New Star Wars novel to feature first lesbian character

The Star Wars universe is nothing if not diverse, incorporating everthing from the slug-like Hutts to the teddy bearish Ewoks and the irritating Gungans. Next month, it will also be able to boast its first official gay resident, thanks to the author Paul S Kemp, who is including a lesbian character in his forthcoming Star Wars novel, Lords of the Sith.

The character, Moff Mors, “is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure. She also happens to be a lesbian,” revealed the site Big Shiny Robot.

Kemp confirmed the news on Twitter, writing: “It’s true that Lords of the Sith has a lesbian character. Her orientation is a characteristic in the same way as is her brunette hair. It just fit with my conception of her.”

The novelist added: “I don’t do ‘political correctness’, whatever that means. I write the stories I want to write, featuring the characters I want to feature. I don’t touch demographic bases to appease this group or that. I write what I want. Full stop.”

Lords of the Sith, published on 23 April, sees Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader setting out to personally end a rebellion on the planet Ryloth. Big Shiny Robot described it as “excellent across the board”, going on to interview Shelly Shapiro, who edits the Star Wars books at Del Rey, about the inclusion of Mors.

“This is certainly the first character in the canon,” she told the site. “But there was a gay Mandalorian couple, so it’s not brand new. It’s not something I really think about; it just makes sense. There should be diversity in Star Wars. You have all these different species, and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans. If there’s any message at all, it’s simply that Star Wars is as diverse (or more so because they have alien species) as humanity is in real life and we don’t want to pretend it’s not. It just felt perfectly natural.”

Harry Scoble, the Star Wars editor at Century in the UK, said that “the Star Wars universe has always been incredibly diverse – just look at the number of sentient species that rub shoulders there”.

“Alongside that should be an implicit assumption that sexuality there is diverse as well,” he said. “While Moff Mors is the first character in the canon to be explicitly mentioned as being LGBT, this isn’t meant to be a big statement, since there must definitely be others. In the end Star Wars should be as inclusive a world as we aspire to make our own.”

Two years ago, the massively multiplayer game Star Wars: The Old Republic from Bioware moved to include same-gender relationships after criticism from fans. The gay Mandalorian couple Shapiro referred to were in a novel by Karen Traviss, but according to Big Shiny Robot, “that reference was very subtle – and some readers had even felt that they’d misinterpreted it, not realising that they were reading about two gay Mandalorian men”.

The inclusion of a lesbian character in Star Wars is the latest move from a fantasy market keen to embrace diversity following the revelation two weeks ago, in the new issue of the Catwoman comic series, that the character was bisexual. Last year, the Star Trek comic series included a two-parter that flipped the sexes of the Starship Enterprise’s entire crew.