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Star Wars: The Lando Calrissian Adventures Mass Market Paperback – June 1, 1994
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Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu
Lando Calrissian was born with a well-developed taste for the good life. So when he hears that ancient alien treasure is buried on the planets of the Rafa System, he hops aboard the Millennium Falcon and brushes up his rusty astrogation. He never stops to think that someone might be conning him, the connoisseur of cons.
Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon
A solar system with little more than luxury hotels catering to the underemployed filthy rich, the Oseon is every gambler’s dream come true. And so it is for Lando Calrissian, until he breaks the gambler’s cardinal rule: never beat an enforcer at a high-stakes game of chance.
Soon Lando and his feckless five-armed robot companion are being stalked by two enemies—one they know but cannot see and one they see but do not recognize . . . until it’s too late.
Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka
For a year, Lando Calrissian and his robot companion have roamed space in the Millennium Falcon, seeking or creating opportunities to turn an easy, but not too dishonest, credit.
But now their partnership seems doomed—for Lando’s uncharacteristic impulse to help a race of persecuted aliens has suddenly made them vulnerable to several sets of their own enemies . . . not least of whom is the evil Rokur Gepta, the Sorcerer of Tund!
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Worlds
- Publication dateJune 1, 1994
- Dimensions4.2 x 1.1 x 6.7 inches
- ISBN-100345391101
- ISBN-13978-0345391100
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“SABACC!”
It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they’d earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.
Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination.
This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface, feel the radiation soaking through its iron-nickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.
Especially this one.
Apparently the locals felt it, too. They’d stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption. Most of them were having ice water and liking it.
Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container’s outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.
What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat’s paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy’s superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.
The gambler was wishing at the moment that he’d never heard of the place. That’s what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hardrock miners were always rich?
He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody’s mental processes.
Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table. It didn’t amount to a great fortune by anybody’s standards—except perhaps the poverty-cautious participants in the evening’s exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he’d have to drain the charge from his electric shaver into the ship’s energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.
Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he’d won his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he’d visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So far, he’d lost money on the deal.
Looking down, he saw he’d dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a single card-chip. Or even without turning it—he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.
That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet, flipping a thirty-credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.
It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody’s hand or in the undealt remainder of the deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals, unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.
The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.
“I’ll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denyms on the gambler’s left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She’d been betting heavily—for that impecunious crowd, anyway—and losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.
“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “ ‘Captain Calrissian’ sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon’s only a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I’m afraid.” He watched her for an indication of the card she’d taken. Nothing.
A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor’s assistant, took a card as well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp. Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he’d been dealt to the pair in his hand.
Suddenly: “Oh, for Edge’s sake, I simply can’t make up my mind! Can you come back to me, Captain Calrissian?” Lando groaned inwardly. This was how the entire evening had gone so far: the speaker, Ottdefa Osuno Whett, for all his dithering, had been the consistent big winner, perhaps owing to his tactics of continuous annoyance of the others. Fully as much a stranger in the Oseon as the young starship captain, at the moment he was operating on considerably less goodwill.
“I’m sorry, Ottdefa, you know I can’t. Will you have a card or not?”
Whett assumed an expression of conspicuous concentration that might have been a big success in his university classes. Ottdefa was a title, something academic or scientific, Lando gathered, conferred in the Lekua System. It was the equivalent of “Professor.”
Its owner was a spindly wraith, ridiculously tall, gray-headed, with a high-pitched whiny voice and a chronically indecisive manner. It had taken him twenty minutes to order a drink at the beginning of the game—and even then he’d changed his order just as the drink arrived.
Lando didn’t like him.
“Oh, very well. If you insist, I’ll take a card.”
“Fine,” Lando dealt it. Either the academic had an excellent poker face, or he was too absentminded to notice whether the resulting hand was bad or good. Lando looked to his right. “Constable Phuna?”
The squat, curly-headed tough-guy he addressed was T. Lund Phuna, local representative of law-and-order under the Administrator Senior of the Oseon. It was not, apparently, the happiest of assignments in the field. The uniform tunic hanging soddenly over the back of his chair looked nearly as worn as his companions’ work clothes. He lit cigarette after cigarette with nervous, sweaty fingers, filling the cramped, already stifling room with more pollution. He wiped a perspiration-soaked tissue over his jowls.
“I’ll stand. Nothing for me.”
“Dealer takes a card.”
It was the Idiot, worth zero. Given the circumstances, Lando felt it was altogether appropriate. If only he’d headed for the Dela System as he’d planned, instead of the Oseon. He’d seen richer pickings in refugee camps.
