Hello everyone! I was considering picking back up on the DS9 Relaunch. I gave up on it when I started reading "Rough Beasts of Empire." I found really depressing and boring. But I have seen that the series has continued on pretty consistently and I've enjoyed every OTHER David R George novel but "Rough Beasts." Should I give it a go? Is it worth my time, effort, and money? And if I do, where do I go next? Thanks for the input!
Speaking as a guy who loves at least one DS9R character enough that he decided to honor said character in his internet pseudonym, I would have to say yes. Rough Beasts was also depressing for me.
"RBoE" was very divisive amongst the board. Since then it has served more to serve the greater Typhon Pact storylines than it's own, so it's not what it was before. That being said, the next entry on the series by David R George "Plagues of Night/Raise the Dawn" 2-parter is a much better read, and where i would next head.
Let me put it this way: When DRGIII's Plagues of Night/Raise the Dawn came out, a lot of people who had been down on Rough Beasts of Empire revised their opinion of that book.
I loved RBoE from the get-go, but did see this happen as well after PoN/RtD. It's one of those novels that truly work in a greater story. I think that RBoE was supposed to be depressing and sad, so show that sometimes people go through harsh times before things get better. It's not something we like, but it's true of life. Something that's a bit of a trend I feel in DRGIII's writing.
Rough Beasts is great - so are Plagues of Night and Raise the Dawn. Together, this trilogy is amongst my very favourite Treklit.
I still think RBoE was a mess, but the duology was a major step in the right direction. The time jumps the DS9R (if you can still call it that) are getting really long though. Five years between the end of the Ghemor arc and RBoE, and then another two years after the duology we get to The Fall.
Well, to nitpick slightly, Revelation begins two years after the event at the end of Plagues. The end of Dawn was another six months or so after that. So it's only 18 months later, not two years. Which is kind of a distinction without a difference when you don't know what happened either way. I think we kind of just have to assume that nothing of interest happened, at least for the regular DS9 crew. They were working on the new station, settling into their base on Bajor, doing the day-to-day. But, if I understand correctly, Brinkmanship, The Stuff of Dreams and the Cold Equations trilogy all take place within that gap. .
I have to disagree with the others. If you don't like Rough Beasts, I don't think you'll like the next two books in the series either. You could try jumping forward to The Fall; though I thought that DRG's book had its own problems, they were at least different from the prior three.