Joe Johnson Writer

Tag: books

  • Star Wars: The Hutt Gambit

    Star Wars: The Hutt Gambit

    For my first Star Wars extended universe book in 25 years, I thought it would be fun to explore the origins of Han Solo. Disney dropped the ball when they made “Solo,” so I was eager to see what someone else would do with the material.

    The story opens with Han drinking alone in a bar, drowning his sorrows. His dreams are crushed. He’s lamenting a decision that would have made for a much better novel: While serving in the Imperial Navy, Han defied orders and saved the life of a Wookiee slave. His actions saw him stripped of rank and blacklisted from ever working as a commercial pilot.

    A character sacrificing their hopes and dreams to confront a grave injustice would be rich soil for a story to explore, but never mind. Han flies to Nar Shaddaa, the “Smuggler’s Moon,” to find work. He’s joined by the slave he rescued, a Wookiee named Chewbacca who claims to owe him a life-debt. Having seen the movies, we know he means it.

    Han reconnects with an old buddy from the academy and begins his career as a smuggler. This is a lot less exciting than it sounds. We mostly bum around with Han and Chewie as they haul cargo from one place to the next. Later, Han petitions Jabba the Hutt for work, and becomes his chauffer. Then he saves the gangster’s life during a pirate attack, which isn’t very exciting, but it goes on for a while.

    If you squint, you can see the shape of a story here. Han is rebuilding himself after a fall from grace. We witness his rise through the criminal underworld. But it feels like we are reading our way through a sequence that would be a two-minute montage in a feature film. Han meets Lando and teaches him how to fly. Han gets abducted by Boba Fett, then immediately rescued. Han dates a magician, then gets dumped. Han sees the Millenium Falcon for the first time and instantly falls in love with it, because the author has seen the movies.

    There is never an obstacle or setback that isn’t resolved three pages later.

    I complained that the first novel, “The Paradise Snare,” skipped the moments that would have really explored Han’s character. “The Hutt Gambit” has the same problem. It’s very much “tell, don’t show” kind of writing. But “Paradise Snare” at least maintained interest by pivoting in interesting directions—who would have guessed Han spent some formative years running drugs for a religious cult? “The Hutt Gambit” doesn’t have anywhere meaningful to go.

    It culminates in an epic space battle where Han rallies an army of smugglers against the Imperial Navy. It’s meant to be a showstopper. But A. C. Crispin has a hard time conveying the logistics. First, she spends an obscene amount of time with characters announcing their plans to an audience (and the readers). Then the battle itself becomes a slurry of throwaway characters and relentless pew-pew without any real stakes because we know who survives and the rest are thinly-sketched plot contrivances.

    There’s some truly terrible writing in here. Sample dialog: “Mako here. You ready?” “We’re ready!” “Go for it!” Or how about: “We’re being drawn by the moon’s gravity! In about a minute, we’re going to hit Nar Shaddaa’s energy shield! And what an explosion that would be!” Oof.

    It’s a testament to the author’s ability that the book ends up being tolerable. She captures the feeling of Han, Chewie, and Lando well enough to elevate this above bad fan fiction. But only just.

    You can tell this is intended as the middle chapter of a trilogy. We get several asides with other characters that have no relevance on the story we are reading. They are just setting the table for a payoff in the third book.

    I’m hoping that one will be better. “The Hutt Gambit” isn’t bad. But just days after finishing, I had to look up a synopsis online to even remember what happened. That’s probably not what the author intended.

  • Star Wars: The Paradise Snare

    Star Wars: The Paradise Snare

    Long before he gut-shot Greedo in a dimly lit bar and tossed a few credits to the owner to apologize for the mess, Han Solo was a young thief on the streets of Corellia. “The Paradise Snare” is his origin story — or, at least, it was. Then Disney acquired Star Wars and tossed everything from the Extended Universe into the Sarlacc pit. But never mind.

    We open with Han planning his escape from Garris Shrike, a Fagin-like crime lord who presses young orphans into service as grifters and pickpockets. Han has been scamming Corellian noblemen under Shrike’s orders for years. But he aspires to a life where he isn’t forced to commit crimes to make a living. He dreams of joining the Imperial Academy to become a real pilot. Yet he’s already an accomplished racer on his home world, and he masters any spacecraft he’s given with a deft hand. What’s left for him to learn? Is he looking to pad his resume?

    To pay his tuition, he needs to earn some money that doesn’t end up in Shrike’s pocket. So he stows away aboard a shuttle and travels to the planet Ylesia, run by a secretive religious sect in desperate need of pilots. The sect fills their coffers by selling black market spice and conscripting their pilgrims to mine it. While touring the facility, Han meets and falls for a beautiful young pilgrim. We imagine this will end poorly, since the girl is not mentioned in the movies. But how will it happen and how will this mold him into the character we know? The mystery holds our interest, but it’s not hard to guess.

