Star Wars adds first official lesbian character

Moff Mors will appear in Paul S Kemp's upcoming novel Lords of the Sith

Star Wars is getting its first lesbian character.

Paul S Kemp has revealed that he is adding the mystery woman to his upcoming novel Lords of the Sith, the next instalment in the official sci-fi canon due out on 28 April.

Little is known about her, but “nerd news” blog Big Shiny Robot has dropped a few hints about what fans can expect.

“Moff Mors is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes, but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure,” a recent post reads. “She also happens to be a lesbian.”

Shelly Shapiro, editor of the Star Wars books, explaining that including a lesbian character “just makes sense”.

“There’s a lot of diversity…there should be diversity in Star Wars,” she said. “You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.

“If there’s any message at all, it’s simply that Star Wars is as diverse (or more so because they have alien species) as humanity is in real life and we don’t want to pretend it’s not. It just felt perfectly natural.”

Mors will be the first such character in the new canon, but the first same-sex relationship in Star Wars came courtesy of Karen Traviss who, albeit subtly, included two happily-married male Mandalorians, Goran Beviin and Medrit Vasur.

It remains unknown whether the character will feature in future Star Wars movies, with JJ Abrams’ hotly-awaited The Force Awakens set for release in December.

One diversity advocate who will welcome this news is screenwriter Russell T Davies, who questioned the lack of a homosexual character in Star Wars last July.

“There are whole vast empires where we don’t exist – there’s not a single gay person in Star Wars, in Star Trek, in Disney, in Pixar, and this stuff isn’t old, it remains current,” he told Attitude. “There’s still a long way to go.”