A review by blancwene
Hard Merchandise, by K. W. Jeter
1.0
For 2020, I decided to reread (in publication order) all the Bantam-era Star Wars books that were released between 1991 and 1999; that shakes out to 38 adult novels and 5 anthologies of short stories & novellas.
This week’s focus: the last book in the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, Hard Merchandise by K.W. Jeter.
SOME HISTORY:
You might be familiar with Paul Youll’s artwork--he created the cover illustrations for the X-Wing series. But his twin brother, Stephen Youll, also contributed to several Star Wars books, most notably the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy. However, I have to call out whoever from Bantam ordered these covers: the Emperor doesn’t appear in Hard Merchandise at all? Likewise the Royal Guardsman and dewback-riding stormtroopers. They’re well-done covers, they just don’t mesh with the actual content of these books.
Like with [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007], I couldn’t find any data that Hard Merchandise made the New York Times paperback bestseller list for any of the weeks after its release.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I’m not sure that I was even aware originally that this was a trilogy! Thinking back, I might have thought it was a single book about Boba Fett, so nothing feels familiar here.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
In the past, Boba Fett discovers who was behind the plot to dismantle the Bounty Hunter’s Guild; while in the present, Fett faces off against Kuat of Kuat.
THE CHARACTERS:
My biggest issue with these books has been how Jeter chose to portray Boba Fett. Fett's motivations boil down to two things: he wants to be the best, and he wants to make a lot of money in the process. The problem there is that it's hard for him to come across as a three-dimensional, nuanced character if what's driving him is...money. He's better than everyone else, he outsmarts everyone else, but we're never really given the reason why other than that he's the best. And that's not really enough for me to follow a character and be interested in his journey!
The only interesting bit with Fett we get in this book is when he goes to Tatooine to meet with Bossk because he needs to reacquire the fabricated evidence that Kuat of Kuat had created. Rather than having a big shootout in the cantina, Fett just pays Bossk off, because Bossk realized that part of Boba Fett's strength is that he's not afraid to die. Which was an interesting take on the character-- were it not for the fact that immediately afterwards it's forgotten and never brought up again. And I'm not sure I really buy that Fett's not afraid to die because every encounter we've seen him in where things are looking really bad, Fett seems to be working his gosh darn hardest to live. Jeter doesn't give us any human reasons to root for Fett; rather he's this Superman character that’s leagues above everyone else.
Dengar initially seemed like a sympathetic character, but by book 3 he’s primarily an idiot sidekick. He rarely questions Fett’s plans or motives, he nearly dies on the Hound’s Teeth, and he’s only able to quit the bounty hunting trade because Manaroo placed a huge bet on his survival. (He also thinks about how he might stay in the game, because someone probably told Jeter that Dengar pops back up as a bounty hunter in the Young Jedi Knights books.)
Neelah finally discovers who she is and why her memory was wiped, but it doesn't feel 100% satisfying to me. Boba Fett didn’t save Neelah out of any human goodwill but because he might be able to make a profit off of her. Her memory wasn’t wiped because she knew anything particularly integral to the conclusion of this trilogy, but because Kodir of Kuhlvult wanted her support in overthrowing K of K. Neelah said no, and Kodir wiped her memory and tossed her out. I guess she had enough good feelings for her sister that she couldn't outright kill her, but Neelah doesn’t actually play a role in the conclusion at all. By the end, she knows who she is; maybe she’ll take a leadership role among the Kuati nobles but ???
Bossk begins Hard Merchandise in a bad place: Boba Fett has stolen his ship, and someone else has stolen all his cash. He's in a very vulnerable position now where people don't want to help him because he doesn't have money, and he can't take on any bounty hunting jobs because he doesn't have the necessary gear. While i still don't agree with Jeter's characterization of Bossk, I did like his encounter with Fett in the cantina--that he goes from being scared of Fett to actually figuring out how Fett approaches everything.