    Meanwhile, the priests saddle Han with a bodyguard. It becomes apparent that he is really just there to keep an eye on Solo. Han knows he can earn the money he needs honestly (or as honestly as one can while smuggling drugs), but he could speed up the process by slipping his hand into the till. It raises the question: Does he really want to go straight? Old habits die hard. Eventually, Han discovers that the religious colony is a front for the Hutts, and he comes up with a plan to rob them and escape with the girl.

    Prequels are a hard thing to get right. The audience already knows where the story ends up, so it is up to the author to make the journey worth the trip. When done right, a prequel can cast the original stories in a new light, providing nuance and context to reshape the scenes we already know. “The Paradise Snare” fails at this. Han Solo arrives at the story fully-formed as the character we know—just younger and a bit naive. He hasn’t been struck by life’s great disappointments yet. There are no missing puzzle pieces that unlock a greater understanding of his character.

    Instead, we get a few glimmers into the events that harden Solo’s heart. There’s the death of Dewlanna, a kindly Wookiee and cook to Shrike’s crew who takes Solo under her wing. There’s no indication that she cares about the other children. But, again, never mind. We also get a brief flashback to the time Han ran away to find out what happened to his parents. The episode plays out far differently than we might expect.

    We only get a few brief asides about Solo’s childhood. I was left wondering if we’d be better served going deeper into the past. Dewlanna’s death and Solo’s hatred of Shrike are good ideas that end up carrying little weight because the characters are introduced and disappear in the first chapter. Seeing him develop from a poor street kid into a charming swindler and how his relationship develops with two vastly different parental figures would’ve made this story far more emotionally resonant.

    Instead, “The Paradise Snare” suffers from the same problem that plagues all tie-in fiction: Nothing of great importance can happen, so the story feels like glorified fan-fic. I enjoyed the novel, but it isn’t essential. There’s little here that couldn’t be inferred from reading between the lines in the original films.

    That said, the author tells a decent story that avoids all the rebel vs. empire, light vs. dark side tropes that mire the rest of the series. It feels like a small miracle that no one shows up to wave a lightsaber around. It also manages to fill in the blanks without being trite and asking questions nobody cares about, like “Solo: A Star Wars Story” did (Why is he called Solo? Because he tells an Imperial officer he is alone).

    The book also sticks the landing with a wonderful ending. For Han, it’s a personal triumph. But knowing, as we do, what Han’s future holds, it’s a poignant and bittersweet note.

  • Wool

    Wool

    An unspecified event hundreds of years ago forced humanity underground. To go out on the surface now is a death sentence, reserved only for those who commit the most terrible of crimes: Asking to leave.

    This is called being “sent out to clean.” The individual is dressed in a protective suit and given a wool cloth. They are asked to wipe off the sensors that give the Silo’s inhabitants a view of the desolate outside world. It’s a mystery why every cleaner follows through with this before they succumb and die.

    Juliette is a mechanic in the bowels of the Silo. She is too busy keeping the power on to worry about the outside world. Then, one day, the mayor of the silo descends all 144 floors of the grand staircase to make Juliette an offer: Replace the last Sheriff who went out to clean.

    As a girl from the down-deeps, Juliette has no idea about the politics at play in the floors above. No sooner does she pin on her star then she finds herself embroiled in a high-profile murder case, targeted by department heads who want her gone, and unraveling the mystery of what happened to her predecessor.

    This is a fantastic setup for a mystery story that the author, Hugh Howey, clearly has no interest in. Everything is either spelled out right away or is so heavily signposted that you can’t help but immediately connect the dots before the characters do. Then the author dumps all this and takes the story in a totally different direction.

    After doing a little digging, I discovered that Wool originally began life as a short story. The author then kept expanding it, first into a series of novellas and then finally into a novel. This makes a lot of sense and explains some of the lumpy story structure.

    More problematic are the characters, who all feel paper thin when they aren’t acting like weepy, melodramatic teenagers. There’s never any subtlety. The players pound their chests and wail and moan, their inner dialogue a seething turmoil of pithy emotions.

    I think if you took a shot of alcohol every time one of the characters starts crying, you’d be dead or comatose before the final chapter. It’s almost funny, later in the book, when they introduce a new character who is described as a stunted child in a man’s body. He acts just like everyone else.

    It doesn’t feel like anyone grows or changes. Most of the players exist simply as a plot function. You know everything about each character in just a few lines because there is nothing else to discover. The villain is so laughably obvious that he might as well appear twirling his moustache and cackling.

    This will sound like blasphemy to some, but I actually prefer what the TV adaptation is doing at this point. I feel like the writers there took these bare character sketches and breathed life into them, expanding the plot and embelishing the worldbuilding that mostly sits in the margins here.

    As something that inspired some great television, I have to give this book some grudging respect. I wouldn’t say I regret reading it. I didn’t hate it. But Wool reads like a rough draft that the show’s creators wisely edited into a great story. As such, I think I’ll stick with the show for now and give the two follow-up novels a pass.