Before I begin; a quick SWTOR note. I doubt that my playthrough will advance as fast as I anticipated in the tracker update, because I've spent more time yesterday editing and posting videos of the playthroughs rather than playing through and generating more raw footage. I'll probably do the same today, and maybe tomorrow too. I feel like there's a big backlog of raw footage that I've recorded, and continuing to make more without addressing the backlog is starting to feel like a poor logistical choice. So I'm playing just a bit of catch-up before I move on. But I'll address what actually happens at some point next week. In the meantime, if you follow my YouTube channel with the SWTOR playthrough updates, you've got five new videos to watch, and probably a fair number more coming today and tomorrow.
Of course, I believe that Daley (as well as Lucas himself) were bringing as much from the genre as they were from Star Wars specifically. Star Wars has been so massive in the cultural zeitgeist that even to many science fiction fans themselves its defined how we view the genre in ways that are different than how we viewed it before Star Wars. But with only one movie and one novelized sequel yet in place in the late 70s when Daley was writing this, he didn't have a lot of material to fall back to to understand the "feel" of Star Wars, so he just did what he was familiar with. Daley was already an author, although much of what he wrote wasn't published until after these Han Solo novels. His Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt novels are probably a good example of what he'd do on his own in space opera outside of Star Wars. Two space-faring adventurers in a light-hearted, sometimes humorous romp through space, dealing as much with irritating bureaucrats as with any other danger. To be fair, that's a fair enough description of his take on Han Solo too.
Unable to use the Empire, because Lucas wanted to reserve it and its iconic characters for his own upcoming sequel, which was of course The Empire Strikes Back, Daley went a prequel route for Han Solo and described some of his adventures and set them in the Corporate Sector. Now, although the canon-aficionados have made Daley's Corporate Sector and the Corporate Sector referenced many times through the Clone Wars series the same place, its not very clear that his vision for them is very similar to that of the story overall. The vibe of this bureaucratic and amoral Corporate Sector Authority vs the Empire is very different, of course. Not that that's a bad thing, but that does suggest that it will feel somewhat different than Star Wars as we're used to.
The version pictured here looks like mine, except that my prices were a little bit lower, so it must have been an earlier print ($14.99 and $4.99 respectively, and no mention of Canadian prices.) It is, as noted, three original slim novels that have been omnibused. Given that the omnibus is under 600 pages, the average page count of each novel is under 200 pages.
And this is a major change from how we read now. The Timothy Zahn books are roughly the size of the Lord of the Rings books, i.e. ~350 pages each, or so, and with a much more tightly linked story spread over three books, as opposed to books that are nearly half the length and they are only loosely connected rather than part of a single epic storyline. How does this impact the end result? Well, older, shorter science fiction stories were much more punchy and focused much more on fast-moving plot, and had very little emphasis on character. In fact, I'd suggest that few if any of Daley's characters come to life at all; they're just names and plot points, for the most part, and only a handful of characters really "come to life". Part of this is certainly predictable; you just don't have time to develop them, especially if the cast starts to proliferate. Characters who really work include the two robots, Bollux and Blue Max, who are spread across all three books (which helps) and Gallandro, the dark mirror and would-be nemesis of Han Solo across this small series. A few others actually have some personality, but they're still mostly forgettable. In fact, Hasti, for example, a kinda sorta love-interest (maybe; not really, not sure) in the final novel was never more than a name and a very vague image to me, other than her role in advancing the plot.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a matter of opinion, of course. Plenty of people like the punchier, plot-driven type of science fiction, although I'd suggest that in more general terms, all good stories are stories about interesting characters. I think that the novels would have been better if they weren't necessarily longer, but with a slightly slimmer cast of characters and a bit more emphasis on character vs plot. Curiously, even Han and Chewie rarely come to life as real characters. I think Daley figured that since they were known characters from the movie, they didn't need development, but curiously they were kind of boring characters in their own series.
All in all, I'd suggest that the book is an interesting peek into Star Wars while it was still in an almost "larval" state; it hadn't yet accrued most of the details and tone that make it recognizably Star Wars to us. This is both interesting and yet also not in some ways, as the novels feel very much like they could be forgettable, generic space opera and nothing all that special when seen in that light.
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