Alan Dean Foster is no stranger to crafting Star Wars novelizations, penning 1976’s “Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker” and the 1978 sequel, “Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.” As for the decision to write the “Force Awakens” novelization, Foster told Midnight’s Edge he knew the script director J.J. Abrams co-authored would be good since he wrote the novelizations for the filmmaker’s Star Trek reboot movies.
Foster said he can fix certain things he reads in the script, like the science behind the technology. The author noted his improvement of the description of the First Order’s Starkiller weapon — which he anticipated being removed — was left in. On the flip side, he doesn’t have as much leeway with the characters.
“The characters are fairly well-established in a screenplay,” Foster said. “Some things they said to take out, and some things they left alone. Some of the things they said to take out I thought were silly and would really have improved the book.”
As such, Foster not only had to remove any hints of a Finn-Rey romance but also a callback to “A New Hope.” The author included a line where Han Solo (Harrison Ford) tells Rey, “Don’t get cocky, kid,” when she fixes a problem he can’t solve aboard the Millennium Falcon. The production made him cut it.
