I’m well into the fourth of seven books in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I got to thinking last night that his gunslinger characters are really cool, but that I think Star Wars has laid permanent claim to the “last of a dying breed of warrior” type. Just as no one will be able to write a book about a wizard school ever again without being compared against Harry Potter, I wonder if the Jedi is simply the winner in that category. Not that King is whatsoever ripping off George Lucas. I think that he started the early writing of The Gunslinger at around the time that A New Hope came out, and certainly he’s drawing from westerns which in turn drew from samurai stories. And of course it occurs to me that there in fact are Star Wars novels featuring Jedi wizard schools.