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Since the first moment he showed up in The Phantom Menace, Mace Windu has been one of the coolest, most powerful characters in the Star Wars franchise. However, that means that he's never had the chance to grow into a full person. The key to fixing that is to let him dance naked in his kitchen, according to the writer of a Mace Windu-centered novel.

Star Wars: The Glass Abyss has been a long time in the making. Twenty years ago, author and screenwriter Steven Barnes was given the job of a lifetime: to write a Star Wars novel. He remembered seeing the original film, and how much the ending impacted him. “In the midst of all of this overwhelming future shock in which human beings are totally dwarfed by a space station the size of a planet, you hear a voice saying, ‘Trust your feelings,’” he recalls. “In the midst of this world, we still count. By God…George Lucas choreographed an epiphany.”

Twenty years later, he got an even more exciting offer: to write a Star Wars book about Mace Windu, a character who in the films “...is kind of a cipher.  There’s a lot to be done in terms of filling him out.” As he sees it, the real problem is that past writers “couldn’t imagine his heart.” Or as he put it more colloquially: “They could see the authoritarian, they could see the deadly warrior, they could see the man who sent Jedi off to kill and die,” he acknowledges, but “the previous people who wrote Mace Windu couldn’t imagine him dancing naked in the kitchen making pancakes.”

Barnes would not reveal whether his novel Star Wars: The Glass Abyss, which is now out in stores, actually featured the Jedi Master cooking breakfast for himself in the nude, or a naked Jedi Council brunch. (Where do they holster their lightsabers?) But he did promise a richer portrait of Windu, one that handles “all the levels of him at the same time” to tell the kind of story “I wish I had read when I was younger.”

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