From A Certain Point of View Proves the Star Wars Galaxy Is Much Weirder Than You Remember

This thing is delightful. A wide variety of incredibly talented writers—over 40 of them— from within and outside the SW fold telling stories set around and during the events of A New Hope, reassembling the story from the point of view of characters we only glimpsed onscreen (or never saw at all).
There are big revelations about what was going on just out of frame of the camera, but also a cheeky sense of humor, as characters you never thought you’d get to know tell their tales. It’s as if you showed up on time for the movie…but came in through the side entrance. Or caught a truly absurd director’s cut.
It would be fascinating to hand to someone who hasn’t seen Star Wars and see if they could figure out what the movie is about. You’d likely here about a wide, weird variety of soldiers, smugglers, gamblers, gangsters, drunks, and aliens, most of whom only have the faintest notion they’re part of a grander tale. After all, we’re all the heroes of our own stories—it’s an old saw as true in our galaxy as in the one far, far away.
Here are ten of the most surprising characters to offer a new perspective on the first film in the Star Wars saga. (Number 11 was the mouse droid that skitters away from Chewie on the Death Star, so you know this is going to be a good list.)

Imperial Fleet Logistics Liaison Arvira
If there’s a job that disqualifies you from a leading role in a sci-fi adventure story, it’s probably got a title like “fleet logistics liaison.” While Arvira, the star of Ken Liu’s story “The Sith of Datawork,” might not be personally fascinating, he does provide insight into the Imperial bureaucracy you never knew you needed. Remember the escape pod containing R2-D2, C3P0, and the critical Scarif data? The one that a couple of gunners decided wasn’t worth firing at? The guy who gave the order not to shoot quickly realizes he made a big mistake. Enter his pal Arvira, Imperial paper-pusher par excellence. His mastery of the letter and form of Imperial law allows him to create an ingenious cloud of paperwork and red tape, such that no one will ever be precisely sure just what happened over Tatooine.

Qui-Gonn Jinn
What…you thought he was dead? Well, yeah, he’s dead. But that’s never stopped a Jedi from popping when advice is needed. He does that here, giving his old padawan Ben Kenobi a last-minute pep talk. In the closing moments of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda hinted Obi-Wan would be seeing more of his old pal. Claudia Gray’s story “Master and Apprentice” shows us how it happened—even if it took a little while.

R5-D4
Rae Carson’s “The Red One” gives a narrative to one of SW’s most ignominious characters. R5-D4 is the droid that Own Lars initially chooses over R2-D2 when the Jawas are running around selling stuff that might charitably called junk. When he literally blows his top, R2 can carry on with his mission, and the rebellion is saved. This story suggests the plucky red droid might have had more of a say in those events than the movie lets on. (If this sounds familiar, we’ve heard R5’s story before—in issue one of the decidedly non-canon Star Wars Tales, writer Peter David posited “Skippy the Jedi droid” could see R2’s fate via the Force, and willing sabotaged his own motivator.)

Aunt Beru
The best of these stories are both funny and touching, and this story from Aunt Beru’s perspective is definitely one of the best. Meg Cabot’s “Beru Whitesun Lars” reveals Beru was good at much more than serving blue milk. She was also really good at making blue milk cheese, for instance. In a very short space, she reveals herself as a woman with her own dreams and plans, who realized that a Jedi showing up on the doorstep with a baby probably wasn’t going to end well. Didn’t stop her from loving that blonde-haired little tyke, though. The character isn’t very well-served by the film (Luke cries harder over an old man he knew for a day or two). Turns out she wasn’t merely a pawn of fate: the choice was always hers.
Jot
Those filthy little junk-dealers, the Jawas, don’t get much of an upgrade here. But the charming story of Jot in Griffin McElroy’s “Stories in the Sand” reveals they aren’t all like that. The littlest Jawa locates a secret cubby inside his sandcrawler in which he hides to watch holos from salvaged memory droid cores. Usually they’re wiped clean for new customers, but Jot revels in the adventures he vicariously experiences. When he witnesses the adventures of a particularly pivotal R2 unit? He’s as inspired as we are.
Ryland
In a lesser work, we’d be well into scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel territory with the story of Ryland, the guy who clears a Rebel transport to jump into hyperspace. He’s onscreen for all of two seconds, but his brief line of dialogue takes on surprisingly poignant meaning in Wil Wheaton’s story “Laina,” revealing precisely what it is that Ryland is saying goodbye to as he watches that ship depart.

The Muftak
Several of the denizens of Chalmun’s Cantina get time in the spotlight here, and it’s only fitting: the bar is the setting for a pivotal piece of the story, but it also represents the moment when the Star Wars universe blows wide open: that small, filthy, smoky dive is host to a stunning variety of people and creatures. A key story is told in Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction’s “The Kloo Horn Cantina Caper,” starring Muftak (aka The Muftak). It’s a funny and strangely human tale, given that it largely stars fuzzy aliens, but it also makes clear what we already knew: there was a lot more going on in that cantina that we got to see in the film. The story also provides the book’s second shout-out to Ackmena, officially canonizing Bea Arthur’s sassy singing bartender from The Star Wars Holiday Special. Until Lucasfilm accepts my pitch for an Ackmena solo novel, this will have to do.

Admiral Motti
What do you do when you show up to a staff meeting only to have one of your peers loudly proselytize for his obscure religion and then choke you in front of the entire senior staff? You head straight to HR, naturally. Motti gets his say in Mallory Ortberg’s “An Incident Report,” presented as the document of his entirely reasonable complaint about the wildly unprofessional behavior of a certain Darth Vader. Quite rightly: no one should have to put up with being force-choked in the workplace.

Doctor Aphra
She may not be a household name (yet), but Aphra is one of the breakout characters of the current Star Wars canon. Debuting in Marvel’s Darth Vader comic, she’s the first new character to have warranted her own spinoff. Aphra’s an archaeologist and tech expert who’s not evil, exactly, but she’s definitely a scoundrel in the best tradition of the franchise. She takes center stage in “The Trigger,” written by her co-creator, Kieron Gillen, and set before the start of her comic book adventures. While most of the stories in From a Certain Point of View involve characters specifically seen onscreen, a little side trip with Aphra is welcome.

The Dianoga
Nnedi Okorafor’s story “The Baptist” might just break Star Wars for you. That’s OK, though. Let it happen. Perhaps the most unlikely point of view in this collection is that of the Death Star’s one-eyed garbage monster—that thing with all the tendrils that nearly drowned Luke after a rescue attempt led to a hasty escape into the refuse bin. Even more surprising? She gives the thing a heart and a soul that makes it tough to cheer on our heroes during those moments with quite the same passion. If the case needed to be made there’s a story in every crack and crevice of the Star Wars universe, Dr. Okorafor makes it, unambiguously. Turns out even a garbage monster can make you cry.
How are you celebrating 40 yeas of Star Wars?