Bets were placed again. Vett Fori took another card, her fourth, as did her assistant, Arun Feb, asking for it around the stub of his cigar. Ottdefa Whett stood pat. A Master of Sabres brought the value of Lando’s hand up to a positive ten, as a final round of wagering commenced.
Arun Feb and Vett Fori both folded with a nine and minus-nine respectively. The cop Phuna hung grimly on, his broad features misted with sweat. Lando was about to resign himself, when Whett excitedly cried, “Sabacc!” slapping the Mistress of Staves, the Four of Flasks, and the Six of Coins down on the worn felt tabletop.
The Ottdefa raked in a meager pot: “Ah … not exactly the Imperial Crown jewels, nor even the fabulous Treasure of Rafa, but—”
“Treasure of Rafa?” echoed Vett Fori.
She might as well ask, thought Lando, she isn’t doing herself any good playing cards.
“I’ve heard of the Rafa System,” the mine supervisor continued, “everybody has. It’s the closest to our own. But I haven’t heard of any treasure.”
The academic cleared his throat. It was a silly, goose-honk noise. “The Treasure of Rafa—or of the Sharu, as we are now compelled to call it, not for the Rafa System, my dear, but for the ancient race who once flourished there and subsequently vanished without a trace—is a subject of some interest.”
This had been delivered in Whett’s best professional tones. Vett Fori’s weathered face, impassive enough when it came to playing cards, plainly displayed annoyance at being patronized. She picked up her cigar, stuck it between her teeth, and glared across the table.
“Without a trace?” Arun Feb snorted with disbelief. “I’ve been there, friend, and those ruins of your—what’d you call ’em?—‘Sharu,’ are the biggest hunks of engineering in the known galaxy. What’s more, they cover every body in the system bigger than my thumbnail. They—”
“Are not themselves the Sharu, my dear fellow, of whom no trace remains,” Whett insisted, his tone divided between pedantry and insulted reaction. “I certainly ought to know, for, until recently, I was a research anthropologist for the new governor of the Rafa System.”
“What’s a bureaucrat want with a tame anthropologist?” Feb asked blandly. He blew a final smoke ring, mashed his cigar out on the edge of the vacuum tray, and took a long drink of water. It dribbled down his chin, soaking the collar of his soiled shirt.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Worlds; Reprint edition (June 1, 1994)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345391101
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345391100
- Item Weight : 7.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.7 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #387,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #694 in Classic Action & Adventure (Books)
- #6,036 in Space Operas
- #9,493 in Science Fiction Adventures
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
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Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book fun to read, with interesting stories and good characters. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and entertaining, while others say it drags at times.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book fun to read.
"...A really fun trilogy, if a tad short as some sci-fi books were at the time, more often than not...." Read more
"...I digress the Lando Calrissian Adventures is a quick read that is fun and different...." Read more
"Overall entertaining but I personally felt that after finally getting around to reading this series that it really could have been set in any sci fi..." Read more
"...his career as a ship's captain, galactic con man and gambler is an enjoyable read...." Read more
Customers find the plot interesting, creative, and original. They also mention that the first novel is a pretty interesting idea.
"...Third, there are some big ideas and original elements of the EU that are not part of, or thus far have not been part of the Star Wars universe in..." Read more
"...The characters are well developed and the story develops in a reasonably logical manner...." Read more
"...Did not enjoy at all, am unsure why I even read the whole thing. Big waste of time, avoid!" Read more
"...were exciting, the space battles were phenomenal, and each story had many fantasy elements like lost civilizations and sorcerers and majestic..." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book well written and good.
"...n't necessarily a bad thing at all, I found Rokur Gepta to a very enjoyable character...." Read more
"...The characters are well developed and the story develops in a reasonably logical manner...." Read more
"...Vuffi Raa. A very interesting character with a good mystery behind him and until the very end the author did nothing with it and the origin felt..." Read more
"Its an entertaining book, well written and with good characters...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some find the book entertaining, well written, and a quick read. Others say the story can drag at times, with sketchy descriptions of situations. They also say the plot stinks, and the characters are static and predictable throughout the entire book.
"...Too much tobacco. Landon character remains static and predictable throughout the entire book...." Read more
"...The characterization was pretty good. Gepta is actually shown to not just be empty inside but to *like* being that way...." Read more
"...There is a lot of description of irrelevant minutiae which slows the pace down to a crawl...." Read more
"...Why you'll like it:Lando is really written well here. If you are a fan of the gambler/administrator you should enjoy these tales...." Read more
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These three short books (in one volume) take place for the classic SW heroes about five to three years before Episode IV (depending on which adventure of the trilogy we are talking about), or, in other words, about eight to six years before we meet Lando in Episode V. Lando is a very young man trying to make his way in the galaxy, and it shows in his glaring lack of ability compared to later on. Though he does, of course, show the first hints of the brilliant pilot and tactician he later would become, as these novels begin, he is a talented gambler and smooth talker. Not much else.
