Hungarian Han Solo Novels in Translation!

Han Solo’s Nomads features Bollux and Blue Max, and some references to Han killing Gallandro. And Han Solo: The Imperial Agent briefly references events from Nomads, so there’s some continuity between the novels.

The Imperial Agent also says the Death Star is approximately a year away from completion, which is surprisingly consistent with the official placement of the Brian Daley trilogy.

 

I'm going to have to look through these properly again sometime (it's been a while) but as far as I remember they were self-contained stories that were simply advertised as "the next Han Solo trilogy". As far as references to Brian Daley's novels go, I'm quite unsure as I've yet to read any of them in their full Google Translated glory.

EDIT: Whoops, didn't see Go Rien Moss's reply.

 

I’ve seen pictures of self-published editions of a fan translation of the first book. Is that translation still online anywhere?

 

I know I grabbed a copy from starwarstimeline.net, but I just checked and it doesn't seem to be there. Maybe try looking on their FB page?

 

I was just scrolling through Reddit and it seems like people were using this rough translation.

 

“Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.”

Looks like it’s not available anymore. Too bad.

 

Yup, I removed the file because I didn’t want it getting spread around too much before Joe had a chance to proofread it.

 

I’m late to the party. Id love to know if there’s any update with these, or at the very least some best guesses at where on the timeline to would have taken place

 

I’m over halfway through the second translation, making slow progress but still progress! Joe Bongiorno expects to have his Supernatural Encounters project wrapped up around the end of the year, so he’ll start his proofread/edit of my work thus far around that time.

The novels are a direct continuation of the Brian Daley Han Solo trilogy, so in the 2 BBY-1 BBY era.

 

on my personal timeline there is 3 months between Lost Legacy and chapter 9 of Rebel Dawn, so I guess I can fit them in there

 

Hey, I found this interview with Nyulászi Zsolttal, aka Dale Avery, author of the Han Solo novels. He talks a little bit about the books, but it's mostly tabletop games and stuff. Just thought I'd pass it on.

 

Thought I’d give a brief but exciting update. Han Solo’s Nomads is FINALLY done, and Han Solo and the Bounty Hunters will be translated simultaneously with Han Solo’s War thanks to a good friend who’s volunteered to help. While I don’t want to estimate a date we can’t keep, I expect the last two novels to be finished in only a few months. I also probably won’t share Nomads publicly yet, since I want to get it formatted and ready for Joe to release as soon as he’s able

 

Since I forgot to mention it earlier in the week, I’ll drop a Sunday surprise: all four of the Han Solo novels have been translated and are now being proofread and formatted! All that’s left is to finalize the covers and for Joe to do his readthrough after Supernatural Encounters is released. I had to track down an artbook by the two Hungarian cover artists called Eclectic: Az album to get clean prints for the final English versions of the artwork, which also took some time. As for Power of the Jedi, I’m taking a break before getting seriously involved with it, but that translation will see the light of day soon enough as well!

 

Awesome find! Are there any Star Wars illustrations in the art book that aren't from the covers of the Han books?

 

Great news! Hopefully Imperial Blood will one day make the jump as well.

 

Still working on it. I'm probably half done. I just had some IRL stuff hit really hard.

 

Only for the OT novelizations and the Thrawn trilogy - the album was published in December 1994 so doesn’t feature their work for WEG (except for the artwork from Dark Force Rising and Han Solo and the Bounty Hunters, which we know were later repurposed for the RPG). Here’s a link to some quick scans I made:

 

Out of curiosity, are there any plans to print these translations at some point, whether like Heart of the Jedi or crowd-funded like Supernatural Encounters?

 

Not in an openly-public capacity, but some printable files might find their way around after the books are published online…

 

Just to put something out there for the translations, Joe said this in the news section of his site a couple days ago:

Work will soon begin on editing the now-translated Hungarian Han Solo books (thank you to Matthew Smith) with the intent of releasing them as PDFs... maybe as an omnibus for private printing (we'll see how that goes later on).

 

I decided to go down the rabbit hole of unlicensed Hungarian novels from the 90s once again and found a few more interesting series that I hadn't known about before (all unrelated to Star Wars, but still interesting nonetheless...). Be warned, there's quite a bit of stuff in here.

