{"product_id":"from-a-certain-point-of-view-return-of-the-jedi-star-wars-isbn-9780593597910","title":"From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi (Star Wars)","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Celebrate the lasting impact of \u003ci\u003eReturn of the Jedi\u003c\/i\u003e with this exciting reimagining of the timeless \u003ci\u003eStar Wars\u003c\/i\u003e film featuring new perspectives from forty contributors. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eOn May 25, 1983, \u003ci\u003eStar Wars\u003c\/i\u003e cemented its legacy as the greatest movie franchise of all time with the release of \u003ci\u003eReturn of the Jedi\u003c\/i\u003e. In honor of its fortieth anniversary, forty storytellers re-create an iconic scene from \u003ci\u003eReturn of the Jedi\u003c\/i\u003e through the eyes of a supporting character, from heroes and villains to droids and creatures. \u003ci\u003eFrom a Certain Point of View\u003c\/i\u003e features contributions by bestselling authors and trendsetting artists:\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e• \u003cb\u003eOlivie Blake\u003c\/b\u003e provides a chilling glimpse into the mind of Emperor Palpatine.\u003cbr\u003e• \u003cb\u003eSaladin Ahmed\u003c\/b\u003e recounts the tragic history of the rancor trainer.\u003cbr\u003e• \u003cb\u003eCharlie Jane Anders \u003c\/b\u003eexplores the life and times of the Sarlacc.\u003cbr\u003e• \u003cb\u003eFran Wilde\u003c\/b\u003e reveals Mon Mothma’s secret mission to save the Rebel Alliance.\u003cbr\u003e• \u003cb\u003eMary Kenney\u003c\/b\u003e chronicles Wicket the Ewok’s quest for one quiet day on the forest moon of Endor.\u003cbr\u003e• Anakin Skywalker becomes one with the Force in a gripping tale by \u003cb\u003eMike Chen\u003c\/b\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePlus more hilarious, heartbreaking, and astonishing tales from:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTom Angleberger, K Arsenault Rivera, Kristin Baver, Akemi Dawn Bowman, Emma Mieko Candon, Olivia Chadha, Gloria Chao, Adam Christopher, Paul Crilley, Amal El-Mohtar, M. K. England, Jason Fry, Adam Lance Garcia, Lamar Giles, Max Gladstone, Thea Guanzon, Ali Hazelwood, Patricia A. Jackson, Alex Jennings, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Sarah Kuhn, Danny Lore, Sarah Glenn Marsh, Kwame Mbalia, Marieke Nijkamp, Danielle Paige, Laura Pohl, Dana Schwartz, Tara Sim, Phil Szostak, Suzanne Walker, Hannah Whitten, Sean Williams, Alyssa Wong\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTo celebrate the launch of this book, Penguin Random House and Disney\/Lucasfilm will each make donations to First Book—a leading nonprofit that provides new books, learning materials, and other essentials to educators and organizations serving children in need. In recognition of both companies’ longstanding relationships with First Book, Penguin Random House will donate at least $100,000 worth of books\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eto First Book and Disney\/Lucasfilm will donate 100,000 children’s books to support First Book and their mission of providing equal access to quality education.\u003cb\u003eSaladin Ahmed\u003c\/b\u003e is the Eisner Award–winning writer of \u003ci\u003eMarvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Magnificent Ms. Marvel. \u003c\/i\u003eHis novel \u003ci\u003eThrone of the Crescent Moon \u003c\/i\u003ewas nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He lives with his children near Detroit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCharlie Jane Anders\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the Unstoppable trilogy, beginning with \u003ci\u003eVictories Greater Than Death. \u003c\/i\u003eShe’s also the author of the short-story collection \u003ci\u003eEven Greater Mistakes, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eNever Say You Can’t Survive\u003c\/i\u003e, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include \u003ci\u003eThe City in the Middle of the Night \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eAll the Birds in the Sky. \u003c\/i\u003eShe’s won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford, and Locus awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running \u003ci\u003eNew Mutants \u003c\/i\u003ecomic. And she’s currently the science-fiction and fantasy book reviewer for \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post. \u003c\/i\u003eHer TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got seven hundred thousand views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast \u003ci\u003eOur Opinions Are Correct.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOlivie Blake\u003c\/b\u003e is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of the Atlas series and \u003ci\u003eAlone with You in the Ether. \u003c\/i\u003eAs Alexene Farol Follmuth, she is also the author of the young adult romcom \u003ci\u003eMy Mechanical Romance. \u003c\/i\u003eShe lives in Los Angeles with her husband, goblin prince\/toddler, and rescue pit bull.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMike Chen\u003c\/b\u003e is the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of \u003ci\u003eStar Wars: Brotherhood, Here and Now and Then, Light Years from Home, \u003c\/i\u003eand other novels. He has covered geek culture for sites such as Nerdist, \u003ci\u003eTordotcom,\u003c\/i\u003e and StarTrekdotcom, and in a different life, covered the NHL. A member of SFWA, Mike lives in the Bay Area with his wife, daughter, and many rescue animals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMary Kenney\u003c\/b\u003e writes critically acclaimed videogames, books, and comics. She works at Insomniac Games, where she was on the writing team for \u003ci\u003eMarvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eRatchet \u0026amp; Clank: Rift Apart, \u003c\/i\u003eand she was a lead writer on Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. Her first book, \u003ci\u003eGamer Girls: 25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry, \u003c\/i\u003ewas released in July 2022 to glowing reviews from \u003ci\u003eKirkus \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eBooklist. \u003c\/i\u003eBefore making games, she studied in the game design master’s program at New York University, and she teaches narrative design at Indiana University. She was an