It's human psychology. Events, even major events with major impacts, get memory holed on a personal and a societal level. We are literally living through the memory-holing of COVID, yet four years ago today almost every single one of us was huddled up in our homes trying to avoid it. @Christopher's citing of the Afghanistan War is a great example, imho, of something getting memory-holed while it was happening; once focus turned to Iraq, people simply forgot that we were active in Afghanistan... until the United States finally withdrew.
Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III Published: October 2017 Time Span: March 2386 / 2380 Ah, we've finally tied off all the lingering threads of the Deep Space Nine time jump. Now the story can move forward at last! David R. George III set up some new concepts in his previous book, so surely we'll be building on them. What's that? We never heard the story of Rebecca Sisko's kidnapping? Oh, well, I guess so... To be honest, I had forgotten this had even happened. It was part, I think, of the litany of bad things that was used in Rough Beasts of Empire to justify Sisko running away from his family, along with "neighbors who the reader never saw died." Because, as we know, the thing good fathers do when their children are kidnapped is spend less time around them. I don't think this was a story that actually demanded to be told. Original Sin has two parallel plotlines; in the present day, Sisko's command, the USS Robinson, has set out on a journey of exploration in the Gamma Quadrant, but Rebecca is kidnapped (along with a bunch of other children aboard the Galaxy-class starship). This reminds Sisko of the last time she was kidnapped, so we get that filled in, too. It is dead boring. I can't imagine anyone reading all the post-Destiny DS9 novels up until this point and thinking to themselves, "Gee, I really want more of Sisko sitting around thinking about how worried he is," but that's exactly what we get here. Ad nauseam. It may be realistic that Sisko does nothing to find Rebecca in the flashback while a trained investigator works on it... but that kind of realism is not what I read Star Trek books for! Seriously, he's barely in the flashbacks, it all focuses on some investigator lady who I assume must have been in earlier books but whom I did not remember at all. Like, what's the point of this? It just goes on and on and on. Also, at at least one point, the frame narrative deflates the flashback by telling us something about it before we actually get to see it (p. 142). C'mon, why do this? In theory, Sisko is the active character in the present-day narrative, but it also feels like little happens here. The kids are kidnapped, the Robinson crew putzes around a lot, they rescue the kids, the end. No plot twists, no character development, no interesting worldbuilding. The whole thing is incredibly linear and dull. Thematically, there doesn't seem to be anything going on, there's just people doing stuff... but why? The original Mission: Gamma novels (see below) largely managed to explore interesting alien cultures and tell gripping character stories, but this does neither. Other Notes: Am I supposed to parse this as a book called Gamma: Original Sin? Or a book called Original Sin in a subseries called Gamma that only lasted one installment? Or was this supposed to be book five of Mission: Gamma but someone screwed up? (This is, after all, the era where Section 31 and The Lost Era were revived for further installments, a decade on.) Are the crew of the Robinson the least interesting "leads" to ever grace the pages of a Star Trek book? Deep Space Nine Overall: Other than a Cardassia-focused Una McCormack book, this is our last Deep Space Nine novel. As someone who found the original sequence of DS9 relaunch novels from Avatar to Unity one of the best things Star Trek fiction has ever done, I have found the sequence from Rough Beasts of Empire to here one of the worst. All the characters have been dispersed, many of them eliminated, others changed to the point of unrecognizability. The characters never seem to do anything except think about the past, slowly; ongoing plots are doled out so slowly as to become profoundly tedious. I really like how Alvaro Zinos-Amaro puts it in his review of the novel for the late, lamented Tor.com: The sequence in which the Robinson is encased in null space is neat, but it sticks in my mind as a microcosm of the relaunch series itself at this point. We’re in uncharted waters, but seem to have become adrift in a kind of oblivion, with too many recent books expending significant effort on filling in previous gaps in the chronology and slowly crawling us back into the “normal space” of present time, rather than boldly pushing the story forward. Or as our own @David cgc once put it, "'When are the[y] going to get to the fireworks factory?!' ... [T]he answer turned out to be 'never.'" But worst of all is surely the handling of Sisko. The trajectory of the original show was to take a guy who was uncomfortable with this alien planet and its society and to show him slowly becoming part of it. He began a Starfleet officer and ended up the Emissary. (I have my issues with Sisko in "What You Leave Behind," but this was not one of them.) Post-Destiny, this was entirely undone. He totally abandons Bajor, he becomes a guy obsessed with exploration. Why? Nothing about this captures what made the character appealing in his original run. Fundamental to the way I think about Sisko is something Michael Piller says in the Deep Space Nine Companion: Picard is the explorer, but Sisko is the builder. But the Sisko of the books builds nothing: not a planet, not a station, not even his own family. I don't think David R. George understands Sisko at all and if there is any saving grace to the abrupt cutting off of the DS9 novels with so many threads unresolved, it's that I don't have to keep reading about this boring character masquerading as Sisko. And that brings a somewhat belated end to this batch of five; sorry, reading Hugo finalists took over as my priority. BOOKS REMAINING: 11 ESTIMATED DATE OF NEXT BATCH: January 2025 ESTIMATED DATE OF COMPLETION: November 2025
I just figured something was going to happen with the giant wormhole-making-scaffold built by God disguised as a moon, and it was probably going to be good. But now we’ll never know and in hindsight, even if the climax had been pretty neat, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to balance all the build-up.
