Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy Review!

November 2024 saw the release of the latest reference book from Dorling Kindersly, Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide To The Star Wars Galaxy. After being able to really dive deep into this massive tome, let’s talk about whether this book is worth a buy or not.

DK Publishing

This book is the latest in a long line of Star Wars encyclopedias from A Guide To The Star Wars Universe (First Edition) written by Raymond L. Velasco and published way back in December 1984, to the single volume hardback Star Wars Encyclopedia written by Stephen Sansweet and published in 1998, to the massive 3 volume hardback, 1408 page, behemoth The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia written by Stephen Sansweet and Pablo Hidalgo. 

This latest iteration is the first fully-Canon encyclopedia, although it is billed as “a fully updated of Ultimate Star Wars published in 2015 and 2019”, and at almost 450 pages, it is nearly 100 pages longer than either of those editions. In fact, I believe this is the largest Star Wars book DK have ever published and this is fully reflected in the sheer volume of content.

This book features over 2,200 separate entries from the whole spectrum of Star Wars stories - movies, TV, video games, books, comics, and so much more - and split into various sections, characters and creatures, locations, technology, and vehicles.

DK Publishing

At first glance, the book is very aesthetically pleasing. There’s a healthy variety of picture and entry sizes that break up the visual monotony that could happen with something of this size. For larger entries that warrant more than one accompanying picture the book pulls from various sources and it is refreshing to see comic art featuring alongside live action stills for the same character.

The book has been authored by no less than 13 writers but it’s clear that each and every one of them understood the assignment. The text is never less than engaging, and longer sections for main film characters are broken up into digestible chunks.

While the presentation of the entries and the layout of the pages is aesthetically pleasing, as mentioned, the decision to present every entry in timeline order, based on the characters first appearance in the timeline, is honestly baffling. While on your first read through it makes sense at first, opening as it does with the High Republic era, it soon becomes confusing. 

One particularly egregious example is having the biographies of Luke and Leia at the point of their birth at the end of Revenge Of The Sith. Not the first place you’d naturally look if you were flicking through this book trying to find them. 

In fact most of the main characters in A New Hope now appear in earlier sources meaning that by the time you reach that movie you only have 3 pages worth of content (for context, the Young Jedi Adventures animated show has 4 pages!). There is a comprehensive index at the back of the book to counter this, however whilst reading it I was more often than not questioning this decision and wondering whether alphabetical order, as used in all previous Star Wars encyclopedias, would have worked better.

DK Publishing

The above sequencing does, however, work in its favor when looking for characters, settings etc from specific, isolated, stories such as Andor, Alphabet Squadron, or the 2015 Marvel Star Wars run as you can just skip to the relevant section of the timeline. 

The sheer amount of information included in this book is honestly mind-blowing and while some of it is carried over from its previous life as Ultimate Star Wars, there is more than enough new information to ensure that no reader will feel short-changed. 

It is also worth noting that in any project of this scope there are bound to be inaccuracies here and there, whether caused by an author misunderstanding something while writing or new content changing the interpretation of previous established events. However, apart from one particularly annoying example (which I won’t mention here) there was nothing that jumped out at me as just being flat-out wrong - a remarkable achievement in itself. 

DK Publishing

While this latest Star Wars Encyclopedia is indeed “comprehensive”, as its title states, it cannot be called complete. As is the nature with these books there would have been a production deadline meaning whole shows like The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew are missing, and your mileage will vary as to whether you’ll be disappointed by the lack of characters from the Aftermath trilogy or thrilled by the inclusion of the droids from the Galaxy Of Creatures animated shorts from the Star Wars Kids YouTube channel.

It’s easy to recommend this book to everyone from casual fans to more hardcore lovers of the minutiae. There is enough here for everyone to enjoy and will make the perfect “pick up and read a random page” coffee table book. While it may be true that it is simultaneously incomplete while also being out of date the second it hit bookstores, that in no way diminishes the final product. 

It merely ensures that we can look forward to an even longer edition in a decade’s time!