Of course, he's not really as good at those thing either, at least not as much as he thinks he is. Oh, he can play games brilliantly, such as being so good at *sabacc* that he struggles to actually lose *on purpose*. And he can think on his feet and talk fast in tough pickles. But the difficulties he finds himself in, and how easily he is boxed in, show that he is not as good at reading others as he thinks he is, and that he is *quite* naive at times.
Of course, that is part of the charm, in that we get to actually *see* Lando Calrissian become the pretty badass guy he is in the last two original films. We see some of the beginnings of that growth, at least. And of course, one doesn't become that type of guy with no real tests of endurance and thus we get the main difficulty for this series, the Big Bad.
In this trilogy that part was played by a character called Rokur Gepta, the "Sorcerer of Tund". Later materials outright state Force powers for these mystics and somewhat (I think) Dark Side conjurors. Even in this early series, the author, L. Neil Smith, hinted at this somewhat, or at least left it vague enough that it could be easily worked into later plots. I mean, this guy was an influential political figure that had Emperor Palpatine's ear, and knew various seemingly mystical secrets. "Fellow Force User" is practically screaming in your face here.
The characterization was pretty good. Gepta is actually shown to not just be empty inside but to *like* being that way. He is chillingly evil, and not just proud but nonchalant about his crimes. Vuffi Raa, Lando's droid aide and pilot, is probably the heart of the books, as his journey of friendship with Lando and self-discovery about his origins are what drive the plot. And finally, for Lando himself. He is a good guy trying to act mercenary. But in the end, even if he can be self-centered and egotistical at times, he is a good and honorable man who cares about others and wants to do the right thing. Of course, he wants to get rich while doing so, preferably while gambling and avoiding real work, but he's a good guy nonetheless. The seeds are there and it's fun to see the beginnings of this good man and badass guy.
A really fun trilogy, if a tad short as some sci-fi books were at the time, more often than not. I really enjoyed, and Highly Recommend, this trilogy.
Rating:
*Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu* (Vol. 1) - 4/5 Stars
*Lando Calrissian and Flamewind of Oseon* (Vol. 2) - 3.5/5 Stars
*Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of Thonboka* (Vol. 3) - 5/5 Stars
Overall Rating: 4/5 Stars.
You get an early trilogy of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now "Legends") starring one of the classic film trilogy's most love characters, Lando Calrissian. Yes, these were originally three separate novels, now in one updated paperback, with smaller text. It's readable but a bit on the small side. Great deal though.
Fundamentally, these are classic adventure stories in brand new sectors of the Star Wars universe.
Why you'll like it:
Lando is really written well here. If you are a fan of the gambler/administrator you should enjoy these tales. The writer does an excellent job of capturing his essence as a rather happy go lucky gambler through and through. First off, you really see his essence as a gambler. His character really seems to take the ups and downs of the story with a gambler's spirit. That is, he rides the wave of good luck when it strikes, but also gets placed in a lot of situations where he just has to figure out how best to play the hand he was dealt, no matter the consequences. It was refreshing to read a character that doesn't spend a lot of time moping or getting overwhelmed by being in a bad situation. It was nice to read a character who was upbeat and generally took things in stride.
Second, Vuffi Raa! Lando's companion from early on in the trilogy is a very unique droid named Vuffi Raa. His uniqueness does play a significant part in the books, by the end and I think he's as likable and as memorable as R2-D2 and Threepio.
Third, there are some big ideas and original elements of the EU that are not part of, or thus far have not been part of the Star Wars universe in other media, like films and television. The big mystery/twist (the Sharu) of the first novel is a pretty interesting idea an quite original. The second novel introduces a totally new system with it's own tourist culture and natural phenomenon (the Flamewind), and the third brings in both an incredibly unique race AND then some.
Why people may not like it:
If you are looking strictly for "cannon" elements this won't be for you. Lando is the only character from the films and television shows in these books, which take place well before his Cloud City life and have not been confirmed in cannon. If you are looking for stories steeped in movie elements or the Mandolorian show, these stories won't be your cup of tea.
As for writing, there is little to complain about, but some might find the transition of one of the characters from minor villain(in the first book) to arch nemesis a bit odd or unlikely, but to the writer's credit, so does Lando, who repeats on more than one occasion that he can't quite figure out how he could have possibly angered him so much.
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