I believe so, yes -- a "pilot" for a series focusing on Sisko exploring the Gamma Quadrant. Odd choice of description, since you linked to the article's current home at Reactor. The site isn't "late," just renamed and supposedly "upgraded," though I certainly lament the terrible, clunky new site software that makes it much more difficult to use.
I mean, the site called Tor.com is dead, yes? Even if it has been, stupidly, replaced by a new site called Reactor.
The format and software of the site are gone, but the articles it contained are not. It's the same contents in a new (very badly designed) container, therefore not dead, simply transplanted.
If this isn't the beginning of the end of the site formerly known as Tor.com, I'll eat my hat. It's dead. Besides, I'm sure no one has ever said this to you before, but you're being overly pedantic about a throwaway joke.
No need to get ad hominem. I'm just trying to let people know that the site still exists and has plenty of new content they might want to check out -- for instance, the next post in KRAD's Babylon 5 rewatch will go live in a few hours (it's Walter Koenig's debut episode this week!). I don't want anyone reading this thread to worry that the site has gone away. It's true that I hate the current format of Reactor, but I prefer to err on the side of optimism and hope the technical flaws can be fixed. There's still plenty of worthwhile new content on the site, so it's premature to declare it dead. After all, Tor.com went through several previous software "upgrades" that always made things worse (though none so drastically awful as this one), but the site continued to thrive. No reason to embrace a negative outcome before it actually happens.
I liked this one! I find it hard to disagree with your assessment of DRG3's flaws, you're not wrong about any of them, but his writing has a certain weight to it that I think makes the big moments more powerful. When it's working. (A lot of disclaimers there; he's admittedly not my favorite. But when it works...) Like: I thought Serpents Among the Ruins was excellent, and it really isn't so much a story as one big long introspective weight added to a single ending plot twist, almost like a punchline. But: that big long introspective weight made that plot twist land, and I thought that was a unique experience to get from a book. I had the same experience here. Zooming out, a lot of the book took a long time getting where it was going and there weren't many main characters, but the weight of the buildup made the reveal about Rebecca feel huge, in a way it wouldn't have if it had been tossed off in a novel full of other stuff. I finally felt like Rebecca was important, the way the initial relaunch books promised. Hanging the story off of that worked for me; the dual climaxes of the two stories hitting the point home hard. As a piece of an ongoing narrative it felt grand in a way I found quite appealing. After a lot of his books meandering pretty much nowhere, maybe I was grading on a curve, but I thought this was his best in a while.
There are a lot of early DRG3 novels I really enjoyed: The 34th Rule, Twilight, Serpents among the Ruins, Provenance of Shadows. (Or at least, I remember enjoying them; I don't know if I'd take them the same way at age 38 as I did at ages 14-21. My tastes in fiction have definitely changed in what has in some cases been over half a lifetime!) I probably was doing the opposite of grading on a curve, like when you've read so many bad student essays that your reaction to the next one is to be grumpy and nitpick. Having read eight DRG3 novels during this project that ranged from mediocre to dull to misconceived, I was never going to go into this predisposed to find what worked... though the seemingly interminable prologue about a Ohalavaru cultist didn't help win me over.
