Star Wars’ Saddest Character Is The Space Slug (No, Seriously)

For the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, 40 authors were commissioned to write 40 short stories about 40 side characters from the movie, collected in an anthology called From a Certain Point of View. In between stories about Imperials and Rebels and that one guy running through Cloud City with an ice cream maker, Catherynne M. Valente penned a story about the space slug that eats the Millennium Falcon … and it is the saddest goddamned thing ever written.

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The space slug — technically an exogorth — is as old as the cosmos, born on the edge of existence where “light and warmth are legends told to frighten children.” Sy-O, as it is called, eats a dead star, kisses its ma and pa goodbye, then starts out toward the Galactic Core, a.k.a. Star Wars Land. The slug’s a billion years old and a baby simultaneously, and it marvels at all the good and bad watching entire civilizations rise and fall in the time it takes to perform its species’ equivalent of a sneeze. 

Gesundheit.

But space, Sy-O soon discovers, is cold and endless. And as much as it enjoys eating stars and dust and scattered debris, it’s also desperately alone. All Sy-O wants is to be loved, and to love something in return.

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And, lo, the hum of the universe changes. There’s a big space-slug jamboree happening and Sy-O is invited! So it gussies up its exoskeletal asteroid — that’s right, all those “asteroids” the Empire kept exploding against were actually exogorths having a party — and swallows a bunch of mynocks whole so it’ll have something to show off to all its fellow slugs. Because that’s the space slugs’ whole deal: they’re little, floating pocket planets that exist to house interstellar life inside of them.