Tales from Jabba's Palace

I approach Star Wars novels with a bit of skepticism - they’re largely trashy spin-offs - but the fan in me just can’t resist an occasional visit. This one, like the other Tales collections (Mos Eisley, Bounty Hunters) is more bearable than most. It adds some background to the background characters observed on screen, describing what they were doing there and their own plans and motivations. What impressed me most is the common threads and overlap between stories. About a dozen of the nineteen depict similar invented scenes from multiple perspectives, and later stories solve mysteries set up by earlier ones. However, this did become a bit tiresome after a while when the same events kept being revisited. That remained bearable where show more the new characters introduced were given some bite, but this wasn’t always the case.

Highlights of this anthology are the tales of Mara Jade, Ephant Mon, EV-9D9 (my personal favourite) and Boba Fett. One extreme low point is the tale of the Weequays. Its author is more humourist than sci-fi writer, and he clearly forgot which audience he was writing for. In his hands the potential of these formidable characters is entirely lost and they become little better than a bunch of clowns. This story should have been rejected by the editor. Rip those pages out of your copy, and the rest hangs together pretty well. show less

The second Tales from anthology is a bit more of a miss than the previous hit-and-miss Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. It does boast one of the cooler pieces of Star Wars short fiction - the strangely noirish 'Old Friends' - but some of the stories do devolve into pure silliness (for instance, Weequays worshiping a magic eight ball) and it just takes a few too many liberties with the source material for my taste.

A third theme anthology, this time with a variety of writers taking characters from the palace of Jabba the Hutt. Some of the writers are pretty raw, but the seasoned professionals like Barbara Hambly, Esther M. Friesner, and George Alec Effinger are definitely not slacking when they write in someone else's universe. More of the writers resist the temptation to have every character cross paths at some point in their past with the main characters of the films, their writers content to simply show the effects of having these heavy hitters pass through their lives in the palace.

Collection of short stories about, well, Jabba's palace. There were some *weird* stories in there, yo -- I had only read the one about Mara before. I liked the one about the Rancor keeper, and the one about the six-breasted dancer, and the one about Oola; I didn't much care for the one about the invisible assassin. But my two favorite things were: 1, Boba Fett being digested by the Sarlacc, 'cause heh! digesting Boba Fett! and 2, the monks who were just brains in jars that use spidery metal walkers to get around, 'cause heh! That gives me so many inappropriate TMNT/SW crossover thoughts. :)

Good ole ROTJ revisited, well written and fun to dig into the backstories of some if the characters in the SW universe. Faves: the Weequay's divine magic 8-ball; the Ugly One finding love; Bobba Fett.

Star Wars Tales From Jabba's Palace is a great compilation of short stories from various authors. Kevin J. Anderson edits this book and does a good job of it. The stories take place at various times ranging from when life in the palace was normal to the time Luke Skywalker and his friends turned the place into an uproar. There are really good back stories for characters that are unmissable in Jabba's court and for those whom you see on screen in Star Wars VI for barley a moment. An altogether fun and entertaining novel that's pretty easy to read, thanks to it's being broken into nineteen stories.

Along with the Mos Eisley Cantina scene, Tatooine in Return of the Jedi had been one of the few scenes that had actually featured a large multitude of different aliens in the Original Trilogy. Tales from Jabba’s Palace, edited by Kevin J. Anderson, is the second Star Wars anthology book released and is based on the background characters from the classic Jabba scenes in Return of the Jedi. I found it a great book, and it was very entertaining to read about the various plots and schemes of the characters trying to rid Jabba.