JasperKazai’s Reviews > Tales of the Bounty Hunters > Status Update

I don't think this Fett story was all that good. This characterization of Fett as some hypermoral prude is weird and bad. He kept referring to gray armor, even though it's clearly green. Also that cliffhanger ending is a lazy copout.
As per usual, the rest of this ebook is filled with excerpts. Done with this. Next is Shadows of Empire. I have read it before, and I remember liking it, but don't recall many details.

This part w/ Han, Leia, and Luke in 19 ABY feels like fanfiction. Not how they normally act. I was thinking maybe it's because this was written before that period of the timeline was explored, but nope, this is right in the heyday of that. The Jedi Academy Trilogy, Corellian trilogy, and Black Fleet Crisis trilogy were all written before this. No excuse. Also why is this from Han's PoV in a Fett short story?!

Of course they saved the Boba Fett story for last. This one is a bit odd, because it technically takes place in 19 ABY (much later in the timeline) with flashbacks. I'm not going to bother waiting to read it in sequence, so here it goes. Also weird because this is the old pre-Episode II backstory for Fett where he's actually Jaster Mereel. This got completely retconned by EpII due to Fett being a clone.

The Zuckuss and 4-LOM story by M. Shayne Bell was pretty decent. He wrote one of the better stories in the Cantina compilation, so I'm not too surprised. One aspect that was weird was that he claimed the Rebel rendezvous point was outside of the galaxy. Yeah, at the end of TESB Luke and Leia are gazing at some cosmic galaxy-looking thing, but I don't think it was meant to be taken literally. It just was to look cool.

That wasn't a Bossk story. That was a story about a human female/male Wookiee bounty hunter duo defeating Bossk. I don't know if these authors were assigned the character to write about, or it was a first-come-first-serve choice basis. Either way, this story was a damn copout. That ain't a Bossk story! I saw that unnecessary reference to Bakura, Tyers. You can't sneak one past us. Anyways, it wasn't good.

That was bad. The beginning was ok, but it's like he had no idea what to do in the middle and it grew very dumb. Both Jabba and Boba Fett were written terribly. The little agreement between Jabba and Dengar made no sense. The 'romance' with Manaroo is silly. I think Dengar finding Fett at the sarlacc is retconned by later stories, which is good because that's dumb as well.
Next is Bossk by Kathy Tyers. Ugh

This Dengar story is by Dave Wolverton. I hated Courtship of Princess Leia, but his short story in the Cantina compilation was ok. So far, this is leaning more towards Courtship. It's not great. What are the odds that Manaroo would also just so happened to have went to Bespin? Nil. That wouldn't happen. It's dumb. Wolverton seems to have had some... uh... interesting ideas about women. He sucked at writing them.

Finished the first story, about IG-88 by KJA. Too silly. It's a short story so you have to take some license to move things along, but the idea that an infected droid just so happened to already be aboard the Executor when IG-88 needed it was dumb. The idea that IG-88 was secretly in control of the second Death Star was also really dumb. Hard to take seriously when it feels like the author isn't taking it seriously.

I noticed this in the Mos Eisley Cantina compilation, and it's here too. There's something about short stories that seems to make author(s) more willing to include pointlessly cruel things. Like, here, a human is introduced and then literally pulled apart and killed by 5 droids like 3 paragraphs later. Is that really necessary? Does it add anything of value to the story? I say no.

I had been ready to read Shadows of the Empire next. But then I re-checked the list, and it turns out most of the stories in this compilation take place vaguely before Shadows. I had kind of forgotten about the rest of the Tales books... The Jabba's Palace one will be coming up soon as well.
This one has only 5 stories, so they're longer than the ones from Cantina. Not sure how I'll feel about that.