The title of this anthology should really just be “It’s Tough to Be A Gangster.” (Or maybe, “If Your Criminal Life Doesn’t Work Out, Become A Bodiless Monk.”) Because if you ever wanted the secrets behind all those characters in Jabba’s entourage, all you really need to know is pretty much everyone wants him dead. In fact, if he hadn’t given Luke and Leia a reason to come after him, it probably wouldn’t have changed his Date of Expiration by that many dual sunsets.
Also, monks built his palace way before he came to live there? Monks that keep their brains in jars attached to droid spider bodies? I know. It’s madness. But it’s all true.
There is an arc running through Tales From Jabba’s Palace is actually pretty hard to keep track of, so let’s see if I can’t break it down: Tessek, Jabba’s accountant, wants the crime lord offed and enlists the help of several others: Barada (a Klatoonian—yeah, that’s for serious right there, just like Admiral Ackbar is a Mon Calamari), Ree-Yees the three-eyed Gran, and some Weequay guards. Ree-Yees’ part of the plan involves having pieces of a bomb delivered to the palace one at a time, which he knows about because he’s ordering them from a panel he had Imperial surgeons place in Jabba’s frog-dog, Bubo.
Bubo is decidedly not happy with this arrangement. Poor Bubo.
A lot of the palace crew are spies for, or interact with spies for Lady Valarian, who is apparently Jabba’s competition on Tatooine. Which is cool because she’s a lady running a casino and also because it makes sense that Jabba would have someone to contend with on-world. Wish we’d seen her in the films, trash-talking Jabba as he slithered by. It would’ve been like Bring It On, but with desert criminal syndicates instead of cheerleaders.
One of the spies for Lady Valarian is a Whiphid named J’Quille, who pays a kitchen boy to put poison in Jabba’s food, but the kid blackmails him in return. (Somehow J’Quille doesn’t guess it’s the kid, even though that is most logical course of action a lowly kitchen boy could take.) He kills one of the B’omarr monks thinking he’s the blackmailer, but the corrupted monk was also a spy who worked for Lady Valarian. More bodies! Gartogg, the dumbest Gamorean guard at the palace decides to investigate the murders, and carries the dead guys around with him because… evidence! The poor palace chef, Porcellus, gets caught up in the plot when Jabba assumes that he is the one trying to poison him, and only accidentally got the kitchen boy killed. Porcellus just wants to make good food for Jabba without everyone else on staff getting their hands on the delicacies first.
Porcellus is buddies with Malakili—remember that guy who sobs when Luke kills the rancor? (That’s the fun in these anthologies, the moment when you get an explanation for those weird little asides….) Malakili is the rancor’s handler and doesn’t have any nasty designs on Jabba at all; he just wants to take the rancor away someplace nice where they can live out a happy life together in peace. He doesn’t get his sunny ending, but he and Porcellus open up one of the greatest restaurants in the Outer Rim once Jabba gets chain-choked, so that’s nine kinds of adorable right there.
The dancing girls don’t get off easy, not that anyone expected them too. Oola’s tale (she’s the green Twi’lek that Jabba feeds to the rancor before offering up a Jedi dessert) lets us in on the finer points of Twi’lek slavery. After being lured off her homeward with a friend by Jabba’s majordomo, Bib Fortuna, she finds that the deal they made to dance is nothing like the one promised. And then winds up dead for her trouble. Mara Jade poses as a dancing girl to get to Luke and kill him, but she makes the mistake of using the Force at the palace and loses her shot. Mara’s story is particularly fun in light of the Heir to the Empire Trilogy—we get to see one of the many times she tried to kill Luke and failed as the Emperor’s Hand. Yarna, the six-breasted dancer on Jabba’s floor has a very interesting tale as well. We find out that Jabba has her shimmying out there because she reminds him of his mother. (Keep in mind that Hutt’s reproduce asexually, so Jabba’s mom is also technically his dad? Um…) Basically, we discover that she has altered her appearance to look more like a Hutt, making the story a fascinating take on what beauty means to different individuals. She gets a happy ending at least, and frees her children from slavery.
We get another soup-y poetic tale about assassin Dannik Jerriko, and the Reeves-Stevens team give us a highly disturbing story about EV-9D9, the droid who assigns 3PO and R2 their roles at the palace. EV’s piece is particularly memorable, not just due to its sadomasochistic content, but due to the fact that EV’s programming is female, something that is incredibly rare from what we’re shown in the Star Wars universe. (But gender programming for robots is a pretty goofy concept in the first place.)
There are a contingent of Jabba-ites (can I call them that?) who join the ranks of the B’ommar monks, creatures who live in the depths of the palace. This is terrifying because not everyone who ends up a monk got a choice in becoming one. And if someone’s going to rip out your brain and put it in a jar connected to a droid spider body, they should at least have the decency to ask you first. So let’s have a moment of contemplation for poor old Bib Fortuna, majordomo extraordinaire, and Tessek, who were not consulted before they were “recruited” by the B’ommar. Actually, Bib sold people into slavery, so let’s not feel bad for him. Bubo was all for it, though. Because being a frog-dog is probably not as cool as being a walking brain.
