Star Wars: Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina [Import] [Paperback]

Kevin J. Anderson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 359 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Books; paperback / softback edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553409719
• ISBN-13: 978-0553409710
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 3.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,346,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kevin J. Anderson has written 46 national bestsellers and has over 20 million books in print worldwide in thirty languages. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Readers' Choice Award. Find out more about Kevin Anderson at www.wordfire.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Watch your step, this place can get a little rough....", February 11, 2004

By 

Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina (Star Wars) (Mass Market Paperback)

"Mos Eisley Spaceport," says Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker as they stand on a mesa overlooking the Tatooine metropolis in a transition scene in Episode IV. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be careful."

Of all the many eye-catching and memorable sequences in Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), the fateful meeting between Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, and a pair of smugglers with a starship for hire is perhaps the most intriguing. It's not only important dramatically or even as far as the change in the film's pacing goes (from this point on, there will be chases, shootouts, rescues, and battles), it's also visually intriguing. The dim lighting, the tense atmosphere, all those aliens, and, of course, that funky cantina band playing Benny Goodman-like tunes.

Of course, in the film, the focus was on Kenobi, Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca as they negotiated a charter flight to Alderaan. But there were others in the cantina that day on Tatooine...many other minor players and eyewitnesses on that fateful day. Who were they? What about their stories? What were some of them doing in Chalmun the Wookiee's Mos Eisley speakeasy?

Star Wars: Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, edited by novelist Kevin J. Anderson (The Jedi Academy Trilogy), is a collection of 16 original short stories set during and after the events depicted in Star Wars: A New Hope. Within such stories as Kathy Tyers "We Don't Do Weddings: The Band's Tale" there are little tidbits of heretofore unknown data that add depth and nuance to the scene in the film. Want to know the name of the cantina band? (It's Figrin Da'n and the Modal Nodes). What are those two women who look like twins doing in the cantina? (I'm not giving any more free info away here...read Timothy Zahn's "Hammertong" to find out.) All 16 stories are well-written and move almost as fast as the Millennium Falcon, and they all seem to fit into the Star Wars storyline without feeling, well, forced.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this anthology was discovering that authors better known for writing about the Star Trek universe also moonlight in the Star Wars Galaxy. A.C. Crispin, who has written such Trek classics as Yesterday's Son contributed "Play It Again, Figrin Da'n: The Tale of Muftak and Kabe," while Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens wrote "One Last Night in the Mos Eisley Cantina: The Tale of the Wolfman and the Lamproid." Reading these stories and marveling at how they captured the essence of George Lucas' "galaxy far, far away," I realized that they are not only good writers of Star Trek fiction, but they are good writers, period.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you like Star Wars, pick this one up., July 7, 2003

By 

Tom Knapp "Rambles.NET editor" (Lancaster, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina (Star Wars) (Mass Market Paperback)

The Mos Eisley cantina is the setting for only a single brief, if pivotal, scene in the first Star Wars film. (That's A New Hope for those of you who weren't around when it opened in theaters the first time.) It is there we first see the formidable fighting skills of Obi-Wan Kenobi, get our first glimpse of the hirsute Chewbacca and witness the cunning ruthlessness of Han Solo (at least in the original version; George Lucas applied revisionist history to the recent re-release, spoiling a good scene by making Solo play nice with the bad guy). It also provided us with a quick glimpse of the many diverse lifeforms that populate the spacefaring regions of the Empire.

Star Wars: Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina provides a peek into those lives via 16 short stories, each intertwined in some way with the characters and events of that brief movie scene. Each character has little beyond a split-second cameo in the film, a flash on the screen to demonstrate the cutting edge in alien makeup. Now, each has a story.

Each also gives readers a slightly different perspective on the droids' failed entrance into the cantina, and each has a different angle on Kenobi's fight at the bar and Greedo's demise. The stories unfold like a great Tatooine tapestry

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best of the tales of/from series I've read., February 15, 2006

By 

C. L Wright (Sturtevant, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina (Star Wars) (Mass Market Paperback)

I've read all but one of the tales of/from series. There were a couple of duds, but overall a good collections of stories. The most interesting one was the last one concerning the "wolfman." I found the one about the pipe smoker a little disturbing and didn't like it. I would recommend this book it is worth your time to read.