Jared's Reviews > A New Threat

Star Wars Legends Project #158

Background: A New Threat was written by Elizabeth Hand and published in April of 2004. Hand wrote the 3rd through 6th books in this series (taking over for Terry Bisson). These are her only Star Wars books, though she has written a variety of non-Star Wars things.

A New Threat takes place 31 months after the Battle of Geonosis, 19 years before the Battle of Yavin. The young (though now 3 years older than when we last saw him) Boba Fett is the main character, with appearances by Jabba the Hutt, Wat Tambor, General Grievous, Anakin Skywalker, and a few recurring characters specific to this series. The book takes place on Tatooine and Xagobah.

Summary: Things are going pretty well for Boba Fett. He has established himself as the favorite bounty hunter of the powerful crime lord Jabba the Hutt, and he's almost a teenager. Of course, "favorite" is a designation contingent on success, and Jabba has just given Boba his most challenging assignment yet: Kill Wat Tambor, Foreman of the Techno Union. To do that, he'll have to fight his way through two armies and infiltrate an impenetrable fortress that has stymied even the Jedi. But that's all in a day's work for the up-and-coming Greatest Bounty Hunter in the Galaxy.

Review: Maybe it's just that I've lost patience for the particular brand of nonsense this series pulls, but this is a strong example of how not to do a Star Wars YA novel. I wanted it to succeed, but I always knew it was a mistake to build a series around the adventures of Boba Fett as a kid, and if you're not even going to try to do it right, then you particularly have no business doing it at all.

But let me pause for a second and detour through a pet peeve of mine. The book tells at one point that Boba "recalled how Jabba would sometimes have his prisoners brought to him frozen in carbonite."

No no no no NO. First we get a comic where Anakin builds a plan around freezing himself and a bunch of troops in carbonite, and now this. You could have literally anyone else in the galaxy reference the carbon freezing trick and it would be lame, but I'd accept it. But the only two people in the galaxy you cannot involve are Darth Vader and Boba Fett! Because in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader freezes Han Solo in carbonite as a test to make sure a human can survive the process, and Fett is worried that he won't . . . and none of that would make any sense if they were both well-aware that this is a common thing (which apparently it is not)! It's cheesy and it's sloppy and I hate it.

I think that's what grates overall. This is not a story that has ambitions to be anything more than a cheap cash-in on the Boba Fett brand. References to Star Wars lore are chosen at random and tossed haphazardly into the lackluster story to remind us that this is a Star Wars book. And you could almost forgive stuff like the author thinking a Clawdite shape-shifter can just morph into anything, like a bug or a bird, if the story were any good at all, and it just isn't. It's shallow pulp . . . and to add insult to injury, it's not even finished. The book ends on a cliffhanger with nothing resolved, making the whole exercise feel that much more pointless.

F