Tales from a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Aliens by Landry Q. Walker

Tales From A Galaxy Far, Far Away: Aliens by Landry Q. Walker is a collection of six short stories detailing a variety of aliens and their misadventures around the time of the new trilogy. Each story had its own unique feel and yet they all cohesively worked together. This was a wonderful read.

"High Noon on Jakku" is a tale very much in the vein of its title--a whodunit with a stand-off between droid and constable. This is a story of one of Constable Zuvio's proudest moments as he solves the crime of the stolen money. Rikard Lovas is a Kubaz banker who flies in to Niima Outpost on behalf of the Western Reaches Exchange to manage transactions amongst the Jakku residents. A bomb blows up the side of the transport and all the peoples' money has been electronically deleted! It's up to Zuvio to crack the case...

     This was a fun story for sure. While it didn't completely keep you guessing, you still didn't know the full story until nearly the very end. And the final scene was a sweet one to behold.

     A description of Zuvio: his hat is a war helmet, his features were perpetually covered by bandages to help "his sensitive respiration system cope with the climate", yellow eyes with black slits for pupils, "his brow was furrowed in an expression that made people think he was always angry (he actually suffered from vision problems, common in Kyuzos, and his face was stuck in a permanent squint), Kyuzos come from a gravity-heavy world and so have more developed muscles than other bipeds making them able to move quickly and leap long distances.

     Zuvio has two cousins on Jakku with him: Drego and Streehn.

     A whole band of rogue droids wreak havoc in this tale and they include:

-a RIC: a crude labor droid with a wheel instead of legs

-a WED Treadwell: "a tall and thin droid that looked much like a stick protruding from a board, with half a dozen tiny arms attached."

-a DD-13 surgical unit: three legs, scalpel

-an EG-6 power droid--note: if opened up, power droids can become quite explosive

-a CZ-IG5 secretary droid: built-in long-wave comlink transmitter

"A Recipe for Death" is a mystery in which "Cookie" Strono Tuggs, the head of Maz Kanata's kitchen, solves the murder of Robbs Ely, his sous chef. Robbs Ely has a knack for mixing strange and unknown ingredients to make brilliantly delightful concoctions. Has somebody set out to claim his glory for themselves? Or is there something more sinister at foot? To find out who is behind Ely's death, Cookie sets up a cooking competition with him believing the winner and murderer will be one and the same. 

     This one definitely kept me guessing until the end and I was blindsided by who actually did the murdering. This was a very well written story indeed with all sorts of obstacles during the cooking competition that kept the mood fun despite the plot's serious nature. And the descriptions of all the food was fascinating with the use of a variety of spices and flours and fruits/vegetables and more that I had never heard of before.

     A few tidbits about various alien species:

Robbs Ely is a Volpai: four-armed, orange-skinned

Cookie is an Artiodac: tall, hunchbacked, misshapen feet, asymmetrical facial features, wide flat nose, apparently he was hideous even by Artiodac standards, making Maz's castle the perfect place for him to find a home

Devaronian's eyes flash lavender when they are feeling aggressive.

Jom Jarusch is one of the competitors and he happens to be a Mon Calamari/Quarren hybrid! Interesting that those two warring species can interbreed! He has tentacle-like, thin, flexible fingers and elastic, somewhat sticky appendages.

     Two repurposed BD-3000 serving droids work in the kitchen as taste testers to ensure that no poisons lurk in the food and no combinations of ingredients will harm the biology of any particular species. They taste test through the synthetic skin of their right hands while their left hands carry a variety of utensils. Apparently they used to be attractively stylized females.

     I'm a little disturbed by one of the dishes being grilled dianoga since From A Certain Point of View made it clear that dianoga are sentient species... Fun fact: blood parasites live in the fatty tissue of dianogas.

     Ingredients listed during the cooking competition: orange and spicy basa root flour, pikobi eggs, grulluck oil, shank of mousta, seallia sandwich, heavy and sweet blood syrup, zuchii, siso-fish, spicy zelrey wyrm 

In "All Creatures Great and Small", Bobbajo tells an outlandish story of how he was trapped on the Death Star moments before the Battle of Yavin. And from his side of things, it was he and his menagerie of animals that led to the battle station's destruction...mmm-hmmm. 

     I enjoyed the descriptions of what the animals were capable of and their escapades as they ran through the Death Star accomplishing various tasks. And it was really neat to watch the "other story" unfold as a freighter was causing a landing bay to be on lock down, the tractor beam had already been turned off, a Wookie was seen through air duct gratings, trash compactors were exploding, and the whole station was on high alert. This tale was quite expertly interwoven with the ending of "A New Hope."

     The tale is actually a story within a story as Bobbajo is trying to get the minds of the residents of Reestkii, Jakku off the Zygeerian slavers that have just arrived to take the townspeople captive. 