award-winning journalist with bylines in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times, Salon, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eKotaku. \u003c\/i\u003eWhen not writing or gaming, she can be found buried in a book, running a tabletop RPG, or trying to keep her forest of indoor plants alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFran Wilde\u003c\/b\u003e won a 2015 Nebula Award for her first novel, \u003ci\u003eUpdraft; \u003c\/i\u003eshe completed the trilogy with \u003ci\u003eCloudbound \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eHorizon \u003c\/i\u003ein 2017. Her debut middle-grade novel \u003ci\u003eRiverland \u003c\/i\u003ewon a 2019 Nebula Award and was named an NPR Best Book of 2019. The middle-grade novel \u003ci\u003eThe Ship of Stolen Words \u003c\/i\u003eappeared in 2021 and books in her Gemworld series with tordotcom have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. Wilde’s short fiction has appeared in \u003ci\u003eAsimov’s\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTordotcom, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, and multiple year’s best collections. Her nonfiction has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post, The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, NPR, \u003ci\u003eTordotcom, \u003c\/i\u003eand elsewhere. The manag­ing editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Morning Transport\u003c\/i\u003e, Wilde holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in information architecture and interaction de­sign. She teaches for Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been waiting her whole life to write a Mon Mothma story.\u003cb\u003eAny Work Worth Doing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmal El-Mohtar\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI hope so, Commander, for your sake. The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLord Vader had forgiven him, then. Moff Tiaan Jerjerrod watched him go for longer than was strictly necessary. He would allow no detail to escape him. The rhythm of Vader’s boots against the hangar bay floor; the sway of his cloak behind him; the precision of his gait, never hurried and never slow. The pace of inevitability.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe watched him go, then turned on his heel and matched that gait, that rhythm, exactly. Let everyone assembled see harmony in the choreography of their parting; let them see how aligned are Jerjerrod and Vader, how attuned, marching to the same silent, powerful music.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet them see Jerjerrod as he thought of himself: not as Vader’s inferior, but as his instrument.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he walked out of the hangar bay, Jerjerrod allowed himself a single dissonant, unbecoming thought: He had lied directly to Lord Vader, and lived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe lie was innocent enough: They would not, in fact, be doubling their efforts. They couldn’t. Jerjerrod was no mathematician, but he took pride in his work, and he knew the scope of the project well enough to recognize that doubling their efforts wouldn’t result in an operational Death Star by the appointed time. Effort was messy, inchoate; a poor swimmer could thrash his limbs against a lake until his lungs gave out and not advance any farther or faster than a fine swimmer breathing evenly. It wasn’t a matter of effort expended, but of efficiency. Of technique.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVader knew this, of course, whether or not he realized it. Jerjerrod had learned from watching him over the years. More powerful in the Force than anyone alive save the Emperor; capable, no doubt, of ripping men’s limbs from their bodies with a thought, of striking them down with his lightsaber, of crushing them into compacted fists of meat and bone and wringing blood from the stone of them—and what did he do, instead?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe obstructed a single airway between his thumb and forefinger. Like playing a flute.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJerjerrod enjoyed music. He wondered if Vader did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had wondered, too—more than once—what it felt like. What it might feel like. Ever since Piett’s promotion to admiral, he’d allowed his thoughts to drift toward the possibility of failing Vader so utterly as to court that particular consequence. Whether he’d experience it as a bone in the throat, plugging him up from within and nothing more—whether it might overwhelm him like an ocean wave, smothering him—or whether he’d feel, in his last moments, leather against his skin, retreating from the ruin of his neck like a caress.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps I can find new ways to motivate them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe did not allow himself to shiver until he knew he was out of sight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJerjerrod’s quarters were spare by the standards of most officers, lacking the plush comforts his rank might have afforded him elsewhere in terms of furnishings and décor. As it was, he had a bed—standard issue, slim as the cots the workers slept in—bare walls, and a draft table large enough to accommodate his peculiar affectations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt had somewhat embarrassed Jerjerrod, ever since his student days, that schematics made more sense to him if he could touch them. He found it much easier to hold vast structures inside his mind if he could first apprehend them in two dimensions. He often did this on large datapads, but he preferred, wherever possible, to produce them on archaic physical media that he could hold flat beneath his palms, before activating the relevant holoprojections to flicker and pulse before him. Otherwise, the projections distracted him; he found it difficult to move past the smooth, false promise of a completed façade until he’d absorbed the plans with his hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’d been mocked for this in his youth, of course, as if it betrayed some immaturity, some lagging development: a child still mouthing the words of a story under his breath as he read. But as an adult, he’d cultivated this into a quaint but acceptable eccentricity: A large part of his discretionary funds were spent on reams of flimsiplast, the more antique in quality the better.