Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
I've read a lot of that, and it seems to have been written before Revenge of the Sith, since it misses a lot of plot points that occurred there, like Obi-Wan and R2 having a lot of direct contact with each other. And I really don't think that even George would write in that all-important mind wipe line if it wasn't actually going to happen. I mean, the whole point was to cover his ass.
I've read a lot of that, and it seems to have been written before Revenge of the Sith, since it misses a lot of plot points that occurred there, like Obi-Wan and R2 having a lot of direct contact with each other. And I really don't think that even George would write in that all-important mind wipe line if it wasn't actually going to happen. I mean, the whole point was to cover his ass.
No, it was updated after the publication of the RotS novelization. Lucas might've written the mindwipe line as a CYA, but...
a) Everyone else writing Star Wars material (except for Lucerno, apparently) is sticking with the the unwiped Threepio,
b) Lucas didn't confirm the mindwipe onscreen; it was just a bit of dramatic handwaving, like dumping Boba Fett into the Sarlac (is he dead? not dead? you decide!). It provides some (rather ham-handed) closure to the filmic continuity, but was done in such a way to allow (or even encourage) the unwiped Threepio in the greater canon, and
c) Saxton is much smarter than Lucas and has a better grasp of the Star Wars universe than he does.
The balance might shift the other way in the future, but right now, the preponderance of published, in-universe evidence suggests that Threepio's memory goes at least as far back as his reconstruction on Tatooine.
Next we can argue about the object Palpatine and Vader inspected at the end of RotS. Lucas and Lucerno insist that it was the Death Star; everything else published to date, reasoning, and simple observation suggest that it was not.