     Bobbajo's menagerie on Jakku includes:

-gwerps: tiny, lean, frog-like creatures with protruding tusks and horns

-pishnes: long-necked, soft-mouthed feathered combinations of avian and mollusk

-a lonlan: a bulbous mammal shaped like a large, semi-inflated, mud-colored balloon

-zhhee: brilliantly colored and especially boisterous winged lizards

-a worrt: a grumpy-looking creature named J'Rrosch

-yellow-bellied sand lizards

     Bobbajo's menagerie on the Death Star includes:

-a thwip: a tiny six-legged mouse-like mammal called Smeep

-a snee: a blue-winged bird named Qyp

-a slitherette: a bright orange, thirty-centimeter long, limbless reptile named Mideyean 

"The Face of Evil" was a terrifying tale that I'm surprised did not give me nightmares. It's about two Frigosian cryptosurgeons who enjoy experimenting on people by exchanging their body parts with those of other species!! Yikes *shiver*. Frigosians are covered in thick, yellow fur with heads as wide as their shoulders and they don't stand very tall. Thromba and Laparo are two members of the species that live at Maz Kanata's castle. They sport metal breathing apparatus on their mouths due to atmospheric differences between Takodana and their homeworld of Tansyl 5. They wear heavy black goggles to protect their nocturnal eyes from daylight.

     The story starts off as we see the criminal Ryn Biggleston betray her counterpart BeeLee Amdas, a blonde, bue-eyed Balosar. This species is nearly identical to humans except for two small sensory-enhancing antennae on the tops of their heads and a natural immunity to nearly every toxin in the galaxy.

     Ryn makes her way to Takodana and Maz's castle and hires the Frigosians to change her appearance so that the criminalizing data BeeLee leaked in her last moments will not follow Ryn forever. Little does she know, the Frigosians have a sneaky little joke up their sleeves. The ending of this one didn't surprise me in the least but it was still fascinating to read play out.

"True Love" is the story of Igo and Scoggan's ploy to cheat Unkar Plutt out of his wealth by developing a Crolute romantic match for the junk boss.  Despite Unkar's seemingly falling prey to the plan, there's a surprise in store that totally caught me off guard. The female crolute that's really a computer virus set up to take codes, passwords, and other important information, is named Tanandra and she ends up falling in love with Unkar, bypassing her programming to swindle the man. Igo and Scoggan certainly didn't plan for that turn of events!

     To my delight, this story tied in to "High Noon on Jakku" by saying that Unkar, in regards to the banking craft that flies into Niima Outpost to manage the residents' money, "had found a way to reach out and disrupt even that little bit of independence." Apparently the culprit in the first story of this book may not have been the ultimate reason for the crime...interesting.

     Igo and Scoggan venture out into the desert to locate Unkar's treasure in a dilapidated AT-AT. It was fascinating reading about them walking around inside the thing. I never imagined they had so many rooms!

"The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku" was a fabulously rollicking tale and my favorite out of the entire book! Absolutely ridiculous things just kept on happening and I couldn't wait to read what was going to take place next. It felt very Terry Pratchett-esque which was a delight.

     Sidon Ithano is the captain of the Meson Martinet and his crew includes Quiggold (a Gabdorin--large, round-headed amphibian with massive sweat glands), Pendewquell (an Ishi Tib), Reeg Brosna (an Arcona--a desert species), Reveth (a red-skinned Twi'lek), and Squeaky (a surprisingly friendly Gamorrean). They find themselves on the desert planet Ponemah (mentioned in "True Love" as a location of some of Unkar's accounts) where they hear a signal broadcasting the existence of the treasure of Count Dooku. None of the crew know what the treasure could be but they have their suspicions. The treasure's location is at the Southern Pole of the planet where "fifteen meter waves of caustic sand continually rose and cascaded down again, intermittent lava geysers randomly peppered the already dangerous landscape, and the sky[...]was filled with a never-ending storm of ionic lightning." Not to mention this was the habitat for giant acid-spitting worms. Needless to say, their journey across this wasteland is treacherous...and it doesn't help that other pirates caught wind of the signal as well!

     Scorza has a score to settle with Sidon (Sidon had once refused to let Scorza join his gang) and races to catch up with the man. The one-eyed Ortolan, the Gray Gundark biker gang, and Toltek the Devaronian are all also in a race to the treasure. The story flits back and forth between each criminal organization as they journey across the sands. Each in turn meets a terrible fate with Scorza being the only one to make it to the treasure...but without his gang. 

     Two random "backwater" planets are mentioned off-hand: Wasco and Andui.

     The treasure they end up finding is not at all what they expected, but it has a canon connection to the prequels and "The Clone Wars" series!!! So excited about the way things ended up transpiring. I don't want to give it away because the surprise is just that good. 

     This was a truly engaging book with each story being so different from the last. It was an absolute pleasure to read and I definitely recommend it to anyone looking to expand their knowledge of what is going on in the galaxy around the time of the new trilogy.