The Further Adventures: Planet of the Hoojibs

Planet of the Hoojibs

Author: Jymn Magon

Illustrator: Greg Winters

Medium: Picture book

Publication Date: April 1983

Timeline Placement: 3 ABY

 

Princess Leia, C-3PO, and Chewbacca are on a post-Empire Strikes Back mission without Han Solo, who is frozen in carbonite, or Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, or Lando Calrissian, none of whom is in the book. The Rebel Alliance sent the B-team.

Leia and company arrive on the planet Arbra in search of a new base for the Rebellion instead of searching for Han. The dominant species on the planet is the Hoojibs, a race of small, fluffy rabbit-like creatures. Threepio is quick to assure the princess that they are unintelligent. 

The Rebels welcome the wild Hoojibs into their camp and spend their time petting them and posting Instagram pictures of them because they are so floofy. They are like cuter, less commercial porgs. That night, however, C-3PO awakens from shutdown mode to find the Hoojibs are attempting to eat him alive. They have already drained all the energy from the Rebels' weapons. The Hoojibs, it turns out, feed on the electrical energy of technology. 

 

Chewbacca grabs one of the Hoojibs, presumably to lift it over his head like a baby, and is surprised when it begins to speak! The Hoojib, one Plif by name, explains that his people used to live in a cavern filled with crystals that supplied them with all the energy they ever needed, but recently they were driven out by a monstrous space creature called a slivilith. He does not explain that the slivilith is actually a bio-engineered long-range intelligence-gathering device created by the extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong and sent into deep-space prior to the Yuuzhan Vong's development of faster-than-light technology. That factoid wouldn't be added to the lore until Wizards of the Coast's release of Alien Anthology in 2001.

The slivilith attacks! It is a giant flying green bat/manta ray-like creature with prehensile tentacles. The only functional blaster the Rebels have left belongs to the guard who was on duty at the time, but rather than shoot at the slivilith himself he hands the gun over to Leia like a true cuck.

The princess fends off the monster, and the Hoojibs show the Rebels the way to its lair in their former cave, where they keep it at bay with wooden spears until Chewbacca gets bored and just swings the thing, many times larger than himself, by its tentacles into the pointy crystals, killing it. It then falls into a bottomless pit.

With the Hoojibs' food supply restored, Leia contacts the rest of the Alliance and reports that she's found them a new base.

A simplified version of the story told in Marvel Comics' Star Wars #55: Plif!, but as with the previous (and only other) Further Adventure, the illustrations are gorgeous and worth reading the book for, or at least looking up scans online. Another hit!