I got maybe... thirty-ish pages in to Original Sin and decided that I had better things to do and just moved on. I mean, I read it at a time I already had Coda waiting, so I knew that if there were any plot threads begun here, they’d go nowhere anyway, so it was all the easier, knowing that it would not have any real impact. But yeah, I agree about how he does not seem to understand Benjamin Sisko - not just does he set up the character to in many ways functionally reexperience the experiences and trauma that brought him to DS9, but then make the absolute opposite choices of before for no apparent reason. At one point, it even felt like he really just didn't even seem to care about the characters of DS9, especially the initial cast from the novels, aside from Vaughn (who he dragged out the death of and STILL didn't seem like letting the character go, even though he was the one who wrote in Vaughn's death). I noticed it when I reread Twilight... He doesn't really seem to give any care to how Prynn felt about the estrangement with her father, or even much of her trauma - that book opens with Vaughn being certain she'd been killed in an attack on the Defiant, and has him agonize over it for some time, while Prynn never gets any focus on the subject, how she feels about nearly dying. Then we don't really get much exploration of her point of view of Vaughn's absence in her life,up until the point that he decides to give them an emotional resolution to things. Then that goes in to her use in post-Destiny, where she does pretty much nothing but sit by his bedside until he dies, then an occasional pop in to her doing something that just establishes that she is there, rather than having anything to do in the story. Then there's Counselor Matthias, who'd been growing into a more major role over the course of the Mission Gamma novels (after his entry...), but then also drops off the map. There's also Vedek Yevir, Gul Macet, Treir, and even Opaka, who's return was this major thing for Bajor, considering this is the Kai who helped them through the Occupation, who was thought dead and is returned to them, and who'd even seemed to suggest that she'd be involved in some way with things with the Ascendants, and yet is a total non-entity. Hell, for all that he brought O'Brien back (while seeming to not give much thought or attention to his family), O'Brien never even DID much that necessitated him in that role. In some ways, it seemed like he was there to keep Nog in a subordinate position, even though by this point in time, Nog had already been in his role for years. And the way he wrote Cenn out felt like he just didn't want to deal with the character, especially by making this character who'd never served on DS9 during the Occupation have trouble more than a decade and a half after the end of the Occupation not thinking of the station commander's office as "the prefect's office." These were characters who made up the extended cast of DS9 prior to his takeover, and it feels like he set about writing out or diminishing them to the point of nothing... And while he put characters into those roles after taking over, the characters he did create all just felt like position fillers, having little characterization or just repeating the same beats, over and over. To say nothing of his handling of Kira, which felt like it suffered the same issues of his handling of Sisko, particularly when he was given the chance to go back in and lay groundwork during Ascendance, but instead gave the impression of trying to convince the reader that the groundwork was already there, trust him. As disappointed as I was in the great continuity reset mandated by canon, for the sake of DS9 and the characters there, I genuinely felt relief that he was no longer the one charting the course for them, because I feel like he and I had a massive disparity in how we viewed these characters, and I am pleased to see other writers get more opportunities to write them going forward.
You and @Christopher already hashed this out, but speaking as one of the regular writers for Reactor, everything you say in these posts is wrong and insulting. Tor.com was renamed to something that isn't a URL (that's a holdover from trends when the site was created in the late aughts, but which has fallen out of favor for good reason) and something that doesn't make people think it's part of Tor Books, which it isn't. It's not dead, it's just been renamed and redesigned. Posts are getting the same number of comments (or more) than they did before the redesign, so I hope your hat is tasty, and I want video footage of you eating it.
This is honestly good to hear, Keith. The rebranding to Reactor struck me as the kind of thing one does either 1) because the site is failing and you need a Hail Mary pass, or 2) because someone needlessly interferes in what was working, and therefore makes it not work. I do have to say it seems weird and backwards that the web site doesn't have "dot-com" in its name, but the not-a-web-site publishing imprint still does.
Nope, not a Hail Mary at all. The redesign was going to happen regardless -- I don't share Christopher's dislike of the redesign, but I'm not 100% thrilled with it, either -- and they took advantaqe of the opportunity to also do a rebranding that most of the people working there felt was long overdue.