And because it’s me, I have to shriek excitedly for a while about Boba Fett’s story, which explains how he escaped that Mighty Sarlacc. Daniel Keys Moran hated the changes Lucasfilm made to his tale so much that he insisted it be published under a pseudonym, and that’s a shame, because the conceit of Fett’s time being digested is pretty fascinating. It suggests that the Sarlaac (and other beings like it) has a special bond with the first person it gobbles up, a symbiotic link, if you will. And Susejo, the person that this Sarlacc swallowed first, likes to pass time by getting the stories of every other being the Sarlacc eats. Fett, naturally, does not want to play ball. A battle of wills ensues. We get some awesome flashbacks that Susejo forces out of Fett’s head, and then the bounty hunter escapes by literally blowing up the Sarlacc and jetpacking the hell out. After sustaining major acid burns and psychological terror and whatnot.
The point is—no one is more hardcore than Boba Fett.
And those are the tales of those poor souls bound to Jabba the Hutt. Practically no one was sad to see him and go, and everyone was better off without him around. Nearly all of them got a second chance, a most of them made use of it. I suppose what it proves is that no one’s life in the Star Wars universe is uneventful. Which is one of the reasons why we love Star Wars so much, I’d say. Here’s to those Weequay guards—at least Fett shortened their period of digestion inside the Great Pit of Carkoon.
Originally published in June 2013.
Emmet Asher-Perrin still feels bad for the Max Rebo Band, though. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I don’t know why specifically these are all resurfacing, but I’m here for it :)
I hunted down my old comment, since it still stands, really. These books were such a huge part of cementing my Star Wars fan the summer of 97. Discovering that all of these books existed was like…an amazing treasure to me. The fact that even random monsters and aliens got a story just made me even more in love with the universe as a whole.
Here’s the comment :)
This was the first anthology I read, and in fact, one of the very first EU books I read. So, it is of course, one of my favorites :) I was 14 that summer, and I thought Boba Fett escaping from the Sarlaac pit was one of the coolest things EVER, and helped cement him as a ‘favorite’ character of mine.
I think one of my favorite stories was Yarna’s tale, if for no other reason, we finally have something to think of her as other than ‘Fat Dancer’, which is how she’s referred to in the credits.
This one also has the Ephant Mon story too, right? He was the only creature that pretty much DIDN’T want Jabba dead, right? And silly Max Rebo, signing a contract for food ;)
>1, I’ve always wondered about that credit. Imagine the excitement you would feel as an on-screen extra in a Star Wars film! You can’t wait for your family to see this, your friends, the mailman, tell everybody! And then the credits roll, and you see you’ve been credited as …
Boba Fett great villian![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
I just ate these anthologies up growing up.
These and the X-Wing books probably did more to cement my ongoing love of Star Wars than anything else. Well, excepting the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series and the adventures of one Kyle Katarn….
SQUEEEE.
As I’ve previously said, this book is THE Star Wars canon for me. I adore it, I’ve read it countless times and memorized every detail in some of the stories, and I refuse to believe anything that contradicts it. Even the rare parts I dislike, e.g. Boba Fett harming* the Sarlacc. I don’t blame Fett wanting to escape – some people don’t like getting vored — though I don’t care if/how he lived or died, and we got a magnificent story out of his experience. Malakili’s moment of grief onscreen in RotJ had made me so happy as a monster-lover, and his tale here was a daydream come true, even though it contradicts other peoples’ delightful imaginings of him raising the rancor from a baby. And I feel I have the inside scoop on my favorite segment of the original trilogy. Things like why the palace had suitable job vacancies when C-3PO and R2-D2 arrived, and why Han, Chewy, and Leia had the well-nourished strength to make their great escape.
I don’t feel too bad for Tessek as a jarred brain. He no longer had to endure endless suffering as a sea creature exiled on a desert planet.
@1: Yes, this book has the tale Ephant Mon, allegedly Jabba’s only friend. And Yarna’s tale is one of my favorites, too. But Max wasn’t silly. He just had his priorities right, and got what he wanted. :-D Admittedly, he didn’t consider the desires of his band-mates before doing so, but they didn’t have many other options at that point. I heart Max.
Where do we learn that Hutts reproduce asexually? *wanders around Wookiepedia* Multiple EU sources, apparently. This says they’re hermaphrodites with masculine or feminine personalities, and even the masculine ones can temporarily “become female” to birth young, e.g. Jabba’s “father” Zorba, who doesn’t look much like Yarna to me, but whatevs. I love that their babies are called Huttlets; where do we learn that? *checks citation* Oh, Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know Sounds awesomesauce no matter how canonical it is or isn’t and I will get it from my library ASAP.
*I don’t think he killed it. The story here is a little ambiguous; it was alive when Fett visited a year later, but “a dark spirit rose into the night” — Susejo? But Zorba the Hutt later got swallowed and then vomited by it while trying to vengefully feed Leia to it; at least I think that was the same sarlacc.
Holy Carp, where was all this information when I was around eleven years old, obsessed with Star Wars, and especilly interested in Hutts? Much of it was non-existent, that’s where. Grumble. Kids today don’t know how good they have it. :-p
I was impressed with this particular collection for the intriguing way there was a backstory threaded through it that you had to read multiple stories to grasp the whole view of; that was well done. A lot less impressed with what was done with the Weequays and their worship of a Magic 8 Ball, where did that come from?? Hence losing this as canon is not all bad.