Thirty years after we last saw the heroic Jedi knight celebrating with his friends on the moon of Endor, an unknown scavenger named Rey will respond to his name by saying, “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth.”
Rey’s line from STAR WARS: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the basis of Ken Liu’s canonical short story collection, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Released during the run-up to STAR WARS: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, the collection is centered around an evening of stories told to the young deckhands of a transport barge making its way across the galaxy to Canto Bight.
All told, the collection includes six “legends” about Luke Skywalker. The first revolves around a conspiracy theory that sees Luke and his friends, led by an old con-man named Benny ‘Wiseman’ O’Kenoby, tricking the Republic into using them as weapons in a propaganda war with the Empire. It seems, according to this conspiracy, that there never was a Death Star, that the Emperor made the whole thing up to scare his enemies, but the Republic knew of the secret, so they came up with their own false story about Benny Kenobi and his gang of bandits blowing the Death Star to pieces.
The second story is told from the perspective of a gunner in the Imperial navy whose Star Destroyer crashed during the Battle of Jakku. According to the gunner, Luke Skywalker was singlehandedly responsible for pulling all of the Star Destroyers down from the sky:
He was real, a glowing figure of sorcery and magic. He floated in space, his feet astride the stars, his cape billowing with an arcane power that could not be understood by mere mortals… He was a god playing with toys, except the toys were city-sized structures of steel and held tens of thousands of lives.
— The Legends of Luke Skywalker, p. 79
Crashed on the surface now, the Imperial gunner is rescued by a shadowy figure in a hooded robe. He is convinced the figure is Luke Skywalker, and as the figure drags him through the deserts of Jakku, he worries over the torture he’s about to undergo: how will the wizard, Luke Skywalker, attempt to draw the secrets of the Empire from him?
When they get surrounded, with a crew of other scavengers, by the melted-down reactor cores of the crashed starships, the hooded figure leads them all to safety. The question the reader is left with is: Was the hooded figure, indeed, Luke Skywalker?
The third story takes place on the world Lew’el, where the people “lived by, from, and with the sea.” In The Last Jedi, we watch as Luke Skywalker uses a spear at least fifty feet in length to catch a fish for his dinner. In this third story, we learn how Luke gained his fishing skills.
Like many throughout the galaxy, the people of Lew’el are Force sensitives. A long time ago, they paid the price for their skills, and now they refuse to share their understanding of “the Tide” with outsiders. When Luke shows up, he charms his way into being instructed in the Tide, where he learns to “Trust in the Tide, and do what needs to be done.” But more importantly, he learns that, for the people of Lew’el, there is no “dark side” of the Tide:
We don’t think of the Tide that way. The ebb and flow are phases of one Tide, not two opposed sides. To use the Tide is to pervert it… It is those who seek to master it, to control it—whatever excuse they make up for themselves—who bring suffering.
– The Legends of Luke Skywalker, p. 161 & 163
The fourth legend is narrated by “a construction droid from the Z7 series,” a droid, “designed for the heavy work of digging ditches, cleaning fields, grading terrain, putting up new buildings—everything necessary for civilization to blossom in the wilderness on newly settled planets.” When the droid is captured by slavers, it finds itself in the company of another captive, a “small astromech droid painted in white, silver, and blue.”
The narrator droid ends up getting a chip implanted into it that forces it to become an enforcer for the slaves. It quickly discovers that the astromech, R2-D2 (of course), “refused to do as he was told. I had to deliver shock after shock,” but even with all of that, R2-D2 was “full of defiance.”
Later, a new droid arrives on a slave ship, a humanoid figure with “five red stripes” on its arms (for those who remember, Luke Skywalker’s pilot designation is “Red 5”). The rest of the legend demonstrates Luke’s Force abilities and his charisma as he rescues R2-D2 and thousands of other droids from the slavers.
The fifth story takes the narration in an even weirder direction than a droid. This time, the narrator is Lugubrious Mote, a four-millimeter insect that lives on the fur of Salacious Crumb, the cackling creature that survives on Jabba the Hutt’s lap.
In Lugubrious Mote’s tale, Luke Skywalker only survived his battle with the rancor thanks to Lugubrious’ skill as a puppet master. Riding atop of Luke’s scalp like Remy the Rat in the Pixar film, Ratatouille, Lugubrious whispers fighting tactics into Luke’s ear and bites him on the scalp to steer his actions in a certain direction. The Jedi knight interprets Lugubrious’ instructions not as the voice of an intelligent insect but as the spirit of some long-dead Jedi offering him guidance through the Force.
Lugubrious also accompanies Luke to the sarlac pit, guiding the young Jedi as he defeats Jabba’s guards and rescues Han, Leia, and the others from the Hutt’s clutches. Finding the job of helping Luke too exhausting, Lugubrious retires from the rebellion and takes a job at a circus, where she winds up with her name in lights.
The final legend is told by a young biology student who hitchhiked a ride with Luke Skywalker while conducting fieldwork on two remote planets. Luke was out searching for more information on the Jedi, and together, he and the biologist decided to take a look inside a cave on an asteroid. Unfortunately, it ended up not being a cave, but the inside of “an exogerth…giant, silicon-based creatures that live on asteroids and can grow large enough to swallow starships.”
The inside of the space slug is a world unto itself, with creatures living inside the slug similar to the way bacteria live inside of us. But along with the ecology of the place, Luke discovers a series of glowing letters and carvings that seem to be alive. Entranced by the opportunity to investigate a potential Jedi connection, he and the biologist delve deeper into the slug.
Days or weeks later (it’s difficult for them to keep time in the slug), they discover three statues at an altar, except further investigation reveals the statues aren’t statues at all, but creatures who, despairing at being trapped in the slug, have wrapped themselves in a kind of “time cocoon,” stretching one lifetime into thousands. The arrival of Luke Skywalker, who these creatures call “Bright Heart,” has awakened them to the flow of real time, and in their returned state, they concoct a plan to save Bright Heart from suffering their same fate.
Unfortunately, it requires Luke to sacrifice their lives with his lightsaber. The plan reminds him of the sacrifice Obi Wan Kenobi made, who trusted his life to the Force and allowed Darth Vader to cut him down in order for Luke and the others to escape the Death Star.
After following through with the plan, Luke admits to finally understanding “that accepting the sacrifice of those who love us and share our ideals is the first step to becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine.”
All told, the six legends of Luke Skywalker add little to the canon of STAR WARS, but they do provide a young adult with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jedi knight and how the Force can be interpreted in different ways, much like the diverse cultures on Earth interpret divinity.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book for adults, but if your pre-teen or teenager is a big fan of Luke Skywalker and STAR WARS, this collection of short stories should resonate with their sense of the Force.
