I am a fan of Star Wars. It’s something I will freely admit, although the qualifiers necessitated by Episodes I, II, and III, (Dumb, Dumber, and Not Enough and Too Late, respectively) are still called for. I was a huge fan in childhood, I was a nostalgic but not avid fan until the idiot trilogy appeared, I was the kind of fan that harboured some enmity towards Lucas from 1999 until last year, and I’m a happy, nostalgic lightly-scarred fan in the wake of last Christmas’s return to form.
However– the whole “Star Wars Day” thing? That didn’t present itself to me until the period of the Great Embitterment. May 4th? “Run along, sonny,” was my response, “Star Wars is a summer film, not a spring one.” This year, the first May 4th since the cloud lifted, I find that I don’t snarl the way I did, but I still can’t embrace the idea.
However, it being mentioned constantly all that day did get some thoughts passing through my head, and those thoughts were sufficient foundation for the new flash fiction, The Suspension of Disbelief.
It may, I fear, be more of a flash than ever. I realized, as I poked the final period of the story, that the foundation of the last paragraph stands on some slightly soft intellectual property ground. I’m not entirely comfortable that “fair dealing” provides me with full protection in making such long references to Star Wars in a work of fiction (that’s “fair use” to you folks in the US). Probably… but not definitely; it’s a grey area to me. I therefore urge you to glance at it while you may; I well bend like the supple grass should a Disney lawyer as much as clear a Bar-accepted throat in my direction.
Dirck de Lint's Missives from the Living Skies 