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore embarrassing was the truth: There was an intimacy to the process he couldn’t explain. In his first year as a recruit Jerjerrod had trained in basic field medicine, and it had struck him at the time that when a body was brought to him to treat, he saw it as a broken machine in need of fixing: Here it leaked fluid, there its circuits needed patching, or else the whole was scrap that couldn’t even be reused. Jerjerrod learned early on that he couldn’t bear waste.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had followed this insight into a study of engineering, and from there to grander architectures—but to his surprise, once surrounded by machines, every schematic began to look to him like a body. Every project had a beating heart, a nervous system, fibers flexing beneath a sheath of skin; every project needed to be comprehended as an organism struggling to be born. He sometimes drew them as he imagined them—he never gave them faces, that would be several steps too far, but he felt compelled to give them some comprehensible personhood. He made his peace with this, and disliked speaking of it—but whenever he needed to focus on a problem, to understand it so profoundly that the solution arrived like breathing, he would roll out lengths of flimsiplast in his quarters and spend hours running his fingers over diagrammed lines as if he could coax from them a gasp or shudder of revelation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo it was with the DS-II battle station. The project was too vast to lay out in one sheet, but he’d built a model of it that he could split open and lock shut when he wanted to be able to shift his perspective on something, and he’d mapped out key areas by hand with reference to it when he wanted to understand a projection from the inside out. As he smoothed out these reference drawings, his eye was first drawn, as always, to the improvements he’d made to the orbital station’s unfortunate predecessor. They pulsed bright in his mind: Instead of the angry red area around a single thermal exhaust port wailing its treacherous vulnerability, he’d insisted on a capillary system for venting exhaust, discarding dozens of designs in pursuit of the correct one. Now millions of minuscule tubes would stretch from core to surface, allowing the DS-II to breathe. He’d also built choke points and fail-safes to prevent the kind of catastrophic chain reaction that had doomed the original; now the system had the elegance of a Coruscanti necklace, with each bead or gem individually knotted in place such that one section could break without ruining the whole.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was proud of his improvements. In theory, the completed DS-II would exceed its elder sibling by every relevant metric: power, efficiency, invincibility. But in practice, the angles of one stubborn geometry refused to meet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was simply no way to complete construction of the DS-II in the time frame allotted with the resources he’d been given. Its beating heart: the thrum of the generators. Its nervous system: the complex circuitries that would eventually resonate with kyber frequencies. Its lifeblood: for now, merely workers, flowing through its nascent corridors, building out its veins and arteries. The DS-II was anemic. He’d asked for more troops, and been denied; the Emperor had made quite clear that he could not ask for more time. So it fell to him to do the impossible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe thought of Vader’s cape, swaying behind him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJerjerrod went to work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe traced the contours of the plans. The DS-II ached beneath his hands. He could feel tension gathering in several key muscle groups—work areas—threatening to spasm into problems, delays, ruptures. He’d pushed the men hard, but if they broke now, there was no replacing them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps to do the impossible, he had to do the unexpected.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he studied the diagrams, he drafted new shift rotations, changed their shapes: Instead of tight clusters of furious effort running so hot they’d burn out, he lengthened and stretched the groups to be more flexible, to ramp on and off from different key areas. He didn’t have more men, but he did have plentiful shuttles gathering dust in the hangars; he would requisition them to move workers more quickly across wider areas, such that the journey itself would provide some relief without interrupting the overall workflow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt could work, given a comprehensive enough vision; he’d relax the pressure in some sectors by raising it in others, and keep redistributing it as it collected. Instead of cracking a whip, he’d be an iron hand in a supple glove, massaging the deep tissue of the project until it released its secrets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn practice, this meant keener oversight. It meant pacing the corridors, seeing while being seen. Not a distraction, but a reminder of regularity. A metronome, perhaps—no, a conductor, shifting the melody line from one part of the station to another.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJerjerrod closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. His metaphors were blurring into each other, as if he could solve the problem by simply finding the right one. But it wouldn’t be enough. This method would help—but if he wanted to meet the Emperor’s deadline, he needed a true force multiplier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhich, of course, the Emperor had already sent.40 Stories Celebrating 40 Years of Return of the Jedi","brand":"Random House Worlds","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300033810661,"sku":"NP9780593597910","price":36.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593597910.jpg?v=1767727725","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/from-a-certain-point-of-view-return-of-the-jedi-star-wars-isbn-9780593597910","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}