Zuckuss’s appearance here seemed pointless other than to introduce the gambler that Manaroo later meets; he’s finally teamed up with 4-LOM, but gets drunk and wants to ditch him. Zuckuss's portrayal in these books is such a complete whiplash from his portrayal in [b:Tales of the Bounty Hunters|131776|Tales of the Bounty Hunters (Star Wars)|Kevin J. Anderson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1411172275l/131776._SY75_.jpg|2599174] that I went on Wookieepedia to see if they had any explanation why: “Zuckuss's multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia diagnoses were a retcon introduced in the first edition of [b:The Essential Guide to Alien Species|35407|Star Wars The New Essential Guide to Alien Species|Ann Margaret Lewis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386920882l/35407._SX50_.jpg|35342] to explain drastic character differences between sources.”
...
I guess that's the best they could do??
Xizor sets out to kill Fett. It’s looking really bad for him, as the Slave One is literally falling to pieces. Then Xizor...changes his mind offscreen? It makes no sense, and seems predisposed to only piss Fett off further. Apparently Balancesheet the little tiny spider told him that Boba Fett's better off alive because he's a useful person, and Xizor changes his mind on the spur of the moment. It's just stupid! And I still don’t understand the point of dismantling the Guild--I don't know how that worked out in Xizor's favor.
We also see how Balancesheet betrays his progenitor Ku’dar Mu’bat: by allying himself with Black Sun so they could do all the dirty work for him. We also get a (perhaps unnecessary) subplot in the present timeline where Boba Fett resurrects Ku’dar Mu’bat to ask him questions which Ku’dar Mu’bat no longer has the answers to. While it was interesting to learn a little bit more about their arachnid assembler species, it felt like a red herring.
And we have our big baddie, Kuat of Kuat (although I’m not even sure if you can call him a baddie). K of K has been trying to kill Boba Fett since [b:The Mandalorian Armor|372828|The Mandalorian Armor (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #1)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415588006l/372828._SY75_.jpg|98660]--not because of anything that Fett has done, and not because of Neelah at all (he doesn’t even know who she is), but because Fett had gotten his hands on fabricated evidence implicating Prince Xizor in the murder of Luke Skywalker’s family. [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007] piqued my interest in K of K and Kuati politics, but in Hard Merchandise I ping-ponged back to my earlier interpretation of K of K. I feel like his plotline could have been handled a lot differently! He's not necessarily a bad guy--yes, he wants to kill Fett, but he also wants to be a neutral power in the galaxy. When it looks like the Rebel Alliance will either take over the Kuat Drive Yards or steal some of their products, K of K decides that he'd rather destroy everything than give it to either the Rebels or the Empire.
I suppose this is similar to his ruse with the fabricated evidence against Xizor: he doesn't want anyone else having a say in KDY, and he's willing to completely ruin everything in the process. I'm not sure why he was so desperate to get his fabricated evidence back, because Xizor’s already dead (honestly, what's gonna happen at this point?) but it did drive a lot of the events in book three. I guess it's dumb but it's a plot necessity. But even his grand gesture at the end to destroy KDY fails because the Star Destroyer that Boba Fett (improbably) stole is the key to the detonation system that he put in place. (And that's another thing: Star Destroyers require a lot of people to operate successfully, so the fact that Fett could just go jetting out of there all alone on a Star Destroyer is stupid.)
I'd wondered at the end of [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007] what Kodir of Kuhlvult was doing, but it was just a takeover plotline. Her only interest in her sister was to kill her this time around. I thought from book two that K of K knew that Kodir had her own agenda, but here he's completely taken by surprise when she's scheming with the Rebels to take over KDY.
Ultimately, I felt like Kuat of Kuat's characterization was all over the place: he was not interesting, he was interesting, and then he just got really stupid at the end.
ISSUES:
The biggest issue with Hard Merchandise and with the trilogy as a whole is that Jeter does an awful lot of telling and very little showing. This is one instance where I think the present and the past timelines could have been synced up a lot better and a lot tighter. In the past we have Boba Fett dismantling the Bounty Hunter’s Guild, and in the present we have Boba Fett evading death at the hands of Kuat of Kuat. The problem is that those two aren't really connected at all. Instead of Boba Fett telling us how he found the fabricated evidence and Neelah, why couldn’t we have seen that? At least then we’d have a better connection between past events and why K of K (now) wants to kill Fett. Instead we get so many characters explaining what they've done but we never actually see them doing things--they just monologue about these past events.
