Star Wars Episode 8

[MsMarvelDuckie]

Actually, Mara Jade explained to Luke pretty clearly who she was when they were on the planet with the Yreslamari(sp?) aka "Force-null" lizards. When they were forced to work together to survive, she told him the story of how the Emperor raised and trained her personally as his "Hand" and how her entire destiny was to kill him. Her backstory is right there in the story. Thrawn's was pretty well spelled out, too, as the only non-human Grand Admiral (and one of the few non-human high-ranked officers) in the Empire. The story of C'Boath was told over the course of the trilogy, and why he was so unstable was explained early on. All well-fleshed, interesting characters whom were not just one-dimensional retreads of the OT characters with different names and appearances. (And the books introduced a much richer history between them and the OT, which made for a great deal better storytelling opportunities.)

That said, it would have to be the RIGHT set of books/stories to really work. A lot of the Jedi Academy/ Young Jedi Knights series would work if condensed a bit, like the Jacen/Jaina, Lowbacca, and Tenel Kaa relationships, the death of Chewie in Vector Prime (which was what made me put that book down and leave it unfinished, it was just so darn depressing that I couldn't read past it, in spite of how great a scene it was) and some other really great moments that would have been SOOO much better than the current "canon". As much as I love SW, the new movies just don't feel like they belong to the same universe in some ways.