James Luceno

James Luceno is an American author who has written numerous books in the Star Wars universe, including eight novels in the Star Wars Legends continuity and two within the new canon. Born in 1947, he was raised as a military brat; television re-runs of classic movies watched in his youth fostered his love of storytelling. His early adulthood found him playing bass in rock bands throughout New York and New Jersey, and being on the road with The Manhattan Transfer fueled his love of traveling. Much of the 1970s saw Luceno embark on various globetrotting adventures, and a detailed journal he kept of his experiences eventually blossomed into his first novel. He also met Brian Daley, a fellow traveler and aspiring writer, during this decade, and the two became close friends and collaborators, writing together for the 1986 cartoon The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers and later jointly penning the popular Robotech novels under the pseudonym Jack McKinney. They were also approached by Del Rey Books about relaunching its Star Wars fiction line, but the publisher ultimately lost its licensing rights, and in 1996 Daley passed away from pancreatic cancer.

A number of adventure and science fiction novels by Luceno were released in the 1980s and 1990s, and when Del Rey regained the right to publish Star Wars fiction, they hired him to help oversee a massive multi-author series called The New Jedi Order. While overseeing its planning and development, Luceno also contributed three books to the project, and he additionally wrote Cloak of Deception, a 2001 lead-in novel to Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. The rest of the decade added several more Star Wars novels and reference guides to his résumé, and his acclaimed Darth Plagueis was released in 2012 following a tumultuous development period that originally saw it shelved in 2007. Luceno successfully pushed for its revival, and the five years between its pitch and publication gave him unprecedented time to work on and perfect it. When the Expanded Universe was re-branded as Star Wars Legends in 2014, he was one of several novelists hired to contribute to the new canon, and his most recent book, Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel, was published in 2016.

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