Via Making Light comes the entertaining saga of Another Hope, a Star Wars fan-fiction novel that you can buy on Amazon, though I should imagine not for very much longer. Apparently the author believes that this doesn’t contravene George Lucas’s copyright because “I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there”—Amazon being your local, small private website.

Anyway, the Making Light thread has lots more, but I thought a short excerpt from the book was worth reproducing here, because I read it and why should I be the only one with blood leaking out of my eyes?

The galaxy known as Celestine … was a spiraling mass of six concentric rings that encircled a small group of densely packed stars, the Deep Core. The Core Worlds formed the first ring around the Deep Core, and the Core Worlds were the oldest known places of human habitation. A second ring, the Colonies, was quickly established around the Core Worlds. Like the Core Worlds, the colonies became heavily populated. Later, humans again fanned out into a third region called the Inner Rim, a great ring of sparsely populated territory where conditions were harsh and resources extremely scarce. This lawless region formed the largely uncharted frontier between Celestine and wild space.

In between the Deep Core and the Colonies was a region known as the Old Suburban Worlds, where people moved after the Core Worlds filled up with immigrants from a nearby Galaxy. But this happened long ago—shortly after the invention of hyperdrive technology—and so most of those people (or rather, their descendants, for all this happens a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) now inhabit the New Suburban Ring Worlds, a rapidly developing region located between the Inner Rim and Wild Space, where the Malls are nicer and there are fewer of those awful Gungans.