Star Wars: Han Solo at Star's End by Brian Daley (Book Review)
Here’s the next book in my read of the Star Wars Expanded Universe/Legends:
Cover by Wayne Douglas Barlowe (image courtesy of Wookiepedia)
This is the first of a series of novels published by Del Rey from 1979 to 1980. The Han Solo Adventures were set roughly a couple of years before the events of A New Hope, starring Han, Chewbacca and the Millennium Falcon against the galaxy. Written by the late Brian Daley, these novels are short (under 200 pages) and you can find them collected in an ebook trilogy set. These novels, like Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, came out before Empire Strikes Back, so there’s little material to build upon—or blue sky if you’re creatively open. The first novel, Han Solo at Star’s End, came out and was an instant New York Times bestseller, post Star Wars release. Han is figuratively solo and without Luke and Leia (who are probably kicking around Tatooine and Alderaan, respectively), and interesting contrast to Splinter.
Han is a smuggler living on the fringes of both the galactic and the legal, but it is fun to get a peak of life in the Star Wars universe for those rare few (in the Galactic Empire, less so in Disney Star Wars) force users, and just a high paced space opera. There are some tidbits about Star Wars lore here, as I see them. First, the radar dish (Falcon’s long range sensors) is sheered away in a daring pursuit and escape from the Corporate Sector Authority ship. It’ll be years before Lando sheers the dish off in his escape from the second Death Star’s destruction in Return of the Jedi, and it’s not the reason the Falcon has a rectangular dish in The Force Awakens, but it gives the Falcon a sense that it’s been in more than a few scrapes over the years. In TFA, it’s a note that the radar dish was replaced by Lando, but it ultimately didn’t have Solo from losing his precious ship. The other tidbit is that—as we know definitely before Lucas tweaked ANH in his Special Edition—that Han shot first.
Solo and Chewie deal with the damage to the Falcon and go to where she needs repairs, sending him on a journey that brings along two droids, Bollux (a worker bee droid who’s seen some sh!t and whose name was changed to Zollux in the UK version as the original is offensive) and Blue Max (a stripped down, amped up super brain that lives within Bollux much like Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). One departure from the meager canon here is that these names are not much in keeping with the established alphanumeric designation (i.e. R2D2, C3PO, R5D4, etc.) in ANH, so it’s easy to surmise these were entirely Daley’s fabrication. The CSA appears to be another invention of Daley’s, as there’s no mention whatsoever about the Galactic Empire/Senate. CSA, to me, thinly alludes to a seceding portion of the Galactic Empire, perhaps, since the Confederate States of America share the same acronym.
The novel also codifies a couple of SW tenants. First, Solo is a hotshot pilot no matter what ship controls he’s behind. There’s even a fun bit of actual dogfighting in the novel with ships that have interstellar and atmospheric capability. It occurs to me that this also may be why Lucas did not want dogfights in Foster’s Splinter, but that may just be happenstance. Second, Solo is also a crack shot with his weapon and will use it any time he has to, and Daley uses it to good effect.
The problems arise in the characterization. Solo in this novel talks one way (tough), while somehow always doing the right thing (moral compass). It’s only problematic because it’s just not conveyed well to me—Daley brings some of his Vietnam veteran experience into play. Solo can talk tough, but the subtext could be better. As a character and smuggler, if Solo did the right thing all the time, he would be weak and easily manipulated. Chewbacca is more fleshed out here, though like Splinter, only by degrees. The world building is where Daley adds liberally with new races, the addition of gravity generators and the like. The plot is paper thin—with a whole circus motif so harshly contrived that even I couldn’t help but roll my eyes while reading. There was also some dialogue that appears ripped straight from the 70s itself—Lucas did this himself in ANH:
While it’s fine, such lines didn’t sing on the page as well on the screen.. While a quick read, I thought I missed something, though it may have been the frenetic pacing. The characters weren’t particularly memorable here—there were Jessa and Doc, who could’ve been any tough, spunky woman or absent-minded professor, respectively.
I looked up the late Brian Daley and learned he was one of the staff writers on a short-lived but much beloved tv cartoon series called The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. I loved that show, and he gets some credit for doing work on the small screen. For its brevity, Daley packs some world building in here and the writing works to breeze you through the story. He has two more novels in this series, and we’ll see what other kinds of scrapes Solo gets into and out of. If you’re interested in Daley, his most famous work outside of Star Wars is his GammaLAW series, completed over twenty years. If you’re interested in radio dramas, Brian Daley worked the screenplays for all of these, and passed away the day after the wrap party for RotJ’s completed series in 1996. You can find out all about them here.
May the Force be with you.