I found 9 different books based on both Alien and Predator, three of which were published by our old friend Valhalla and apparently attempt to closely tie the plots of all the Alien movies (at the time) to the Predator films, while also featuring returning characters. Some reviews on Moly said these books were better than Dark Horse's AvP comics. The writers of these books weren't "Dale Avery" or "Ed Fisher", but the writer of one (Predator 2017: Heatwave in New York) also wrote a sci-fi duology involving some guy named Bud Thorpe and someone else called Tickles. The remaining 6 books include a novelisation of the AvP2 game, an unofficial sequel to Predator 2 called "Predator 3: New Hunters", two books with really bad covers, and a book that was written by someone (apparently a doctor, like our good Dr. Matheidesz, the writer of Power of the Jedi) who didn't like the Alien movies after Aliens, so he just wrote his own sequel and published it to the market without permission. The last Alien book was just an Alan Dean Foster book retitled with the Alien logo, something that good old Valhalla also used to do.

I found one RoboCop book, but it doesn't seem to have any relation to the movie. It was written by someone under the same pseudonym as one of the Alien books, though. The same name also seems to have been used for some illustrated Hungarian kids books, but that may just be a coincidence (same publisher, so probably not).

Now here's the really interesting one: Terminator. The earliest one I could find is "Demon from the Future", which follows a third Terminator (this book came out between the 2nd and 3rd films) being sent all the way back to 1181. From the rough translation of the synopsis, it seems like the Knights Templar attempt to summon a demon to help them conquer the Holy Land, but instead get a Terminator (because of some malfunction with the time travel shenanigans). Because he can't really hunt Sarah/John Connor in this time period, he joins a group of assassins and attempts to kill every single person with the name Conn/Connor (seriously), in hopes of stopping Sarah from ever being born. He gets backstabbed and basically destroyed, so he teams up with an alchemist to rebuild himself. This is just based on the synopses, so I don't know how the story ends. These four books were then collected as "Terminator: The Demon of Destruction".

A second series was produced, following a SkyNET base called "Death Zone". Essentially, this area houses the SkyNET main terminal and is, thus, heavily guarded. Many human children have been kidnapped by Terminators and taken to the Death Zone for some kind of experiment, so John Connor sends a hand-picked group to a) save the children and b) upload a virus into the main terminal. Meanwhile, SkyNET is planning to use the human's distraction to attack and destroy Shadow Base (one of the main human bases). As the humans attack Death Zone, SkyNET launches an invasion on Shadow Base with as many forces as possible. SkyNET actually ends up winning, and the plot is loosely continued in a book by a different author called "The Underdogs" that I can't seem to find a digital copy of.

There are apparently two more Terminator series from the same publisher (one has as many books as The New Jedi Order!) but Moly.hu is playing up right now, so I'll have to leave looking into those later.

 

@Darth Fandom can you check if there are any unlicensed Willow or Indiana Jones works over there, too?

 

From what I could gather the answer is no. While the Willow novelisation and most (if not all, I can't be bothered to cross-reference right now) of the Indiana Jones Bantam books were translated by Szántai Zsolt (writer of Predator 2017) for the Hungarian market, I couldn't seem to find any unlicensed books. Szántai Zsolt also translated a bunch of the post-ROTJ Bantam books while Valhalla still had the license to those. Interestingly, the publisher of the Willow translation, Impérium, only published one other book: a translation of Cyberpunk 2020. Another curious case, like Ballant.

Back to Terminator, the third unofficial Hungarian series centers on the T-1000. SkyNET is attempting to make a series of T-1000s in order to finally stop the human resistance, so John Connor sends another team of humans to invade a SkyNET base. The humans are also trying to setup a new base of their own since their last one was destroyed. Now, for some reason that I can't get from the synopses, SkyNET wants the humans out of LA, so they plan to use nukes on the area. To be honest, I don't understand the synopsis for the final book one bit because it heavily references details from the other ones, but something happens.

I haven't looked into the final 19-book Terminator series but I will do that later.

EDIT: Another publisher also published Garry Douglas' novelisation of Highlander. This one was translated by Gáspár András, a.k.a. Ed Fisher, the author of Han Solo's Nomads. It seems that there was quite a small circle of Hungarian book translators/writers in this space at the time.

 

@Darth Fandom this is an awesome discovery! I knew of the Alien and Predator novels (as well as a couple of Doom spinoffs), and managed to find pdf’s of them awhile back, but had never heard of the Terminator novels.