If you're listening to this broadcast, you. I'm John. Thank you so much for joining us today. It is a glorious day for Star Wars fans because it is the 40th anniversary of the Empire Strikes Back being released way back in 1980.

And we're going to spend this whole episode dedicated to episode five of the Star Wars saga, which at one point was called Part 2, I guess.

But we'll get into that

later. With me, as always, James and Lacey. And we are joined by a former Lucasfilm creative executive.

He is a writer and author, his upcoming novel about the space race called All Up is available

for pre-order now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and will be released on July 14th.

He's known for writing The Making of Star Wars books, including our topic today, The Empire Strikes Back.

And you may also know him for revealing George Lucas didn't like Mara Jade with us last year on the podcast.

Welcome back to the Resistance broadcast, J.W. Rinsler, welcome back.

Thank you. It's good to be back.

I'm not, yeah, somehow this seems like the only way to talk now.

So it's more welcome than last time in a hot way.

Yeah, we appreciate you coming back. It's been about a little over a year since you were with us last time.

And it certainly feels oddly more normal now to be doing this sort of thing than back then,

I'm sure for you too.

But yeah, before we get into Star Wars and mainly really the Empire Strikes Back, as I mentioned,

your book All Up, why don't you just take a few moments and let us know what that's about,

how it came about, where people can get it and whatever you want to do about it.

I'll keep it short.

So all up is not, it's about the space race, but it's also about the whole first space age.

It really starts actually before World War II and then takes you all the way through World

War II and all the amazing and very strange things that were going on at that time with the

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