Super Star Star Wars author R A Salvatore should have known what she was letting herself in for when she wrote the big brown lunk out of her latest best-selling Star Wars novel.

She was heard complaining to the Washington Post that she has had an avalanche of threatening hate mail, some actually threatening to do to her what she did to Chewbacca - boot her off this sad stage we call life.

Poor old Salvatore is fighting back with the 'I was only obeying orders' ploy. Apparently George Lucas gave the kill order for Chewie to go.

This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has written a share crop novel for Star Wars or Trek. The SOBs who control the super-media companies are paranoid of characters acting out of character, dying, forming relationships, or basically doing anything interesting in a novel that would them have to be reflected back in a film or TV episode.

Writing for these things make you want to take a shower afterward … you feel so cheap and used. For someone as over-controlling as Lucas, it is inconceivable that Salvatore could have snuck in - or even suggested - a main character death without our George being firmly on the side-line egging the author on.

Lucas has now promised the author a quick lend of his professional bodyguard team for as long as the Fan Fatwa against Salvatore lasts.

So don't be surprised if at the next world con, she's being followed by a couple of guys who look like agents from Men in Black. Crowsnest Comment: get over it fans, Star Wars may be one of our genre's finest films, but it's still only a movie.

Shame on you for your wicked stalking antics (or should that be fantics?).