It’s a busy day for me: I’m gearing up for my first presentation on behalf of "The Empire", which will happen at Microsoft’s TechDays event in Calgary (Wednesday, December 10th and Thursday, December 11th). More on that in a later post.

In honour of this preparation, I thought: here’s an opportunity to riff on the theme of “The Empire” (and to provide you with some reading material)  — I can present the storybook version of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Of course, back in those days, it was known simply as plain ol’ Star Wars.

The book came with a vinyl record that was meant to be played along with the book; I’ve included its audio below in MP3 format:

• The Story of Star Wars, Part 1
• The Story of Star Wars, Part 2

The voice work on the record is terribly off – whoever’s playing Darth Vader sounds more like Count Dracula, but you have to keep in mind the book was released in 1979, well before Star Wars had firmly established itself as part of the pop culture canon. Enjoy!