Interview: Author Zoraida Córdova Talks About the Hope She Brings to The High Republic in ‘Convergence’
Star Wars: The High Republic: Convergence is the second Star Wars novel from author Zoraida Córdova; it quickly moved to the top of my favorites list as soon as I put it down. There’s romance, adventure, political intrigue, mystery, and everything you’d come to expect in a grand, space opera like Star Wars. Her writing is sublime, with passages that stay with you and descriptions that bring this story to life with each turn of the page.
Zoraida was kind enough to speak with us a couple weeks ago about what brings her back to Star Wars, creating the characters in The High Republic: Convergence, and what it feels like to introduce a new era in the galaxy far, far away.
If you haven’t read The High Republic: Convergence, I highly recommend you wait to read this review until you do. I knew nothing going in and I’m grateful for that because there are so many great surprises. It’s available everywhere and you can find our review here.
One question I always try to ask creators who get to play in the Star Wars storytelling sandbox: What themes do you try to convey through your stories in Star Wars? Zoraida’s answer did not disappoint me and is great precursor for Convergence.
What draws me to Star Wars, and it’s taken me a long time to realize this is the thing, is romance. I think that’s because Star Wars is a love story, at the end of the day. At its cellular level, it wouldn’t be possible without a love story. The love story of Anakin and Padmé. This was a love story which was so powerful it literally changed the course of the galaxy, right? I think that’s one of the strongest themes. If we can just hold on to that and see love and community are powerful enough to make positive change. It is a bit of rose-colored-glasses way of looking at it, but it’s definitely there. Love is powerful enough to change the galaxy and one person is strong enough to make a difference.
With an answer like that, I couldn’t help asking for more about the romance. The High Republic: Convergence has echoes of all the great Star Wars love stories. Anakin and Padmé, Han and Leia, Rey, and Ben… I wanted to know how Zoraida pulled this off while still keeping the romance in the novel very fresh and relatable to the new characters she introduces.
When I started Convergence, as soon as I got the call, one of my first questions to Mike Siglain was: “Cool, can I make it a romance?”. When I started drafting the stories, I wanted to have a sense of the forbidden. Because I think we all love forbidden romance. Jedi are made for forbidden romance. That’s the question of the Jedi. Is there something powerful enough to break you? Anakin was broken by love, while at the same time Kylo was made whole by love. So we have Phan-tu and we have Xiri, two people from different worlds but they’re neighbors. Their worlds have been allies in the past but they’ve been in this war for a long time. They’re young but the futures of their planets and their kingdoms are literally on their shoulders. The only solution they see forward is by unity so they choose that first and then they find romance. Where with Gella and Axel, as much as I wanted to make that at true romance with a future, it’s opposites coming together to figure out a way to work together. And they can’t do it, but they’re supposed to do it and be protectors of Phan-tu and Xiri. They’re foils. I wanted to have one couple who could make it and one who can’t, for a billion different reasons.
The biggest strength of The High Republic: Convergence are the stellar characters Zoraida introduces. Sometimes I get wary, especially in Star Wars, when the cast of characters seems to endlessly expand as the chapters go on. Not in Convergence. I marveled at how well these characters are balanced while keeping their mystery and stories in the spotlight without distraction. I asked Zoraida what went into developing each of them and if they came first; or, did she build the story around them? (BEWARE SPOILERS)
I’m a “character first” when it comes to story and the story of the world tells around it. But because of the nature of this project, because it is intellectual property and I’m playing in the Star Wars sandbox, I got a scenario and then I could pick characters that had been developed for the series or I could make my own. So the characters that I picked from the series were Gella and some of the Jedi. But Phan-tu, Xiri and Axel, and Chancellor Mollo, I needed to make them for this book. Once I wrote my outline, I still didn’t truly know who Phan-tu and Xiri were. I knew who Gella was and I knew Axel was gonna be a space rake. (LAUGHS)
I pitched sort of “Hey, we have this ongoing war, but it’s a cold war, and we need the Jedi and the Republic to come together and then I need to fill in those instances”. Once I got my outline approved of what I wanted to happen in the story, I had to keep developing and pulling the ‘“Who are they?” “What do they want?” “What do they actually want?” “What are they willing to do to get it?” And “who’s playing in the shadows?” I guess I’m the kind of writer who would really love to spend…like this book could have been 700 pages if they had let me. I feel I would have wanted to just have Phan-tu and Xiri and Axel and Gella just on the skiff in the desert, delivering relief supplies on both planets for pages and pages, because I feel like that would have made for such good conflict, but you know, there’s like a limit to how repetitive things can be. I felt like every scene had to show a part of their personality and a part of their ultimate desire and goal in the story. Right? Like Xiri wants peace for her world. Phan-tu wants peace for his world. And Gella wants to find her place in the galaxy. And Axel wants chaos. And so once I knew all of that, it made it all so much easier to write.
