Legends Never Die: Han Solo and the Lost Legacy

Han Solo and the Lost Legacy caps off Brian Daley's Han Solo trilogy, and was published four months after The Empire Strikes Back was released.

Frozen in carbonite, book trilogy ended. 1980 was a rough year to be Han Solo.

After making haste out of the Corporate Sector, Han, Chewie, Bollux and Blue Max are bumming around a backwater sector called the Tion Hegemony doing odd jobs like working for a flying circus.

Adventure comes calling in the form of one of Han's old academy instructors turned treasure hunter: Trooper Badure. Badure's recruits Han to get to the planet Dellalt to find a long-lost treasure ship, The Queen of Ranroon. The ship belonged to a fabled pre-Old Republic conqueror, Xim the Despot, and is said to be guarded by a legion of his deadly war robots. The ship has been the stuff of spacer legends for generations.

After a high-speed chase across a university, Han agrees and meets the rest of Badure's team: Hasti, a miner who's sister discovered the clue to the treasure's location and was killed for it, and Skynx, an eager Ruurian historian who's just about the most adorable fuzzy caterpillar person in the galaxy.

Dellalt proves to be a dangerous world, with a criminal mining operation, a reclusive group of deadly cultists in the mountains, and centuries-old war robots that are just as deadly as their reputation.

And then Gallandro shows up with a grudge against Solo for being humiliated in Han Solo's Revenge.

Considering Raiders of the Lost Ark came out a year later in 1981, the comparisons are inescapable. A character played by Harrison Ford goes on a hunt for ancient treasure and has to deal with angry natives and hostile armies. Probably coincidental, but the pulp element convergence here is striking.

Gallandro himself works as a stand-in for the sinister Setenza from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. His moustache is a little more flamboyant, but there's a lot of Lee Van Cleef in the character. He is one of the few people in the galaxy that Han is legitimately frightened of.

Like the rest of the trilogy, Daley's action sequences are fast-paced and exciting. The aforementioned university chase (which itself has a lot of similarities to one of the few bright spots in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), then there's a mountain chase on a giant metal disc, and a large-scale battle at the climax where everyone's fighting everyone as the war robots advance.

This time, though, there's a tinge of melancholy throughout. Its been a fun ride, but the party's coming to a close. Han makes more mistakes. Hasti, the potential love interest, rejects his advances, saying she wants something real and not a love-em-and-leave-em type. The ancient labor droid Bollux has a touching conversation about obsolescence and free will with the war robot commander. Skynx the academic is rushing to get as much adventure and knowledge into his life before he matures to a full adult and turns into a near-mindless butterfly. Bollux and Blue max have to leave Han by the end because they're not in the movies.

The passage of time undercuts everything in this book, and by the end, Han & Chewie have managed to piss off everyone important in the Corporate Sector and Tion Hegemony, so they bounce around the idea of doing a simple spice run for Jabba the Hutt.

The Han Solo Adventures are a blast to read and can be found individually or in omnibus formats. If you're of a tabletop persuasion, its essential reading for a Scum & Villainy type of game. Highly recommended and essential Expanded Universe reading.

Brian Daley would continue on with a few Star Wars projects, but not more novels. He wrote the script adaptations for the Star Wars Radio dramas (1981, 1983 and 1996, respectively). The audio dramas are really quite good, by the way, and expanded on a few themes that weren't in the movies.

Daley himself died in 1996 of pancreatic cancer shortly after recording of the Return of the Jedi radio drama wrapped. According to his official website, which is still up as a memorial to him, some of his ashes were to be scattered at the Little Big Horn Spirit Gate memorial to help defend it from inter-dimensional threats. 

Legends Never Die: Han Solo's Revenge

Han Solo at Stars' End was published in early 1979. The sequel, Han Solo's Revenge followed in late 1979. Whereas Stars' End ended up a prison break story, this turns into almost a James Bond style adventure/mystery.

It begins with Han and Chewie (and the droids Bollux and Blue Max) operating a movie theater on a desert planet for easy credits. Unbeknownst to them, they've accidentally created a religious experience for the desert natives by showing a documentary of a water world. The scheme ends in a hurry when they try to show a different movie and they're back in space, desperate for cash.

The solution comes in a simple, lucrative smuggling operation. One catch: Han finds out it involves running slaves. Han & Chewie are rogues, but they absolutely refuse to get involved with any slavers. The immediate situation resolved, an angry Han Solo sets out to find the slavers and get the money they still owe him.

To that end, Han runs into one Fiolla of Llord, a beautiful, idealistic and resourceful woman who's also a Corporate Sector Assistant Auditor-General trying to track down the very same slaving ring. Meanwhile Chewie has his hands full dealing with a persistent skip tracer named Spray, who shoves his way onto the Falcon, intending to repossess it once all the shooting stops.

Shootouts on a luxury spaceliner, planet hopping, a bomb on the Millennium Falcon, a high speed swoop bike chase scene five years before the speeder bikes of Return of the Jedi, and an encounter with Gallandro, the deadliest gunslinger in the Corporate Sector, if not the entire Galaxy.

