Star Wars
Lost Stars
Painted after Ralph McQuarrie
- 55 plates
- Ralph McQuarrie
The book
Claudia Gray's 2015 novel. Two children from a backwater world join the Imperial academy together; one defects after Alderaan, one stays out of duty, and they spend the trilogy's whole war on opposite sides of the same battles — Yavin, Hoth, Endor — down to the Battle of Jakku, where a Star Destroyer ends up in the sand.
Why Ralph McQuarrie
This is the trilogy seen from the wrong side of the glass — from bridges, hangars and corridors, by people inside the machine. McQuarrie's production paintings were exactly that vantage: the Empire's architecture rendered calmly, from within, as a place people work.
And the book aims its whole length at one closing image — a Star Destroyer wrecked in a desert — that is a McQuarrie composition before the fact.
What to look for
Familiar battles from unfamiliar angles: Yavin from the Death Star side, Hoth from inside a walker. And the Jakku plates, which the cycle treats as its destination the way the novel does.
