest@gmail.com.

Good luck!