Star Wars: Incredible Cross Sections

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the Star Wars prequels and their merchandise machine rolled into action, an interesting reference book series emerged. This was Dorling Kindersley’s Incredible Cross Sections. I remembered (and loved) similar books as a child showing real things ranging from Boeing 747s to T-34/85 tanks to old age of sail warships. So the art is beautifully done, even if there are issues like the Millennium Falcon being impossible to square totally with its interior and exterior differences.

So these are beautiful books. Unfortunately, the later ones were marred by a controversial author, Curtis Saxton. Saxton’s story is a nerd’s dream come true: An astrophysicist and Star Wars fan who became the writer of a site called the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. Getting to write official material would have been something.

There were two main issues with Saxton. The first is that he was a maximalist who tried to squish the incredibly soft space fantasy of Star Wars into a Stephen Baxterian hard plausible mold. Yes he gives technically accurate numbers for a galactic scale civilization-but it just doesn’t mesh with the actual movies. The second was his fixation on the “Endor Holocaust” (no really he used the exact name) where the debris from the Death Star would have wiped out the Ewok species. Imagine if a Star Trek fan was absolutely adamant that transporters were ‘destructive teleportation’ (ie killing/destroying the original subject and making a copy on the other side). (Ironically the Warhammer 40k fandom has a section like this in the opposite direction, where every Imperial Guardsman is a special forces equivalent elite soldier and most of the human population lives on advanced peaceful civilized worlds).

So not for the first or last time, it was someone plopping their fanfiction into “canon” in a way that didn’t quite fit. But at least the pictures were and are incredible.