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 Band 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: Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka

In the Fall of 1983, Del Rey published the last of the Lando Calrissian Adventures, Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. Like the rest of L. Neil Smith's trilogy, it mixes gambling, comedy, Lando trying to find peaceful solutions to problems, Libertarian themes, and a hefty dose of weirdness.

This time, Lando and his astrogator/flight instructor Vuffi Raa meet and befriend a giant space manta that can naturally fly through hyperspace. His name is Lehesu and he's an Oswaft. Lehesu wanders innocently through the Centrality sector, but in doing so he draws the attention of the Centrality and Imperial Navies, who follow him to his home nebula of ThonBoka (literally “Starcave” in their language) and blockade it, slowly starving the Oswaft.

Deciding to help them, Lando runs food through the blockade by conning and gambling his way through the fleet, and plot threads draw to a conclusion. The strange renegades with a grudge against Vuffi Raa are fully explained, Rokur Gepta's origins and the fate of the Sorcerers of Tund are revealed, and we finally get to meet Vuffi Raa's parents. All this, and Lando teaches space mantas how to play Sabacc.

Its a weird, wild ride that takes place almost exclusively in space. There's a brief side trip to Tund, but that's a dead world thanks to Rokur Gepta. Lando is either onboard spaceships or is floating around in a space suit. The banter between Lando & Vuffi Raa remains a huge part of the series' charm and even their goodbye is handled with bittersweet wit.

Much like Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, there's a melancholy edge to this story. Lando's adventures in the Centrality are coming to an end, and he's going to go off with enough treasure to buy himself a city and an urge to settle down and become a legitimate businessman. The party's over and Lando needs to return to the Galaxy at large for the movies to take their course.

Its a satisfying conclusion to a fun ride. Not quite as quick-paced as The Han Solo Adventures, but Lando's a different kind of scoundrel. Han's general solution to problems is to shoot his way out, and Lando only kills two people in this entire trilogy. Instead, this trilogy hammers home the theme that Lando is a weirdness magnet, which would carry through into later stories.

I recommend it, but its not essential tier like Daley's Han Solo trilogy or Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. In the 90s this trilogy was also reprinted as an omnibus, which is a good way to get it.