Jeter also repeats the same concepts and ideas over and over again. I’m so tired of the phrase “hard merchandise.” I don’t need to be constantly reminded that Neelah has remembered her true name, I got it the first time.
Why was K of K’s big plan to blow up the Kuat Drive Yards? Surely he had enough staff to seize control of things himself? (Then he wouldn’t have been beholden to the Empire or the Rebellion.)
Everything in the Bounty Hunters Wars trilogy was building towards this giant climactic showdown with Kuat of Kuat, but the actual execution felt lackluster to me. Why was K of K’s big plan to blow up the Kuat Drive Yards? Surely he had enough staff to seize control of things himself? (Then he wouldn’t have been beholden to the Empire or the Rebellion.) K of K is blowing up the ships, the Rebels are trying to steal the ships, Neelah is off with her sister, and then Fett shows up to interrogate K of K. Afterwards K of K just goes off to die?
Then the final chapter has Manaroo telling Dengar that they’re set for life--Neelah meeting with Fett--and Fett explaining that he has to take the fabricated evidence to one of the Black Sun factions or they’ll kill him. (Which is another thing: why would that motivate Boba Fett at all?? He’s just going to give it to them for free? Boba Fett never gives anything away; I thought these books made that clear.) And that’s it.
So much of this book devolved into people talking about what they were going to do and yet we saw very little of them actually doing those things. I said in my review of the previous book that there was no reason for this to be a trilogy, and I want to reiterate that point. The past timeline existed merely to rub in how much better of a bounty hunter Fett is than the other bounty hunters--but it didn't really play a role in the present timeline. The two timelines felt disconnected from each other to the point that I'm not even sure we needed to have both the past and the present, especially when the past was almost entirely unrelated to the present events.
IN CONCLUSION:
Do you like Boba Fett? Then you might like these books. But if you’re expecting a little more from your Star Wars reading material (characters you can root for, interconnected plotlines, an exciting climax), this is not the book for you.
Next up: the fourth of Aaron Allston’s X-Wing books, [b:Starfighters of Adumar|773544|Starfighters of Adumar (Star Wars X-Wing, #9)|Aaron Allston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320513855l/773544._SY75_.jpg|759594].
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/qThbb0BvQVA
This week’s focus: the last book in the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, Hard Merchandise by K.W. Jeter.
SOME HISTORY:
You might be familiar with Paul Youll’s artwork--he created the cover illustrations for the X-Wing series. But his twin brother, Stephen Youll, also contributed to several Star Wars books, most notably the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy. However, I have to call out whoever from Bantam ordered these covers: the Emperor doesn’t appear in Hard Merchandise at all? Likewise the Royal Guardsman and dewback-riding stormtroopers. They’re well-done covers, they just don’t mesh with the actual content of these books.
Like with [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007], I couldn’t find any data that Hard Merchandise made the New York Times paperback bestseller list for any of the weeks after its release.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I’m not sure that I was even aware originally that this was a trilogy! Thinking back, I might have thought it was a single book about Boba Fett, so nothing feels familiar here.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
In the past, Boba Fett discovers who was behind the plot to dismantle the Bounty Hunter’s Guild; while in the present, Fett faces off against Kuat of Kuat.
THE CHARACTERS:
My biggest issue with these books has been how Jeter chose to portray Boba Fett. Fett's motivations boil down to two things: he wants to be the best, and he wants to make a lot of money in the process. The problem there is that it's hard for him to come across as a three-dimensional, nuanced character if what's driving him is...money. He's better than everyone else, he outsmarts everyone else, but we're never really given the reason why other than that he's the best. And that's not really enough for me to follow a character and be interested in his journey!
The only interesting bit with Fett we get in this book is when he goes to Tatooine to meet with Bossk because he needs to reacquire the fabricated evidence that Kuat of Kuat had created. Rather than having a big shootout in the cantina, Fett just pays Bossk off, because Bossk realized that part of Boba Fett's strength is that he's not afraid to die. Which was an interesting take on the character-- were it not for the fact that immediately afterwards it's forgotten and never brought up again. And I'm not sure I really buy that Fett's not afraid to die because every encounter we've seen him in where things are looking really bad, Fett seems to be working his gosh darn hardest to live. Jeter doesn't give us any human reasons to root for Fett; rather he's this Superman character that’s leagues above everyone else.
