Assault at Selonia by Roger MacBride Allen (1995)

 Assault at Selonia

Thanks Wookiepedia
That thing in the center of the cover is the point of the book

Back to the Corellian Trilogy... Oh boy...

Summary: After scattering the cast at the end of the last book, they get back together in this one. Classic middle book!

What it introduces:

Nothing important.

Commentary/Review: 1/5 After complaining about the "middle bookishness" of Ambush at Corellia, I'm here to report that Assault at Selonia is more of the same, in a slightly different way. AaC didn't really need to exist. It spends a whole book awkwardly maneuvering characters into position for this book. 90% of it could get chopped, and it'd be fine. AaS has a plot, Macbride just skips over all the good parts for some reason. Here's the 4 main plot threads:

1. Han is captured on Corellia by his cousin, Thracken. He's forced to pit fight a weasel alien, who eventually helps him escape. (The start of the book is pretty decent.) He spends most of the rest of the book crawling around in narrow tunnels while she provides (mostly unnecessary) exposition. Han breaking out of jail has been the plot of at least 2 or 3 other novels so far, and it can be interesting. But he's basically out of danger the end of the first act, so it's never that interesting.

2. Leia has to escape as well, and she's paired up with Mara Jade. We get some good bedsheet rope antics, and Macbride (mostly) suppresses his need for everyone to be super suspicious of her. This is the arc of the book closest to forming actual intrigue, but it's still mostly just a point a to point b.

3. The Solo kids, Chewbacca, and the guest star aliens/droids make their way to Drall, where they find a similar underground complex to the one they found on Corellia. It's a repulsor, one large enough to move planets. (And blow up spaceships.)

4. Luke and Lando go the Bakura, where they manage to recruit a task force (the New Republic's navy is indisposed), including Luke's sort-of-ex Gaeriel Captison. Out of all the Not-Mara-Jade options, Captison's always been my favorite pairing for Luke (by virtue of actually having a personality). There's probably an entire book here in this subplot for a good writer. Luke needs to step into his big boy pants and learn to do diplomacy, he encounters and ol flame just after Lando is forced to leave a new one, intrigue, maybe a subplot to do something to actually "earn" the fleet. But Macbride isn't a good author, and it's all resolved through some clumsy dialogue. Of course militaristic border world will be happy to loan you some ships, Luke.

Meanwhile. the awkward conspiracy subplot continues, as no one can accept that maybe Thracken just found an old super weapon lying around and is using it. It's not like that's been the plot of like half the books in the series so far, surely there must be a conspiracy. MacBride fails to bread crumb it at all, so it's hard to care about.

Beyond that, all around clumsy writing with mixed metaphors, weird characterization, etc. continues. At best, AaC and AaS are probably half a book of content combined. The final novel in the series isn't a ton better, which means this entire trilogy contains about one book worth of plot. Again, a better writer could probably have filled two books here (give Han and Leia something to actually do on Corellia in book one, setup the conspiracy, focus book two on Luke's efforts on Bakura), but MacBride's refusal to actually have characters do anything really limits the amount of productive words. Skip the whole trilogy unless you're some moron trying to read every Star Wars book...

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