After many years of work, STAR WARS: THE ESSENTIAL CHRONOLOGY, the definitive history of the Star Wars universe, was released in April 2000.

Originally begun in 1995, this project grew and changed along with the overwhelming amount of new material being added to the Star Wars universe. The first incarnation was to be a large, James Michener-style novel that covered the sweeping timeline, with the frame story of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker creating his own holocron to preserve the known history of the New Republic. However, as more and more fiction continued to be published, the scope of such a book rapidly grew unmanageable. The release of STAR WARS: EPISODE 1 was bumped by a year, and then another year, allowing even more new novels to be fit into the schedule . . . and the CHRONOLOGY grew in size once more.