A few years ago my sister Krista was sitting in the dentist's chair getting her teeth drilled. In between suctions and rinses, her dentist looked at Krista's wrist and said, "Hey, an R2D2 watch! You a Star Wars fan?"

This would have been some time in the wake of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, when the Star Wars Universe found itself with a whole new generation of fans—those who weren't even born when Darth Vader's corpse flamed brightly on the silver screen, heralding the end fall of the Empire and the end of the original trilogy. Now, these new fans were enraptured by the glowing red-yellow eyes of Darth Maul and the buzzcut of Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi. LucasBooks was flooding the market with "Jedi Apprentice" novels featuring a teenage Obi-Wan, and my sister was right there in the middle of it all, a sparkly new Star Wars fan, but one consumed with "Padawans" and "Jedi temples" and "Coruscant" instead of the traditional "Rebellion" and "Empire" and "Death Stars".

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