Dengar initially seemed like a sympathetic character, but by book 3 he’s primarily an idiot sidekick. He rarely questions Fett’s plans or motives, he nearly dies on the Hound’s Teeth, and he’s only able to quit the bounty hunting trade because Manaroo placed a huge bet on his survival. (He also thinks about how he might stay in the game, because someone probably told Jeter that Dengar pops back up as a bounty hunter in the Young Jedi Knights books.)
Neelah finally discovers who she is and why her memory was wiped, but it doesn't feel 100% satisfying to me. Boba Fett didn’t save Neelah out of any human goodwill but because he might be able to make a profit off of her. Her memory wasn’t wiped because she knew anything particularly integral to the conclusion of this trilogy, but because Kodir of Kuhlvult wanted her support in overthrowing K of K. Neelah said no, and Kodir wiped her memory and tossed her out. I guess she had enough good feelings for her sister that she couldn't outright kill her, but Neelah doesn’t actually play a role in the conclusion at all. By the end, she knows who she is; maybe she’ll take a leadership role among the Kuati nobles but ???
Bossk begins Hard Merchandise in a bad place: Boba Fett has stolen his ship, and someone else has stolen all his cash. He's in a very vulnerable position now where people don't want to help him because he doesn't have money, and he can't take on any bounty hunting jobs because he doesn't have the necessary gear. While i still don't agree with Jeter's characterization of Bossk, I did like his encounter with Fett in the cantina--that he goes from being scared of Fett to actually figuring out how Fett approaches everything.
Zuckuss’s appearance here seemed pointless other than to introduce the gambler that Manaroo later meets; he’s finally teamed up with 4-LOM, but gets drunk and wants to ditch him. Zuckuss's portrayal in these books is such a complete whiplash from his portrayal in [b:Tales of the Bounty Hunters|131776|Tales of the Bounty Hunters (Star Wars)|Kevin J. Anderson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1411172275l/131776._SY75_.jpg|2599174] that I went on Wookieepedia to see if they had any explanation why: “Zuckuss's multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia diagnoses were a retcon introduced in the first edition of [b:The Essential Guide to Alien Species|35407|Star Wars The New Essential Guide to Alien Species|Ann Margaret Lewis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386920882l/35407._SX50_.jpg|35342] to explain drastic character differences between sources.”
...
I guess that's the best they could do??
Xizor sets out to kill Fett. It’s looking really bad for him, as the Slave One is literally falling to pieces. Then Xizor...changes his mind offscreen? It makes no sense, and seems predisposed to only piss Fett off further. Apparently Balancesheet the little tiny spider told him that Boba Fett's better off alive because he's a useful person, and Xizor changes his mind on the spur of the moment. It's just stupid! And I still don’t understand the point of dismantling the Guild--I don't know how that worked out in Xizor's favor.
We also see how Balancesheet betrays his progenitor Ku’dar Mu’bat: by allying himself with Black Sun so they could do all the dirty work for him. We also get a (perhaps unnecessary) subplot in the present timeline where Boba Fett resurrects Ku’dar Mu’bat to ask him questions which Ku’dar Mu’bat no longer has the answers to. While it was interesting to learn a little bit more about their arachnid assembler species, it felt like a red herring.
And we have our big baddie, Kuat of Kuat (although I’m not even sure if you can call him a baddie). K of K has been trying to kill Boba Fett since [b:The Mandalorian Armor|372828|The Mandalorian Armor (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #1)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415588006l/372828._SY75_.jpg|98660]--not because of anything that Fett has done, and not because of Neelah at all (he doesn’t even know who she is), but because Fett had gotten his hands on fabricated evidence implicating Prince Xizor in the murder of Luke Skywalker’s family. [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007] piqued my interest in K of K and Kuati politics, but in Hard Merchandise I ping-ponged back to my earlier interpretation of K of K. I feel like his plotline could have been handled a lot differently! He's not necessarily a bad guy--yes, he wants to kill Fett, but he also wants to be a neutral power in the galaxy. When it looks like the Rebel Alliance will either take over the Kuat Drive Yards or steal some of their products, K of K decides that he'd rather destroy everything than give it to either the Rebels or the Empire.
