Sunday, January 24, 2016

Build Up to A New Hope


The very satisfying Han Solo Trilogy is now complete, at least my reading of it. Rebel Dawn (1998) concludes the three book set with a bang featuring a nicely written ground combat war scene (to go with book 2's big space battle) and tie-ins galore with the Original Trilogy. In fact, the end of this book dumps you right into the lap of A New Hope, leading me to want to read the OT novelizations next (I have never done so).

The only gripe I might have with this one is understandable: A. C. Crispin includes a bunch of 'back story', re-hashing the events of the prior two novels quite a bit (in case book 3 is the only one you read). It wasn't too bad, though. There are some interesting "interludes", where Crispin works in a synopsis of the events from Brian Daley's Han Solo Adventures (in the Corporate Sector). An elegant way to have Rebel Dawn cover material before and after those side-trek books. I may go back and re-read those short works for the sake of completeness. I guess I will have to go get the Lando books, too, and see what Vuffi Raa et al is all about. Even the titles of those Lando stories make me want to cringe: Mindharp of Sharu, Flamewind of Oseon, and Star Cave of Thonboka? I guess they're nothing if not...original.

As far as Rebel Dawn goes, again I was very pleased to pal around with Han, Chewie, and Lando. More Hutts. More Imperials. More fledgling Rebels. All good stuff. This was a wonderful trilogy; I can't believe I took so long to read it. Better late than never, I suppose. Highly recommended!

1 comment:

  1. The Lando trilogy was an enjoyable read. Classic Sci-Fi with some nice twists on how Lando gets screwed by the universe !

    I really enjoyed reading them.

    The novelizaiton of the OT was IMO pretty bad. The second trilogy novelization was actually quite better, again IMO.

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