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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A little bit better and a whole lot worse..., May 23, 2000
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A few sparks of action amid reams of recapitulation ....., November 25, 2006
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 ....
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Scheming aplenty, September 7, 2002
In this second of the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, Jeter continues the two time periods, of just after ANH, and during ROTJ. Starting in ROTJ, we find Boba Fett, Neelah and Dengar taking over Bossk's ship the Hound's Tooth, tricking Bossk that a bomb was onboard to get him to jettison in an escape pod and take over. Boba does not want the galaxy to know he is alive, so he ditches Slave I. Neelah is still looking for her true identity, while trying to extract infor from both Dengar and Boba. So, Boba Fett sets in a course to another sector of the galaxy, with no clue on where he's taking us. Besides this, not too much happens in this time frame, except for the plot around Kuat of Kuat and thechallenge by the other bloodlines on the planet to take over his operations. Somehow we find out he planted Falleen pheremomes on Tatooine to make it look like Xizor had Luke's uncle and aunt killed. Most of the action takes place in the setting just after ANH. Bossk and Boba Fett team up to capture this renegade stormtrooper, not knowing thatPrince Xizor has set a trap for Fett, with help from Palpatine and Kud'ar Mub'at, the spider like alien. Pretty good action. You can definitely see that everyone involved in this novel is looking out for number one. We get a lot of dialogue from Boba Fett in this one, which is contrary to what most think his character to be, a bounty hunter of few words. Jeter at times loves to talk, repeating things about certain characters several times during a chapter; like we would forget or something. This tended to string to the book out longer than it should have. At other times, Jeter's writing was great, especially his use of adjectives to describe a planet that Boba Fett and Bossk meet on, where centipede like creatures live, with one wrapping itself around Bossk's ankle. Overall, this was a fair to good SW book. Looking forward to the finale, Hard Merchandise.
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