I remember the first time I saw “Star Wars” back in 1977. I was seven years old, but I still asked my mom to read the opening crawl for me, whispering it into my ear, because I was dyslexic and didn’t want to miss any of those words before they rushed away into the void. This was long before the addition of “Episode IV: A New Hope” to the title, but that fleeing column of text and the hectic action that followed was enough to give even the younger kids in the audience like me a sense that we were being dropped into the middle of a much larger world.
It would be three years before “The Empire Strikes Back” came along, but I, like so many other now-fifty-somethings, had already expanded the universe a thousand times over with the help of the “Star Wars” toys and soundtrack album and the hours of unstructured play that America produced in abundance back in the late 1970’s. Treating each film from the very first as just one episode in a larger story was part of George Lucas’ homage to movie serials, but it also left open space for the audience’s imagination to plant a homestead. That’s what inspired me to treat “The Elect Stories” as a serial, telling a story in chapters that are likewise broken into subchapters for episodic reading pleasure. The story dashes between two time periods and between multiple characters, leaving gaps to be filled, some by me and some by you.