I suppose this is similar to his ruse with the fabricated evidence against Xizor: he doesn't want anyone else having a say in KDY, and he's willing to completely ruin everything in the process. I'm not sure why he was so desperate to get his fabricated evidence back, because Xizor’s already dead (honestly, what's gonna happen at this point?) but it did drive a lot of the events in book three. I guess it's dumb but it's a plot necessity. But even his grand gesture at the end to destroy KDY fails because the Star Destroyer that Boba Fett (improbably) stole is the key to the detonation system that he put in place. (And that's another thing: Star Destroyers require a lot of people to operate successfully, so the fact that Fett could just go jetting out of there all alone on a Star Destroyer is stupid.)
I'd wondered at the end of [b:Slave Ship|222019|Slave Ship (Star Wars The Bounty Hunter Wars, #2)|K.W. Jeter|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328740749l/222019._SY75_.jpg|215007] what Kodir of Kuhlvult was doing, but it was just a takeover plotline. Her only interest in her sister was to kill her this time around. I thought from book two that K of K knew that Kodir had her own agenda, but here he's completely taken by surprise when she's scheming with the Rebels to take over KDY.
Ultimately, I felt like Kuat of Kuat's characterization was all over the place: he was not interesting, he was interesting, and then he just got really stupid at the end.
ISSUES:
The biggest issue with Hard Merchandise and with the trilogy as a whole is that Jeter does an awful lot of telling and very little showing. This is one instance where I think the present and the past timelines could have been synced up a lot better and a lot tighter. In the past we have Boba Fett dismantling the Bounty Hunter’s Guild, and in the present we have Boba Fett evading death at the hands of Kuat of Kuat. The problem is that those two aren't really connected at all. Instead of Boba Fett telling us how he found the fabricated evidence and Neelah, why couldn’t we have seen that? At least then we’d have a better connection between past events and why K of K (now) wants to kill Fett. Instead we get so many characters explaining what they've done but we never actually see them doing things--they just monologue about these past events.
Jeter also repeats the same concepts and ideas over and over again. I’m so tired of the phrase “hard merchandise.” I don’t need to be constantly reminded that Neelah has remembered her true name, I got it the first time.
Why was K of K’s big plan to blow up the Kuat Drive Yards? Surely he had enough staff to seize control of things himself? (Then he wouldn’t have been beholden to the Empire or the Rebellion.)
Everything in the Bounty Hunters Wars trilogy was building towards this giant climactic showdown with Kuat of Kuat, but the actual execution felt lackluster to me. Why was K of K’s big plan to blow up the Kuat Drive Yards? Surely he had enough staff to seize control of things himself? (Then he wouldn’t have been beholden to the Empire or the Rebellion.) K of K is blowing up the ships, the Rebels are trying to steal the ships, Neelah is off with her sister, and then Fett shows up to interrogate K of K. Afterwards K of K just goes off to die?
Then the final chapter has Manaroo telling Dengar that they’re set for life--Neelah meeting with Fett--and Fett explaining that he has to take the fabricated evidence to one of the Black Sun factions or they’ll kill him. (Which is another thing: why would that motivate Boba Fett at all?? He’s just going to give it to them for free? Boba Fett never gives anything away; I thought these books made that clear.) And that’s it.
So much of this book devolved into people talking about what they were going to do and yet we saw very little of them actually doing those things. I said in my review of the previous book that there was no reason for this to be a trilogy, and I want to reiterate that point. The past timeline existed merely to rub in how much better of a bounty hunter Fett is than the other bounty hunters--but it didn't really play a role in the present timeline. The two timelines felt disconnected from each other to the point that I'm not even sure we needed to have both the past and the present, especially when the past was almost entirely unrelated to the present events.
IN CONCLUSION:
Do you like Boba Fett? Then you might like these books. But if you’re expecting a little more from your Star Wars reading material (characters you can root for, interconnected plotlines, an exciting climax), this is not the book for you.
Next up: the fourth of Aaron Allston’s X-Wing books, [b:Starfighters of Adumar|773544|Starfighters of Adumar (Star Wars X-Wing, #9)|Aaron Allston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320513855l/773544._SY75_.jpg|759594].
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/qThbb0BvQVA