Squaring the Spaarti Cylinder: Contradiction and Reconciliation of Cloning in Star Wars

By Matthew Cartier

In A New Hope, an incredulous Luke Skywalker asked Obi-wan Kenobi, “You served in the Clone Wars?” Just a few moments later, Princess Leia’s recorded plea to Obi-wan referred to his service in the conflict as well. These mentions of the Clone Wars (along with another in the Empire Strikes Back novelization) would prod at the imaginations of Star Wars fans for over two decades. Then in 1991, Lucasfilm began publishing the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. The Thrawn novels offered the first explanation as to how cloning had been used in previous conflicts. While the course of the Clone Wars isn’t substantially explained in Zahn’s novels, there are numerous hints that they were disastrous, with clone soldiers raging out of control across the galaxy.

The Thrawn Trilogy does detail information about cloning in practice. Zahn describes large vats used to grow clones. Known as Spaarti cylinders, these massive tanks can create an adult human clone able to engage in combat in just a year. Thrawn used ysalamiri to isolate the clone tanks from the Force and decreased the time to grow a functional clone to 15-20 days. Thrawn’s swift production of clone soldiers is presented as an existential threat to the New Republic, especially when he acquires Katana fleet’s ships lacking only crews at the end of Dark Force Rising. With the estimated 20,000 cylinders in the Emperor’s warehouse on Wayland running at the new rate of production, Thrawn could theoretically create 360,000 cloned troops per year. Throughout the trilogy, many characters display an aversion to clones borne from their own memory or general social aversion.

Attack of the Clones hit screens less than a decade after The Last Command was published. In the movie, Obi-wan Kenobi discovers that the Kaminoans have been training a clone army in fulfillment of a contract with the Republic. According to the Kaminoans, “200,000 units are ready, with a million more well on the way.” The clones have been in production for approximately a decade and age at an accelerated rate compared to unmodified humans. 

The depiction of cloning technology on the screen presented potential continuity problems. Kaminoan clones are decanted as children and age rapidly, contrary to the adult Spaarti clones in the Thrawn Trilogy. Furthermore, the clone army is rather small. At 1.2 million strong, there are fewer Kaminoan clones than the approximately 1.3 million active duty U.S. military personnel. While it’s possible that the war with the Separatists was only focused on a few areas of operation at once, Palpatine used a clone army to assert control over the galaxy at the end of Revenge of the Sith. The number of Kaminoan clones available seems insufficient to execute such a wide-ranging mission. Frankly, that force is also insufficient in size for the Clone War, both as it is alluded to in EU books published in the 90s and depicted in the prequel films.

The new films also created a new timeline. In Zahn’s books, Leia refers to events during the Clone Wars as occurring “thirty, thirty-five years ago”. This puts the Clone Wars somewhere around 26-21 BBY. The eventual canon date of the Clone Wars is 22-19 BBY. For an estimate made well before the script of Attack of the Clones was written, this is reasonably close. The clones and cloning technology presented their own set of contradictions to be reconciled. To make the clones and cloning in the Thrawn Trilogy consistent with the new movie canon, the Spaarti cylinders needed to be used during the Clone Wars, roughly 30 years before Thrawn rises to power. But at some point, Spaarti cloning technology needed to disappear, as the technology is thought to be extinct before Thrawn reoccupies Wayland. And finally, the rise of the Empire in Revenge of the Sith required a massive force of troops to enforce the new political order. This last problem is due to Attack of the Clones itself, not canon that was established before it was released.

The short story Hero of Cartao by Timothy Zahn, published in Star Wars Insider in 2003, took the first steps towards reconciling these issues. During the battle of Cartao, the site of the one-of-a-kind Spaarti facility, a Republic assault transport crashes into the Spaarti plant, leveling it in a series of devastating explosions and destroying the Spaarti cloning technology. At the end of the story, a Republic official secretly working for Darth Sidious reports to him that there are several thousand cloning cylinders that survived the destruction of the complex. He further reports that Chancellor Palpatine has ordered them to be taken to Wayland, filling the stockpile that Thrawn uses in Heir to the Empire. It is no accident that Timothy Zahn was selected to write this story – it neatly reconciles his depiction of cloning technology with the new canon.

