Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was pretty good. Yesterday afternoon I finished reading the second book in the Han Solo Trilogy, The Hutt Gambit by A.C. Crispin so that's what I'm going to be talking about today. Let's get right into it shall we?
While The Paradise Snare was a great introduction to a young Han Solo, The Hutt Gambit is actually the better of the two. The first book in the trilogy was so small in scope that it doesn't feel like anything really happens. In this one however there's alot going on. Especially with Hutt politics. And there's ALOT of Hutt politics in this book. In fact Jabba and Jiliac have almost as much screen time as Han and Chewie do.
As I said in my review of The Paradise Snare A.C. Crispin was asked by Lucasfilm not to cover Han's time at the Imperial Academy, or the events that led to him meeting Chewie and getting kicked out of the Imperial Military. I can't really find the reason for that, except that this book was written about three years before Star Wars: Chewbacca was published by Dark Horse Comics in 2000 and the second issue covers that event. The development of these comics and novels were pretty compressed back in the 90s, even if they didn't all come out at the same time so it's possible that Chewbacca was in development at the time this trilogy was being written and Lucasfilm didn't want Crispin to cover something the comics were going to be covering anyway. But again there isn't any further information to confirm this theory of mine.
Because of this, the opening of The Hutt Gambit takes place five years after the end of The Paradise Snare. Han wasn't an Imperial officer anymore, and he's friends with a Wookiee named Chewbacca. They get a job piloting for Jabba the Hutt and his uncle/aunt Jiliac the Hutt on Nal Hutta and live on Nar Shaddaa where they meet an entire cast of characters, which I'll get into shortly. But the Empire decides to destroy Nar Shaddaa, hoping to end the smuggling trade once and for all and Han and his friends decide to protect their home.
Most of the characters we're introduced to in this book are actually from previous Star Wars novels. Roa is from Han Solo's Revenge, the second book in Brian Daley's Han Solo Adventures trilogy from the 80s, Xaverri is from The Crystal Star, Ana Blue and Kid DXo'In (don't ask me to try to pronounce that last name) are from The New Rebellion, as is Wynni, a Wookiee who has her eyes on Chewie, and Salla Zend, Shug Ninx and Mako Spince are from the comic book series, Dark Empire. Everyone else is either from the movies like Chewie, Han, Lando, Jabba and Boba Fett or from The Paradise Snare. There's not many important characters in this book that make their first appearance here, aside from Jarik Solo, Moff Shild and Admiral Greelanx, and both Shild and Greelanx are one and done characters who aren't even mentioned anywhere else in the Expanded Universe.
I think Bria works alot better in The Hutt Gambit than she did in The Paradise Snare. I think that's because, except for one scene, she and Han don't have any interactions and even in that scene the don't actually interact with each other. Maybe it's because Bria is working for the Corellian Resistance in this novel, is fighting the Empire, and her whole reason for existing has nothing to do with being Han's girlfriend.
However the existence of the Corellian Resistance is kind of weird. While it matches up with what Timothy Zahn wrote in Dark Force Rising when he created Garm Bel Iblis, it sort of disregards what Stackpole wrote in Star Wars: X-Wing and what Roger MacBride Allen wrote in the Corellian Trilogy about Corellia being run by the Diktat, who was basically the Corellian version of an Imperial Moff (Governor) and the Diktat isn't mentioned at all here. It's not such a big deal since, despite what the timeline at the end of the book says, Bantam Books and Lucasfilm weren't as concerned about making one big cohesive continuity with the novels in the 90s as Lucasfilm and Del Rey were in the 2000s and early 2010s, it's just something I wanted to touch on as being curious since I've probably read a good chunk of the Bantam era novels and they were all over the Star Wars timeline with some events that take place in a certain era being written and published before events taking place earlier in the timeline.
One of the reasons I like this trilogy so much is because it shows Han doing stuff before he meets Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi in A New Hope. He has friends, he falls in love, he has an apartment, and he works for the Hutts. That's also kinda been my problem with Brian Daley's novels from the 80s. Han had things happen to him, but there wasn't really anything personal about it and they were pretty fantastical things as well. Whereas here, Han is portrayed as your average person trying to make a living. Yes, he and Chewie are smugglers, but in between runs they have lives. And I think that's why I can relate to Han in this trilogy than I can in any other book or even the movies, even though this isn't canon anymore. I'll talk about this more in my trilogy wrap-up after I've reviewed the final book, Rebel Dawn.
The last thing I want to talk about in this review is how fascinating and incredibly complex Hutt politics is. Of all the Star Wars novels and comics that I've read, this trilogy develops the Hutts the most. I know there were some Jabba comics that Dark Horse was publishing around the time these novels were coming out in the late 90s, but I've never read them and the Hutts don't really pop up much in the other novels and comics that I have read. As disgusting as Jabba is in Return of the Jedi, I actually quite like the Hutts as they are portrayed in the original Expanded Universe of novels and comics and find their society and culture to be most fascinating. Which is saying something since Star Wars has never really developed the cultures of the characters in the movies, though the novels focus alot on Wookiees, Bothans, Mon Calamari, and the Mandalorians somewhat.
That's it for this review. I would highly recommend you check out these books if you've never read them before. They're super engaging, especially if you're a fan of Han Solo. I'll be back on Wednesday with my overview of the Walt Disney Diamond Editions DVD and Blu-ray releases and then the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier drops on Friday so I'll have a full season/series review for you coming out sometime on Friday afternoon. So until then have a wonderful day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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