27 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' questions answered by the novel

Warning: If you're one of the five or 10 people in America who still haven't seen The Force Awakens, you probably shouldn't read this.
While Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not anywhere close to a remake of the first movie, it does contain many conscious echoes and callbacks. That's also true of the fact that the novelization of Force Awakens, which came out last week, was written by Alan Dean Foster
Foster ghost-wrote the novelization of the original movie, which came out in November 1976 and helped create anticipation for the May 1977 release. He then turned around and wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first "Expanded Universe" novel. Say what you like about his prose style, but he's certainly prolific: the author once told me he writes by "simply describing the movie I see in my head.