The Republic Commando series by Karen Traviss further addresses cloning technology and troop numbers. In the 2009 novel Order 66, a band of clone commandos and their Mandalorian ex-trainers discover that Palpatine is building a massive new army of clone troopers on Centax 2, a moon of Coruscant. Order 66 builds on Hero of Cartao by mentioning the loss of the original Spaarti facility. Ordo, one of the commandos, suggests that Palpatine “picked up a few scientists after the attack on Cartao.” This is the classic pattern of the Star Wars EU, building a shared continuity of events by oblique reference.

The troopers on Centax 2 are being grown using Spaarti technology and are not being trained to the same standard as the Kaminoan clones. In an epigraph, Palpatine is quoted “...[the new clones] have no need to meet the same exacting standards as the army bred on Kamino…This is the culmination of my strategy – two armies with two quite separate tasks.” One of the new clones demonstrates this less proficient standard in Order 66 when he displays poor accuracy in returning fire during a counterinsurgency operation. Afterwards, the clone says that it was not raining when he departed Kamino (really Centax 2), further evidence of his different origin. When Palpatine announces the Galactic Empire, the new clones are deployed across the galaxy. 

Palpatine’s army with which he consolidated the coup d’etat eventually expanded its recruiting criteria. Starting around 9 BBY, non-clone humans began to make up at least some of the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps. In the Timothy Zahn novel Allegiance, Taxtro Grave, a stormtrooper, says “From what I've heard, ISB never liked the idea of opening up the ranks to volunteers like us. They wanted to keep the stormtroopers strictly clones." Daric LaRone, another trooper, responds “That was nine years ago.” It is unclear from the text what drove the recruitment of non-clones into the stormtrooper ranks.

There’s a case that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound (or hundreds of pages) of cure. Looking back on his work in Heir to the Empire: 20th Anniversary Edition, Zahn indicates where his use of clones was preempted by editors or he simply got lucky to avoid all-out conflict with the new canon. When Joruus C’boath is introduced in Heir to the Empire, Zahn notes, “In my first outline this character was an insane clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, created before the Clone Wars by the Emperor…Lucasfilm vetoed the idea.” Later on in the same chapter, Pellaeon, while discussing C’baoth with Thrawn, recalls “The early clones—or at least those the fleet had faced—had been highly unstable, both mentally and emotionally.” Zahn writes, “Again, my assumptions about the Clone Wars were exactly backward: I assumed the clones would be fighting against the Republic…Fortunately, facing doesn’t necessarily mean fighting. My choice of words here was pure luck, but it helped me avoid a retroactive gaffe.” It’s unclear how facing could be otherwise interpreted, especially in this context. But it is certainly better as facing than fighting. In this case Zahn admits luck carried the day.

The continuity editors who preceded the Lucasfilm Story Group had to reconcile cloning technologies from the broader EU with Attack of the Clones. The resulting fix has all the hallmarks of a canon patch job, especially the use of Timothy Zahn to write the story that explicitly places Spaarti cylinders on Wayland and destroys the rest. Discerning fans may still wonder how Palpatine assembled the facility on Centax 2, but broadly speaking the EU canon assembled a reasonable solution to these problems in the years following the movie’s release. Given all the moving parts involved, it’s a wonder that the EU even somewhat held together. Even a phrase such as “the early clones – or at least those the fleet had faced” does not overly detract from the eventual reconciliation of pre-Attack of the Clones canon with what the movies added to the continuity. All of this work – multiple novel series, short stories, different authors, etc – started with fans getting obsessive about a single throwaway reference. At the end of the day though, that’s what the Star Wars EU was built on and why so many of us return to it again and again.

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Matthew Cartier has been a fan of the Star Wars EU since he was old enough to check books out from the library. When not reading a book (Star Wars or otherwise) he works on large scale distributed computing systems.