Originally this book was going to be from two points of view, Gella and Axel. Then as I started writing I somehow started with Xiri and the planet E’ronoh and I was like “I really want to stay in her head, I really like her.” She’s like my echo of Leia and Padmé, and so it just snowballed from there and I had to listen to myself. I really tried not to have so many characters, but it’s hard when the space is so big.
For as many great characters as there are, Convergence could fall into several fiction genres yet still remain a story Star Wars fans will love. While reading, I was curious whether Zoraida leaned more into one genre than another.
I wanted to lean into whether or not I could write a spy, I guess like a military spy novel. You know, for me I’m always gonna be a genre writer of fantasy, right? That’s number one. But there’s a greater mystery of who’s working in the shadows. Because sometimes I think that with Star Wars, villains look like Darth Maul, and they are there and they are hunting you, but sometimes villains look like Palpatine, and they are there in the shadows. And so my original pitch involved Man from UNCLE, because I’m thinking, “Okay, it’s a Cold War, spy movie that has comedy, romance, and two people who hate each other and then become allies”. So, that really sparked something in me. Yes, my Jedi and my Republic person should be antagonistic towards each other, because we’ve seen them work together in the Clone Wars, and how the Jedi become this force for the Republic. And here they’re still very separate in The High Republic, they are separate entities. So it made sense to me, oh, they should be separate.
So that antagonism and then pairing it with, you know, you have two planets at war. And not to sensationalize it, but you know, what if two sides decided to get married and fall in love? I feel like there’s a lot and I wanted to put everything I love into it, and still sort of feel cohesive, and I’m glad people are DM-ing me scenes from the book that when I was writing I was like “I hope somebody likes this paragraph”. And it’s happening, so that’s been really nice.
When Star Wars publishers announced this second phase of The High Republic would jump back over a century from the first one, I had a lot of questions. One consideration I have is t when future readers visit this era, they’ll likely be starting with this second wave to experience the story chronologically. Just like a whole generation of fans who will experience the trilogies from prequels to sequels now that they’re complete. When The High Republic wraps up, Convergence will likely be one of the first books readers enter the era with. I wondered how Zoraida felt about this.
Oh my God! I haven’t actually thought about it that way, but you’re right! Because I grew up in the 90’s and early 00’s, and so the prequels for me…they weren’t my first Star Wars. But they were contemporary. So the idea that people might pick this up land say “Oh, chronologically, this is it!” That’s kind of terrifying but also really exciting because this initiative has so many layers, but one of the things that I love about The High Republic is that it’s expanding the galaxy and it’s making it bigger for literally everyone. There’s themes and storylines that we’ve seen in other works, but it does feel like its very own thing, its very own slice of the big Star Wars cake.
The story of The High Republic: Convergence revolves around a “forever war” between the planets Eiram and E’ronoh. Through the characters and the story, Zoraida gives us a rich survey of their cultures and history. Though this is a character-driven story, the histories of both planets loom large over all the events. The world-building of these two planets and their peoples seemed effortless so I asked Zoraida about her process.
I’ve been excited about it since I read Claudia Gray’s Into the Dark. They had a monarch from E’ronoh and the Queen consort from Eiram. And they had their own little side adventure. But for me, the thing that I love about Star Wars is getting to see the planets and the landscapes and the cultures. I was just a kid in a candy store, but I got to build the candy store. All I knew about Eiram and E’ronoh was Eiram is a water planet and E’ronoh is an arid planet. So when I went to Eiram I thought: “Blue oceans, hurricanes, tsunamis, typhoons… How did the people survive? What do they eat? How does the land change them?”
So making these distinctive markers, figuring out the idea that these two planets are at war and yet E’ronoh has a massive drought, it’s already a desert, they can’t feed their people, and yet they are selling their land in order to keep funding their war. Eiram is still a bit more protective but they still don’t have enough resources, so their worlds are at war with them and they are at war with each other. That was just so fascinating for me, being able to build that.
