Last Sanctuary

Fanfiction
Title:	Last Sanctuary
Author(s):	Maggie Nowakowska
Date(s):	1978
Length:
Genre(s):	gen
Fandom(s):	Star Wars
Relationship(s):
External Links:	art by Pam Kowalski
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Last Sanctuary is a Star Wars story by Maggie Nowakowska.

It was printed in Skywalker #1 and then in ThousandWorlds Collected.

Author Comments

1991

In 1991, the author explained "garnet eyes":

Thanks for mentioning that you enjoyed one of my" stories. Gad, LAST SANCTUARY is 13 years old. The garnet eyes came about because of the giggles people had over the "red eyes" that could be seen through Vader's mask in some prints of ANH. Dyane and I really liked the idea, especially since it opened up a whole new range of colors to play with. I had wanted to make Darth a blond with red eyes, but Dyane—drat it now—talked me out of it.

2017

This was really was when I started with these different ideas. I was ready. Dyane Kirkland was a friend, and she was writing some of the stories. She wanted to write Darth Vader’s history. She wanted to write Chewbacca’s history, and she had a character. That was the other big thing. You only had a few characters in the first movie. It was legitimate to create your own original characters because these people had to live with other people. And so, if you wanted to write a story about—that wasn’t just replaying Star Wars, you had to come up with other people they knew, which I loved. They gave you all these kinds of people to put in your stories.

The zine Skywalker 1 had the Chewie background story that Dyane wrote. It had my Ben and Vader story, which created how Ben came to be on Tatooine and how Vader became a bad guy. I think I had what we called a donut story. We put part of it before Last Sanctuary and part of it after Last Sanctuary, where after the celebrations and after the rebels are going to have to break down the Yavin base because now the people would know they were there. Han goes back to pay off Jabba, to get him off his back, and Luke goes with him to go to Ben’s hut to see if there’s anything there, ..., souvenirs or whatever, you know?

And they bring back his chest where he kept his light saber, and I posited that he had—I spent a lot of time writing down notes, ..., for anybody who might be interested, if anybody is, in 20 years, because 20 years in the desert, you got to do something to keep yourself sane. And that was something people talked about a lot, too, especially once George Lucas said that he had originally intended the Kenobi character to be a little bit more crazy, and he had thought about having Toshiro Mifune play him, and I knew enough about Asian religions and other fairy tales always to know that there’s always a crazy guy somewhere, and he’s usually older, but he ends up turning to be the wise guy—the wise man. Han’s the wise guy. Obi-wan is the wise man.

Reactions and Reviews

Then we have Maggie Nowakowska's Naom Pre and Kyane Kirkland's (and Nowakowska's?) Errme Atani, both appearing in the ThousandworId Chronicles series in SKYWALKER. Naom Pre, Luke's maternal grandmother, is featured in Nowakowska's "Last Sanctuary" in SKY #1. She is a warrior, Ben's lieutenant and Master at Arms of the Jedi Enclave on Alderaan, and one of Vader's instructors. Absorbed in her work, she lets her non-Jedi husband raise their daughter, and after his accidental death clashes with the daughter over the younger woman's determination to marry Skywalker, twice her age. Aside from stubbornness the women have little in common. Naom is anything but passive and feminine, while her daughter is very much so; and her fatal flaws are shared with Ben (who may or may not be her father) and with grandson Luke: temper, impatience, a tendency to allow her emotions to take control, especially where the hated Sith Vader is concerned. She is shown in action as instructor, warrior, and strategist, and, at the end when she's killed by Vader after attacking him as a traitor, accepting responsibility for her failure to act on her earlier suspicion of him.

"Last Sanctuary" was one of the first TW stories published by Maggie Nowakowska and first printed in SKYWALKER 1 in 1977. Built around events in ANN, as all TW stories are, this particular tale Is her version of the fall of Darth Vader, based upon Obi Wan's lines in that film and the remark made by Lucas regarding Vader's physical devastation being due to his fall into a firepit. Upon this foundation, Maggie builds an extraordinary piece of fan writing, the real story centering around ideals, illusions and our treatment of those heroes who do not live up to those same ideals. She uses a complex structure to tell her story prologue, chapter. Interlude and epilogue. The techniques demonstrate a grasp of the writing craft from which every writer can learn, each of them providing Maggie with a way to both move her story's action along and make her point regarding her theme.... I have read "Last Sanctuary" half a dozen times in as many months. Still, it strikes me as a remarkable and admirable piece of writing that few (if any) in my reading of fanzines have ever matched. The depth of is story is flatly rare in most fanzines, and it is her depth of understanding of human behavior that makes reading Nowakowska's "Thousandworld" stories so special. She is a particularly skilled and honest writer.

... [Vader's homeworld] is a dying world headed into an ice age, whose people are forced by the poverty of their planet to live by periodic aggressive raids against the rest of the galaxy. Like most other fan writers, Maggie interprets the title of Dark Lord as one of hereditary nobility, and postulates a stratified semi-feudal society with an arrogant, warlike, semi-barbaric ruling caste quite lacking in the more civilized and human virtues. The Vader set against this background is a beautifully crafted character who 'falls' to the dark side with the inevitability and elegance of a Greek tragedy. Beginning with every advantage -- beauty, intelligence, Force-ability, and a burning idealistic vision -- Darth is lured by impatience with the Jedi's individualistic and low-key policies and by his Miltonic pride to take control and abandon the Jedi for the more direct and autocratic power of the Empire. He subordinates means to ends, and, for the best of motives, accepts tyranny and oppression in the short run to achieve a better society in the long run. He comes to the Jedi in order to 'bring the Truth, the Beauty, the Gory of the power of the Force to all peoples, and all shall herald a New Era, a new a greater understanding of Life.' He comes to the conviction that ONLY he can achieved this, and he must have complete power to do so. He wants to be God, and like that other fallen archangel who challenged God for lordship of the universe, he inevitably becomes a great and terrible, yet compelling, Lord of Evil.

