Few pieces of Star Wars’ expanded universe storytelling have achieved the legendary status of Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelization. First published in 2005, it’s widely regarded by fans as one of the finest Star Wars books ever written, thanks to Sover’s clever prose and deepening of George Lucas’ original story.
Now, two decades later, a new annotated 20th-anniversary edition invites readers to go back to Revenge of the Sith — with Stover as a guide. Packed with more than 170 annotations and a brand-new introduction from the author, this edition offers an unprecedented look behind the curtain of one of the saga’s most emotionally devastating tales.
Over email, Stover says the great challenge of adapting Revenge of the Sith was burrowing into the psychology of Anakin Skywalker and properly chronicling his fall.
“The most finicky part,” he recalls, “was balancing all the different pressures Anakin is under, in order to tease out which of these pressures is on his mind at his major decision points. I wanted readers to look at each individual choice along his downward spiral and think, Yeah, I can see why he did that. I might have even done it myself.’”
The writer knew delving deeper into Anakin’s story would be Star Wars catnip, but he never predicted just how resonant some of his formal flourishes would play to those fans. People, it turns out, really latched onto the book’s poetic side.
“The most surprising for me has been the little ‘The dark is…’ prose poems that introduce the major sections and close the book,” Stover says. “Those bits show up in YouTube clips from chamber-style instrumental settings to hair metal. Some people even get lines tattooed.”
Stover admits he initially resisted the idea of pulling back the curtain on Revenge of the Sith.
“I didn’t want to do the annotation thing at all,” he says with a laugh. “I want stories I write to stand on their own, without any need for Director’s Cut Commentary-style crap.” What changed his mind was a note from Revenge of the Sith editor Tom Dupree, who pitched the project as “a teaching opportunity.”
That line resonated deeply. “I was raised by a teacher,” Stover explains. “The dedication in my first Star Wars novel, Traitor, reads ‘for the teachers.’ So that’s kind of what this edition is — except my teaching style is less like a lecture, and more like a funhouse ride through my writing process.”
Below, Hoeler, who is currently editorial director of licensed fiction and special projects at Random House Worlds, has selected his top annotations from Revenge of the Sith (Deluxe Edition). Stover might gnash his teeth a bit over these revelations, but like his work telling Anakin’s story, they should delight readers who live for Star Wars.
Revenge of the Sith, annotated
This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.
This is the twilight of the Jedi.
The end starts now.
Stover’s annotation: One of the big tricks of the Greek tragedies was something Aristotle would call dramatic irony—basically referring to when you, the reader, know what’s going to happen, but none of the characters do. Done properly, this technique transforms happy anticipation into creeping dread.
Contemplation of death brought only one slight sting of regret, and more than a bit of puzzlement. Until this very moment, Obi-Wan had never realized he’d always expected, for no discernible reason—
That when he died, Anakin would be with him.
How curious, he thought, and then he turned his mind to business.
Stover’s annotation: This easter egg is (of course) not from a Star Wars novel; it’s from the movie A New Hope. It’s supposed to flip the easter egg discovery from “Hey, I got that one!” to “Oh crap… I got that one…”
Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers.
But Anakin’s fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.
Stover’s annotation: I came up with this concept as a metaphor for Anakin’s rage, and I built it into an ongoing nuclear-fury motif that colored most of his scenes. I thought his main struggle was with his anger, right? He locks it down so he won’t explode into a murderous frenzy, like at the Tusken Raider camp. Perhaps because I sometimes struggle with my own temper, I sort of naturally assumed that rage was most of what drove him.
If you turn to “The Sun-Dragon Crisis” on page 423, you can read about why I was completely wrong, and what happened when I found out.
The dark is generous, and it is patient.
Stover’s annotation: I decided to echo “the dark is generous” line (from part 1) to bring it directly to mind before saying it’s patient. This is partly for simple clarity, to be sure this passage isn’t mistaken for some kind of an alternative take; it’s to say, “All that, and also this,” without having to spell it out.
I think it also brings in a creepy formalism. It feels like an incantation.
Anakin and Obi-Wan would never fight each other.
They couldn’t.
They’re a team. They’re the team.
And both of them are sure they always will be.
Stover’s annotation: Burns a little, huh? I hope so. Writing it stung me, and I hate to suffer alone.
This is the death of Count Dooku:
A starburst of clarity blossoms within Anakin Skywalker’s mind, when he says to himself Oh. I get it, now and discovers that the fear within his heart can be a weapon, too.
It is that simple, and that complex.
And it is final.
Dooku is dead already. The rest is mere detail.
Stover’s annotation: This is the first freeze-frame that isn’t quite frozen. Here, I use storyteller mode in present tense to give you a literary split screen, showing side by side how this murder feels to each of them, and how each of them feels about it. I often use present tense as a device to give the action immediacy; to me, past tense reads like memory, while present tense reads like it’s happening now. Another cool thing about present tense as a device is that it always reads like it’s happening now. Turn back to an earlier page, and you’ll find that whatever just happened is still happening, right? I use this effect occasionally to suggest altered mental states, like the feeling you get when your most cherished certainties about yourself suddenly burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, for now:
The Supreme Chancellor returns your look with a hint of smile and a sliver of an approving nod, and for you, this tiny, trivial, comradely victory sparks a warmth and ease that relaxes the dragon-grip of dread on your heart.
Stover’s annotation: The use of second person in storyteller mode is meant to encourage you to imagine yourself as Anakin here, to imagine yourself feeling what he’s feeling right now. This is all to make his fall emotionally persuasive, and (if I got it right) to get you imagining how you’d handle his troubles if they were yours.
And yet the great prophets of the Jedi had always taught that the gravest danger in trying to prevent a vision of the future from coming to pass is that in doing so, a Jedi can actually bring it to pass —as though if he’d run away in time to save his mother, he might have made himself somehow responsible for her death.
Stover’s annotation: To write a prophecy-driven story without at least an oblique reference to the “Appointment in Samarra” fable would be literary malpractice.
There is an understated elegance in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber technique, one that is quite unlike the feel one might get from the other great swordsbeings of the Jedi Order.
Stover’s annotation: I would like to claim that the shift into a more conventional storyteller mode here was designed to ease the transition from Anakin’s dream state into the upcoming lightsaber duel, because I think it’s plausible, and I think it makes me sound smart. Truthfully, my original draft had the bulk of the Utapau sequence in one chapter and the Anakin scenes in another. The final order here was an editorial decision to make this part flow more like the film. Which means the way the narrative voices seem to work together here is a testament to the importance of a good editor.
Reprinted from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Episode III (Deluxe Edition), by Matthew Stover. © 2025 by Lucasfilm Ltd. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