My issue is not with the aesthetics of the redesign (though I've seen multiple people with vision issues complain that the font in comments is far too small), but with the terrible functionality. The new software makes it almost impossible to link directly to new, unread comments in a thread, so you have to scroll through and search for them one by one. There's no easy way to keep track of the comment threads you personally participate in like there was on the old site. If you stay too long on a page before trying to post a comment, the comment won't go through and you have to copy it, reload the page, and paste it in in order to post it. The search function is next to useless, ordering hits chronologically so that you have to sift through a dozen pages of results to find the one you specifically looked for. There's this bizarre "Verify you are human" security page when you visit that often doesn't even work, just sticking you in a loop of verify pages that never let you through to the actual site, so you have to go away and try again later. The site often randomly fails to keep me logged in. The option for flagging comments seems to appear and disappear at random, along with the "My Comments" option in one's personal profile. The tech people managed to fix a few of the early problems, but the rest have continued without improvement for months now. Steve may have jumped the gun in declaring the site dead, but I'm afraid these problems will drive many people away if they don't get fixed soon.
Yes, it was getting a bit broad strokes by the end in terms of parallel books referencing each other. Possibly as a result of too busy publishing schedules? I would have liked more wrap up on the TNG books for several characters. Maybe even an outright passing of the torch moment, for some, prior Coda? As for the Preservers - I often see it as more a generalized title, with possibly several groups across history fulfilling the role? Perhaps bound more by a looser tradition. And Federation science has yet to fully distinguish all of them. Obvious flexibility meantime available, with terms like 'going theory' of course. As for the Prometheus trilogy - I have (so far) skipped the middle book. Did I miss very much?
Another break, not what I had hoped for But what a wonderful deconstruction of why DRG's books post Destiny just didn't work, in general. I also wish he had not run away from here after Rough Beasts and the legitimate & bruising criticism he got; I worry that that reaction led him in many ways to double down on bad ideas - ideas which seemed to really misconstrue the characters we were unlucky enough for him to focus on. However, with DRG, I do feel there was also a real editorial failure, following Destiny - how could the editor have faith in DRG - producing a series of interminably dull novels that just never worked? Did no one else want to tackle the station really? Was the editor genuinely happy with these books? Was it George's past glories that enabled him to get away with such overwritten dull works? Sorry to sound cross, but it just is so frustrating to remember these books, and the total failure they presented versus the original relaunch
Though there have been many excellent Trek books since Marco Palmieri was laid off in '08, I think the difference between the Trek line from like '01-'08 compared to '09-afterwards is a pretty excellent case study in the power of a good editor. I think just about all of the prolific Trek authors of the last 20 years wrote their best stuff under Marco. Maybe only Una McCormack and Kirsten Beyer really maintained their level of quality after he left. DRG is maybe the strongest example of this; though he was a bit uneven before the transition, Marco got Twilight and Serpents Among the Ruins and Provenance of Shadows out of him. Nothing after Marco left was that strong. But the bigger loss was in the long-term strategic thinking. After Marco left, the DS9 relaunch never really came back together, Titan sort of slowly lost its unique identity, there started to be big plot threads that just got ignored... A lot of individual novels have been good, but that sense of cohesion and direction never came back after his departure. I still wonder what we would've gotten if Pocket hadn't let him go.
Oh boy, am I going to get flamed for this, but.... I loved what DRGIII did with Rough Beasts... and onward. Original Sin was not so great, I'll admit that. But I was ok with why he chose to go with the path he decided for Sisko. The man was troubled, always was. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of PTSD and trauma would be deep in his core if he was every evaluated in real life. According to fight/flight/fright and the almost disturbing attachments of deep love he establishes with those around him, it's not odd that he would choose to leave his family during the turmoil he was going through. It seems Niners are forgetting he did the exact same fucking thing when Jadzia died. So many of his emotional resposnes through out DS9 have always been over the top and intense. And people find it weird that he went to such extremes to do what he felt was right...... Like basically nuking Maquis colonies..... Which happened during the show. Many of the character traits DRGIII went with for Sisko are all established in the show itself. People just wanted him to be a Godlike superhero after his stay with the Prophets. But no.... He experienced non-linear time for literally both a second AND for eternity. And than became human again. But sure, he's just going to live a normal life know. Going back to Starfleet was an esape. He admitted that. But he also found grounding their afterwards. And as an adult couple capable of communication, something that took a lot of hard work and effort for both of them, he and Kassidy decided that the Robinson was a good place to be as a family.