Product Description

He's both feared and admired, respected and despised. Boba Fett is the galaxy's most successful bounty hunter. Now he finds himself the hunted in the oldest game of all: survival of the fittest.

The once powerful Bounty Hunter's Guild has been shattered into warring factions. Now the posting of an enormous bounty on a renegade Imperial stormtrooper is about to start a frenzy of murderous greed.

Hoping to fuel rumors of his death, Boba Fett abandons his ship, Slave I, and sets out to claim the prize. Yet his every move leads him closer to a trap set by the cunning Prince Xizor. Fett will die before becoming Xizor's pawn in the Emperor's war against the Rebels. And he may have to. For in order to gain his freedom he must outwit a sentient weapon that feeds on human spirits. Then he must escape a galaxy of deadly enemies who want to make the rumors of his death a reality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41346 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10
• Released on: 1998-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780553578881
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
"How many times, wondered Boba Fett, could he die--and yet not die? Someday it would be all over for him..."

Fett fans take note: Star Wars: Slave Ship features the (in)famous bounty hunter as he chases after the largest bounty ever offered--by tracking down renegade stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't. The story, book 2 in The Bounty Hunter Wars series, jumps back and forth between the time of Star Wars: New Hope and Return of the Jedi in a series of convoluted plot twists that involve everyone from Emperor Palatine and Darth Vader to Zuckuss and Bossk. Written by well-known SF writer K.W. Jeter (whose first novel, Dr. Adder, was praised by Philip K. Dick as "stunning"), Star Wars: Slave Ship is in many ways a perfect serial novel--it raises as many new questions for the next installment as it solves from the previous one. Neelah's identity is finally revealed, but how did she end up in Jabba the Hutt's palace? You'll have to wait and see. --C.B. Delaney

Review
A ruthless enemy threatens Boba Fett with a fate worse than death. . .

From the Publisher
A ruthless enemy threatens Boba Fett with a fate worse than death. . .

Customer Reviews

A little bit better and a whole lot worse...
This book continues the {mis}adventures started in Book 1 of the Bounty Hunter Wars Trilogy, The Mandalorian Armor with varying success. Neelah is still on her quest to piece together her past, Fett and Bossk are still up to same old, same old, Xizor and Mub'at are still plotting, and on it goes. This book also follows the same storylines - one right after A New Hope and one during Return of the Jedi - started in the first one.

First off I'd like to recommend not reading this book immediately after finishing Mandalorian Armor. I tried to do that twice, and was utterly unable to get into it. The author assumes the reader hasn't read the first book, and thus does too much recapping of previous events. Jeter is almost Lumley-esque in this regard. An author should assume that when a reader starts the second book in a trilogy that the reader is intelligent enough to have read the first one.

The most annoying thing about this book is what made the first book so difficult - many of the familiar characters and very misrepresented. Dengar is and emotional, cowardly idiot-wimp, Fett is very talkative, prone to giving `idiot-sheet' speeches, Vader doesn't have enough control over his emotions, etc... However, there is some very good character development in the new characters, which is overshadowed by their mere boringness.

Whereas the assembler Kud'ar Mub'at was interesting in the first book and Kuat unutterably boring, in this book their roles have changed. The arachnoid in this book is predictable, and boring, while Kuat has many interesting thoughts and foresights. Too many in fact. This is another problem with the book. It is hard to read conversations when there are two pages of though between each line of spoken dialogue, for some reason it just doesn't flow that way.

The author also makes the mistake of assuming the readers are inept. He has to have the characters spell out every vestige of every plan, and the dialogue often is overlong and rather speechy. The writer's writing style itself is quite basic, but he covers that up with a lot of adjectives and big thesaurus words. Another filler that he uses is that he repeats physical descriptions and names over and over again, as if afraid that the reader will forget basic stuff from paragraph to paragraph.

Despite all its flaws, however, this is still a pretty good and interesting tale, raising a lot of interesting points, questions and views, while answering other which were opened in the first book. This should be read by fairly serious Star Wars fans, but it's not `necessary' reading.

A few sparks of action amid reams of recapitulation .....
The premise of the book is a lot more exciting than the execution -- in fact, when you find yourself using the words "quiet" and "contemplative" about a book that's supposed to deal with the adventures of a bunch of top-notch bounty-hunters, you know that the author has failed at some level....

Instead of being quick-moving and evoking a sense of danger and action, "Slave Ship" is a series of dense, repetitive internal monologues on the part of the characters, mostly carried out while they're sitting motionless.

For example, an entire chapter is used up by Boba Fett punching in one set of coordinates and telling Dengar that he isn't going to tell the other bounty hunter where they're going. Three pages of dense, monolithic paragraphs are expended in a bounty hunter asking the "arachnoid assembler" character -- "is this area really airtight?" and the assembler answering "yes." Literally, 3 pages are taken up with this one question and answer, because of the narrative following the assembler thinking 20 times over what a clown the bounty hunter is, in great detail.

There are the seeds of a story in here, and the book is all right to read when you've got a spare moment to fill, but don't expect anything fast-paced .... the characters drone on for pages about the exact same idea, thinking about the same thing in 40 different ways, and the author seems to think it necessary to use 3 different sentences to describe the sound of Dengar's boots as he climbs down one short ladder after talking to Boba Fett. And on and on and on ....

it's actually worse than the first book!
This is the second volume of the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy. I read this book not too long ago and I'm already fuzzy on what exactly happened in it. The storylines began in "The Mandalorian Armor" have not been advanced much, except for what happened off screen. Boba Fett, having been rescued by Dengar, is trying to convince the galaxy that he is still dead, so he is hiding his true identity while going into business with Dengar. There is a lot of backstory going on (which I call the previous book). Then, in the other storyline occurring in the past we have found out that the Bounty Hunters Guild has splintered into two fragments. Xizor is still trying to destroy the Guild even farther so all that is left is individual, highly motivated, bounty hunters.

There is far too much backstory and characters explaining things and trying to find out how everything fits together. There is plenty of chapters with Kuat of Kuat and his shipbuilding yards and Kuat trying to hold onto the control he has over the Kuat Driveyards. "Slave Ship" is just a tedious book that takes far too long to accomplish far too little story and action. There were a couple of decent scenes (trying to capture the Imperial defector was very good), but overall this was just a fairly weak novel and was very, very disappointing.

Hopefully the concluding volume of this trilogy will be far better, because if I wasn't trying to read all of the Star Wars novels this would be a complete waste of my time.

-Joe Sherry