One thing I’m always curious about is what kind of stories and media authors consume in the midst of writing a novel. I wondered if Zoraida had been reading Dune during the process because there are some similarities, but she let me know that wasn’t the case. When Zoraida writes Star Wars, she soaks it in.
I use Star Wars as a vibe incubator. I’m like, “What kind of Star Wars vibe do I want? Do I want the funny part of it, or do I want the angsty part of it, like in The Clone Wars?” I watched a lot of Rebels right before this. And it wasn’t to prepare myself for the book at all, it was just because I wanted to rewatch Rebels. Because when I’m writing and editing, I need something in the background, even if I put the volume off. So I didn’t have… Maybe I just can’t think of it right now. But I think I looked to Star Wars for inspiration itself. I watched some World War II to sort of look at what’s happening with the Cold War, because it’s such an ominous period in our collective world history. So looking at the World Wars and the conflict around us, that was really the ugly part of the research, because it just showed how cyclical human history really is, and that is what went into Eiram and E’ronoh. Because they’ve been here before, right? And Phan-tu and Xiri, it’s their job to break generational trauma, and what Millennial and Gen-Z person isn’t going through that right now?
And even other generations, right? Maybe just seeing the repercussions of war. And that would be the actual inspiration. Because Star Wars is always going to be the main inspiration. I do this thing where when I start a book, I go read this non-fiction thing that I really like, like my Joseph Campbell books and I’ll re-read craft books. And I feel like inspiration is everywhere. But it was mostly looking at the wars. Even though this book is such a personal book about the fate of four people, I still wanted the background of war to feel like “This is the thing that they are fighting for.”
As Zoraida brought Convergence to a close, I wondered how she felt about handing all these characters off to another author. What are her hopes for the characters she’s placed at the beginning of their journeys?
I just want them to survive. Because I just don’t know. I don’t know what happens. I haven’t seen the outlines, I haven’t gotten the books yet. Lydia Kang is a phenomenal writer, so I’m just really excited to see. She has told me some things. Some characters are gonna have a more prominent storyline and…it’s just gonna be great. I’m like “Please don’t hurt them…” But obviously, that’s just me as a fan, I don’t know what happens in Cataclysm, but I’m very excited to read George Mann’s novel, The Battle of Jedha. And I’m really enjoying Cavan Scott’s comic book. It’s been really wonderful overall. Right now I’m reading Path of Deceit and I’m in love with Kevmo and that whole gang. I know that Tessa and Justina are ruthless, so I’m preparing myself.
Zoraida’s first novel, A Crash of Fate, remains one of my favorite Star Wars novels. It’s a wonderful story of friendship and love set against the backdrop of the First Order’s arrival on Batuu. It’s a book that came to me at a very rough time in my life, so it has a special place. I couldn’t resist asking Zoraida if we’d ever see more of Izzy and Jules. Sounds like there is hope!
I actually do have the stories in my head. We’ll see, it’s something I’d love to bring up to Lucasfilm at some point, like “Hey, remember these guys?” I would honestly love to go back to Batuu. I have ideas. I definitely miss those two kids. The book is actually on my desk right now.
The last question I’m always asking myself and Star Wars fans around me: What brings you back to Star Wars?
I think there’s a very deep sense of nostalgia when it comes to Star Wars. Every time I think about Kanan and Rebels, I want to cry. I watched Rogue One last month. Actually, it was right after I turned in Convergence, I just put in Rogue One and I cried for two-hours while watching it because I was like “I know everything that happens” and having the whole story just changes everything.
Love, hope, the idea of making a difference, the humor, it’s just it has everything and it has something for everyone. I’m a fan that likes everything, and so I feel like I’ve had a very good time with all of the Star Wars content we’ve been getting over the past few years. It’s a very great love, and it’s a love that we share all together. Millions of us love this one thing. And that’s kind of incredible. And as a writer and as a creator, just seeing the power of that, is just phenomenal. And I’m just so honored to be even a little part of it.
And we were honored to speak with Zoraida Córdova. Don’t even think about skipping The High Republic: Convergence, which is available now where books are sold. Authors like Zoraida are very busy with writing, deadlines, and publicity, so we’re very grateful for her time. She’s truly raised and set a new bar for writing in The High Republic and Star Wars, so I am very confident we’ll see more of her stories in the galaxy far, far away soon. I’m also a huge fan of her other novels (Hollow Crown fans, I see you!) and highly recommend visiting her site for more information.
Kyle Larson lives in Portland, Oregon. When he's not running trails, he's reading and writing.