I think my favourite story is "Last Sanctuary" and not because it features one of my favourites (Darth Vader) so prominently though that plays a part. It is because the writer seems to have captured well characters and a haunting mood of what was and what might have been but is now lost forever. I like the notion too of an incredibly beautiful Darth beguiling those he encounters, striving to be something different but ultimately being drawn back by his heritage. One might almost say, misquoting Don Jose speaking of Car men in Merimee's "Carmen," "Poor child! It was the [Sith] who were to blame, for having brought [him] up so." Also liked "Intersection" for its portrayal of Han and his basic immaturity beneath the devil-may-care exterior.

I notice in "Last Sanctuary" that the author is following the comment thrown out in ROLLING STONE by George Lucas that Vader wears a mask because he fell in to a fire-pit. It is an odd thing but no SW (or Vader) fan I know out here and that is quite a few, either likes or accepts this idea. One objection is that it is unrealistic -- he would have been crisped (else why is leaping into volcanoes such a national pastime amonst suicide-prone Japanese?) At least Maggie Nowa kowska makes it more plausible by having him jump into the flaming ruins left by an incendiary bomb, thus ma king it possible for him to kick himself free of the fires. Another objection is that it makes him appear stupid and clumsy. A third is that it is very unorigi nal to have a villain who is masked because he is dis

figured -- straight out of horror films.

"Last Sanctuary" sounded great. All about Obi-wan and Luke's father and how they tangle with ole D.V. But it was so long and drawn out that I had to Force myself to finish it. All those different chapters and parts was, again, confusing. Even the big confrontation with Vader and Kenobi was not as exciting as I hoped. And Vader shouldn't get away with killing Luke's father in' one sentence! That was terrible. It would be better if they could say some things to each other first. You know—like "So Skywalker, you never suspected, pity, etc., etc..."

I felt I had to write concerning Maggie Nowakowska's "Last Sanctuary." It was good and awful. Awful, solely in her vocabulary, y'understand; gothlc phrasing, like "Yes, yes, it had to be" in narrative for God's sake, and florid fifth-form dialogue get to be a bit much, particularly carried over so long a story as this was. Perhaps this is Nowakowska's style; nevertheless, it is ponderous.

On the other hand, the story she had to tell was fantastic. Super-colossal.. Sensitive and human! Etc.. Even tho Obi-Wan talks like a 1937 historical-movie character, he's real, his pain and learning is believable and sympathetic. Her Darth is the best damn Darth this one has seen in the fanflc—great honk, there's a reason for his evll, his pride, and even his breath-mask. Marvelous stuff. And all the other characters, the half dozen other Jedi including Herr and Frau Skywalker, Dodonna, the Bad Guys, the bartender—they're all real, partly good and partly good and partly culpable as real people are. A most impressive job. Maggie has call to be proud.

One final query, is the front cover Luke supposed to be apotheosized? The Our-Lady-of-Guadelupe nimbus, I mean.

In SW we get a mess of people who, while they weren't characterized very deeply in the movie, lend themselves to a great deal of characterization because of their rich histories. Things happen to the SW people, and a keen student of human nature can show the SW characters evolving through the incidents in their lives. This puts much more of a demand on any SW author, though; there's so much more to make up.

...Maggie's effort in "Last Sanctuary" was impressive. She tried to deal with the fall of the Jedi and handled it quite well but for two things. She never got Into the political situation that permitted Palpatine to come to power, and she was never quite clear about why Darth Vader fell. Reading the intro to Lucas' SW novelization, Palpatine comes over sounding suspiciously like "Tricky Dicky" Nixon, the ambitious senator who got himself elected president of the Republic and then went power-mad, leaving his coolies to run the show. What Palpatine probably had, and Maggie doesn 't deal with, was the Clone Wars. It is my feeling these were the Old Republic's VietNam. They completely demoralized the Republic, and with everyone arguing over whether to clone or not to clone, and the technology creating economic and social chaos, the Republic fell apart.

I sincerely doubt that the Clone Wars conflict was ended very tidily, as Maggie seems to feel. Cloning produces economic chaos since, If you have a mill full of clones, you don't need to pay them much, and this puts your regular (non-clone) people out of work. The folks out of work migrate to Tatooine, creating economic chaos there, and it just snowballs. Then, of course, there's the moral Issues of cloning: are clones people or things, is it murder to grow a clone of your self and then kill it for spare parts, etc. What I'm getting at, is I don't think the clones were an external threat: an army of clones invading the republic; I think it was an internal thing that produced civil war, and Palpatine stepped into"restore order"....

I really enjoyed your story "Last Sanctuary" and I felt so sorry for Ben. Everyone blamed him entirely for the mess with Vader and everyone expected him to be perfect -- your story illustrated this point well.