DS9: Warped by K.W. Jeter Review Thread (spoilers)

Next round of the Classic Review threads, this time a pre-continuity novel. This one always created some strong opinions, so I'm really curious how it will do in the ranking.

DS9: Warped by K.W. Jeter



Blurb:
Political tensions on Bajor are once again on the rise, and the various factions may soon come to open conflict. In addition, a series of murders has shaken everyone on board the station. While Security Chief Odo investigates the murders, Commander Sisko finds himself butting up against a new religious faction that plans to take over Bajor and force the Federation to leave Deep Space Nine.

Odo soon traces the murders to a bizarre and dangerous form of holosuite technology--a technology that turns it's users into insane killers and now threatens Sisko's son, Jake. As the situation on Bajor deteriorates, Sisko learns that the political conflict and the new holosuites are connected. Both are the work of a single dangerous man with a plan that threatens the very fabric of reality.

The plot is darker than anything Sisko has faced before, and to defeat it, he must enter the heart of a twisted, evil world where danger lurks in every corner and death can come at any moment--from the evil within himself, from his closest friends, or even at the hands of his own son.

___________________________________________________________________

My review from 2005 (the last time I read the novel):

This book is a total waste of Paper and other resources.

Everyone who finishes this story definitely deserves some kind of award. I could summarize my review in one word : CRAP ! But I try to write at least a little bit more for you.

Normally I find at least one thing I like about a story, but not here. First of all, I doubt that the author has ever watched an episode of Deep Space Nine or Star Trek in general at all, because seeing this novel I would assume he wrote it based on a one paragraph synopsis of the series. The characterizations doesn’t fit for any of the characters, the background information and references to episodes aren’t accurate and generally the story just hasn’t the right feeling.
The story itself is one big piece of irrational and screwed up mysticism mixed up with implausible techno babble. The shown holotechnology maybe even could have been a starting point for a slightly interesting story, but not in the form it is presented here. A better way would have been if K.W. Jeter had focused on the psychological effects of the technology and left out the Bajor political plot and the whole McHogue plot disaster. One thing I ask myself how a story like this could go through both the editors and Paramount’s hands and still be published in this form.

Overall this is one of the Books where the reader should be paid, not the author.

 

Uh yeah, this was the first book to be pulled out for the newly opened used book store.

There should be a rating worse than poor for this book!

I don't even remember the story but still remember how much I disliked this book after finishing it and never read it again.

Next.

 

I didn't think it was that bad as a story per se; if it had been an original novel, it could've been fairly interesting. But one does generally expect a media tie-in novel to feel like it belongs in the reality of the franchise it's tying into, and Warped just doesn't. Star Trek has always been an essentially rationalist universe where everything that happens has a theoretically rational scientific explanation, even if the science is fanciful in real-world terms. But Warped is more in the vein of the surreal, reality-bending fiction of Philip K. Dick -- understandably, since Dick was a friend of K.W. Jeter and a major influence on Jeter's work. The idea of a story about a virtual-reality technology in which the lines between virtual and actual reality become blurred is right up PKD's alley (in fact, he wrote at least one such story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," better known as the inspiration for Total Recall). But it just doesn't fit in the Trek universe. Trek's reality has occasionally been mutable, but usually under the influence of superbeings like Q or anomalous physical realms as in TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "Remember Me." It's not something that would just spontaneously happen because holodecks create existential uncertainty or whatever. That's the stuff of what I guess you'd call magic realism, and that's not Trek's genre.

Along the same lines, there's the bit where Sisko gets a mystical vision of Kai Opaka communicating with him from the other end of the galaxy. There's no explanation even attempted for how such a thing is possible. It's one more thing that fits the fantasy or magic-realist genre better than the loose but essentially rationalist SF of Trek.

 

To me, this fits in perfectly well with the whole Prophets idea in DS9. Part of the reason I have a general dislike of DS9 is the mysticism. Stuff happens because The Prophets want it to happen. No rational explanation.

 

^Except the show clearly explains the "Prophets" as extradimensional aliens who reside in a realm outside of linear time, a completely rational scientific explanation for their ability to see what we consider the future. Although, granted, the later seasons did change them into something more conventionally mystical and godlike.

 

I haven't read the book, so I'm only working from your description. But why wouldn't that be a good enough reason for Kai's mystical communication, too? It's not like Sisko didn't have other mystical communications in the TV show.

 

^Sure, and if the book had offered an explanation for how it happened, that would be okay. My point is that it didn't treat it as something that needed to be explained. It just gave her an unprecedented and unexplained ability to do something incredible and made no attempt to justify it; it was just there, a bit of random and unquestioned magic.

 

Gotcha. So it didn't even try using the handwavium of The Prophets. I guess that would be pretty bad.

 

I've never read it, but his Star Wars novels were unreadable.

 

Luckily it looks like he only wrote a couple of Star Trek novels and only three Star Wars novels.

Of course, this one came out at the height of what I like to call the shovelware era. They were shoveling Star Trek novels out the door so fast it didn't even have time to close. Many of them, maybe most of them were forgettable at best. The others were more like this one. It definitely wasn't the best time for Star Trek literature.

I guess I'll make certain I never get around to reading this one.

- Byron

 

I know I read a big chunk of Warped on the flight back from a vacation in Amsterdam but I have no memory of the actual content.

I liked his other ST book, Bloodletter. It was #3 and if I remember correctly I think some of the plot elements came from notes in the writers bible that didn't actually make it into the show. Like warp engines needed to be shielded while going through the worm hole. Maybe that was another book, it's been a long time.

 

I liked this - and I liked his star wars books. This had a sense of creeping horror throughout which I loved.

As I said last time this book was mentioned though, it's not really star trek, so I don't really feel comfortable calling it a great 'trek book, so I give it an average. Reminds me a bit of the feeling I had reading Shadow Lord.

 

After Warped, there wasn't another DS9 novel until Unity in 2003.

 

I think you missed the word hardcover somewhere in your sentence.

 

how dare you forget the great ds9 hiatus so easily

 

Jake's nightmare holoprogram appears to have been lifted from "Ender's Game", with elements of Philip K Dick's ouevre thrown in for good measure. This novel was just plain weird - not a patch on "Bloodletter".

Edited to apologise for the overly technical criticism. I should have said this novel was "just weird"!

 

I read this book once years ago and I didn't care for the story or how the DS9 characters were written in this book.

 

We have finally covered this book on Literary Treks!

 

I've wanted to read this one forever, since I tend to enjoy books others scorn here. And messy clusterfucks. I'll get around to it one day...