Much like Stars' End, Revenge runs at a rapid clip of action sequences, betrayals and more action sequences. Comic relief is also strong, as Bollux and Blue Max continue to provide their mix of competence and comedy, while Spray becomes an amusing foil for Chewie.

The real standout is Fiolla, one of the first genuinely memorable Expanded Universe female protagonists and love interests for Han. (Jessa from Stars' End counts too, but she's only there at the beginning and end of that story). Resourceful, witty, and occasionally naive in contrast to Han's practical cynicism, she's great. If one were feeling woke, it could be pointed out that she is a non-Caucasian female hero in a Star Wars story from 1979 and it was no big deal because the franchise was always diverse, but that would shatter the narrative.

She's also a genuinely good cop, which makes a strong contrast to the hard edge the Corporate Sector Authority had in the first book. Tyrants like Viceprex Hirken aren't the only employees in the Authority, which adds a nice layer of nuance.

I absolutely recommend Han Solo's Revenge for fast-paced scum and villainy action, adventure and romance. Essential tier.

Legends Never Die: Han Solo at Stars' End

Han Solo at Stars' End is the second ever Star Wars novel. Published in 1979 by Del Rey, one year after Splinter of the Mind's Eye and two years after the original movie, this was a book of firsts. The first Han Solo-centric novel (the smuggler doesn't even appear in Splinter for reasons I covered in that review), it takes place before A New Hope and follows Han and Chewie's criminal escapades in a new location, the Corporate Sector.

Brian Daley (1947-1996), was a new author in 1979, having published his first novel, The Doomfarers of Coramonde (a story about US soldiers in Vietnam being transported to a fantasy world, which frankly, sounds like a blast) and its sequel, The Starfollowers of Coramonde in 1979. Daley was young, new, and pulpy, and it shows in Stars' End.

The book starts with Han & Chewie running guns for a group of oppressed laborers. Then they almost get impounded for not having the right kind of registration for the Millennium Falcon to operate in the Corporate Sector, and then they get swept up in a search for a missing outlaw tech named Doc who can help with the registration problem that turns into a murder mystery covering up a totalitarian prison on the edge of the galaxy known as Stars' End.

It may not be pulp in the traditional sense, but its a short book and whips from scene to scene with barely any fat. Han Solo as he is here is a committed rogue, scoundrel, and selfish jerk. When he pays back a loan shark named Ploovo Two-For-One, he adds in a vicious little exotic pet that jumps out of the box and attacks Ploovo. He doesn't accept the missing persons' job for free, doing it because he needs to get the Falcon's registration fixed.

Yet there's flashes of the hero he will become. He gives free advice to the aliens he smuggles guns to in the beginning. It takes some prodding from some of the characters, but he sticks it out with the search for Doc.

The new characters are well handled. Jessa, Doc's outlaw tech daughter is a talented tech and fighter pilot in her own right who can match verbal barbs with Han. Atuarre, the Trianii (cat people) ranger looking for her missing husband is a solid warrior woman kind of character who has very personal stakes in the mission. Rekkon, the academic who's much more capable of adventuring than a mere professor would seem is the only true idealist here, and he's a fantastic mentor for Han as somebody who knows to prod him in the right direction. Also, Rekkon's arguably the first important black character in Star Wars, predating Lando by several years, and he's intelligent, cunning, and heroic.

The real standouts are the droids Bollux and Blue Max. Blue Max is an eager little super computer who's amazing at technical feats but has the personality of a child and can't move around by himself. Enter Bollux: a positively ancient labor droid with a laconic personality and Southern drawl who's chest cavity is transformed into a housing unit for smuggling Max. They're fantastic.

The set pieces work out great too, including a fantastic dogfight that introduced early swing-wing versions of Z-95 Headhunters to Star Wars. The escape from the agriworld of Orron III by stealing and reprogramming a harvester droid is great. The climactic prison break at Stars' End ends up with Han blasting the entire station into low orbit and then having to find a way to escape before it comes crashing back down. Its awesome. What's more impressive is that it manages to capture a strong Star Wars feel without the Force and the Empire (well, there's a reference to the Imperial Entertainers' Guild, but that's it). If there's any real complaint I can think up is that aside from the Corporate Sector Authority's heavy-handed bureaucracy, there's no real meaty villain until they reach Stars' End.

In 1980, comics veteran Archie Goodwin (who helmed much of Marvel's Star Wars ongoing comic) and Filipino artist Alfredo Alcala adapted the story to a newspaper strip, which was later collected and printed by Dark Horse in 1997. The technology doesn't always match up with descriptions (Z-95s are described as having swing-wings and the comic doesn't portray them as such, so continuity wonks will grit their teeth) and the strip excised a LOT of the story, but its still a fun read.

Han Solo at Stars' End is damn good space opera. As a Star Wars story, its wickedly fun, fast, and action-packed and perfect for anybody looking for Scum and Villainy adventures. Its on a smaller scale than the Thrawn trilogy, but just as good. Essential tier

Plus, Han launches a villain out of a space lock.

In hyperspace.

I'd like to see Greedo try and do that first.