Light reading for this Sunday, cause I’ve been reading some heavy and ponderous stuff lately. Brian Daley’s Han Solo at Stars’ End is a Star Wars tie-in novel from the late 1970s. My copy is beat and chewed up. All plot and little characterization, so it’s a lot of fun. Just the sort of thing to knock off before my two hour drive back north.
Han Solo is a smuggler in the Corporate Sector. I suspect this is set before the events of Star Wars, but I know very little about the Star Wars canon. He and Chewbacca get ensnared in a scheme to fight the Corporate Sector Authority in return for some fancy repairs and a waiver to be used to avoid inspection. Seems Jessa who heads an outlaw spaceship repair station is looking for her father, the real head. He’s disappeared and she thinks he’s been snatched up by the Authority, along with all sorts of other rabble-rousers. All Han Solo has to do is land at a corporate data center, pick up a crew that infiltrated it, spirit them off, and then go save Jessa. Complications include a traitor in their midst, an attack on Jessa’s station, a firefight with the data center’s guards, and Chewbacca being taken prisoner. All leads to Stars’ End, a desolate world that holds the secret to the disappearances.
Total escapist fun. Well, not totally escapist. There’s a little thing going on where Han keeps insisting he’s just a mercenary out for money and won’t actually join sides. But Jessa and others secretly know it’s just a front. The royal we is just going to ignore that whole thing and remember the fun though.
Title: Han Solo at Stars’ End
Author: Brian Daley
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Ballantine / Random House
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 183 p.
Publication date: October 1979 (3rd printing June 1980)
ISBN-10: 0-345-28355-4
Subject: Solo, Han (Fictitious character) — Fiction
LC classification: PZ4.D1396 Han
