Spoilers DS9: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang Review Thread

Glad you enjoyed it, Reanok, and you and me, both, brother.

 

This constant jumping back and forth to random points in the timeline is getting old, but the book is great when I can keep it straight in my mind.

 

I personally found it an interesting narrative choice with each little jump backwards linked into the actual story in 2386. I didn't get confused either given that each time a change in timeframe occurred, there was sub-title that said it was "ex amount of time earlier."

 

The jumps in time in the narrative where one of the things I loved about this novel.

What interested me the most is, this novel lacked a lot of character development. It was there, but it was not the base of the story. We simply saw the Chief and Nog as we know them best, and that worked so well. They connected a bit more, but by the end of this, nothing fundamentally changed about them. We just experienced the events with them, and I liked that, a lot.

Ginger and Honey..... You know, I HATE spiders. I can tolerate small ones, but big ones.... Nope. And yet, as freaked out as I was when we first met them, I came to really care for them. More then I thought. And that was my biggest personal surprise at the end of this novel, how Lang was capable of really anthropomorphize these two without a lot of big effort. Or, perhaps it was quite hard for him to get there, but he makes it look so easy.

Ben Maxwell. Not sure what to make of him after all of this. I guess that's kinda the point though, isn't it? I do like how mr Lang always has a way of making 24th century humans appear damaged without them going completely bonkers. Nicely done.

I liked it. Perhaps nothing Earth shattering when it comes to galactic events in the 24th century. But a good read. A very good read.

 

I hope his idea will come to fruition!

 

Thought I'd repost this, just to make sure everybody saw it and so I wouldn't have to ask it again somewhere else.

 

Haven't actually read FaM yet, so I don't know the official answer... However, given that he's 10+ years older and supposedly senior to Lt Cdr Nog so he's clearly had some sort of a promotion (as Nog should realistically be the Chief Engineering Officer, with O'Brien as the Chief of Operations/Engineering (co-ordinating/leading/training the repair teams as he did on DS9 I), possibly to something like Sector CMC or something (Similar to the MCPON being the protocol equivalent of a Vice Admiral, despite technically being outranked by rookie ensigns).

 

I think the new character I like the best is Commander Chao. I thought it it strange we didn't see any Phoenix crewmembers (come to think of it, we didn't even see its bridge) so this was a nice touch and giving O'Brien a connection to her was clever. I hope we see her again and I hope O'Brien kept trying to find her.

 

In Chapter 16 it is heavily implied that Bashir was present for the birth of Kirayoshi.
But I don't think this was the case. While we saw Bashir help with the birth of Kirayoshi in DS9 5th season episode "The Begotten" we find out later in the episode "In Purgatory's Shadow" that the real Bashir was actually captured by the Dominion earlier. [Bashir was captured wearing the old style of uniform, even though all the DS9 staff including the changling posing as Bashir in "The Begotten" had changed over to the new "First Contact" version of the uniform by the earlier episode "Rapture".] The Bashir that actually helped deliver Kirayoshi was a changling, not the real Bashir. So the real Bashir in this scene should not remember helping out with Kirayoshi's birth.
But then again, he was very drunk and may have not been thinking clearly.

 

You get a No-Prize. I completely forgot that Bashir was a Changling at that point. Thank you for providing an out. I shall assume that it is now the gospel truth should anyone ask: drunk and not thinking clearly.

 

You weren't the first to make that mistake, Jeffrey_Lang, if it can be called a mistake at all. Bashir claimed that he was present for the birth in Unity by SD Perry as well, as a way of proving to Kira that he wasn't possessed by a Trill/Kurl parasite.

And is the uniform definitely enough to establish exactly when he was taken? There is no dialogue on the matter, the uniform is the only clue. Maybe he forgot to take the new uniform with him to the conference, he has form on that ("Move Along Home"). Maybe it was just in the laundry. Because if Changeling!Bashir helped to deliver the baby in "The Begotten", then he also did the ultra-delicate brain surgery on Sisko in "Rapture".

Anyway, rather than only jump in when micro-trivia is at stake, I suppose I should also say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Maxwell was written wonderfully, and I could completely sympathise with O'Brien's discomfort with giant spiders.

I quite liked though that Nog thought they were cute - that fits with my own conjecture that Ferengi would like things that humans find horrifying, and vice versa. Furry animals like adorable kittens and puppies would completely freak Ferengi out. That's even why Ferengi policemen and DaiMons wear fur - to deliberately put people on edge.

.

 

I think it was established in DS9: Twilight that Vaughn and other late 23rd century starfleet officers had kept their old uniforms because they were more comfortable or something. Maybe something similar applies to early and late DS9 uniforms.

 

Indeed, the timeline doesn't really work out there. The uniform change was in "Rapture," and Bashir was supposedly abducted 37 days before the end of "By Inferno's Light." But there's no way that "Rapture," "The Darkness and the Light," "The Begotten," "For the Uniform," "In Purgatory's Shadow," and "By Inferno's Light" could've all taken place within less than 37 days. According to dialogue, "Darkness" is at least three weeks before "The Begotten," which in turn covers nearly 2 weeks. So that's at least 33 days right there, and the events of "For the Uniform" and the 2-parter cover about a week each, plus however much time might have elapsed between them. (Even if we assumed 26-hour Bajoran days, 37 of those is only 40 Earth days, so that doesn't help.) So Bashir must have been abducted after the uniform change; there's simply no other possibility. The fact that he's in the old uniform is a paradox.

On the other hand, it's stated in dialogue that Kirayoshi was born "less than a month" before "Purgatory." Since the 2-parter takes about a week, that pretty much requires that Bashir was abducted in between "The Darkness and the Light" and "The Begotten." That part can't be finessed, since the dialogue is explicit. On the one hand, Bashir had to be abducted after the uniform change, which creates a plot hole; but on the other hand, Kirayoshi had to be delivered by the changeling impostor, which creates a second plot hole. It's a total mess -- they just didn't think through the timeline carefully when they put in the date references.

But as for this part:

Since "Rapture" was significantly more than 37 days before the end of "Inferno," that means it was the real Bashir who did that.

 

Does Pocket Books no longer employ proofreaders and/or editors?

I'm in the process of reading this book now, in the middle of Chapter 2. I just read a sentence where "disbursed" was used, when "dispersed" was meant. These words sound similar, but have very different meanings.

What's up with this? I'm not surprised when I see errors like this in a self-published book or even one from a small, indie publisher, but there's no excuse for errors like this to make it into print in books from mainstream publishers.

Other than that, I'm enjoying the book so far. Hearing about what happened to Benjamin Maxwell is what attracted me to this book.

 

Well, yes, there is; it's literally impossible to catch all errors in any publication of any sort. Earlier in either this thread or some other thread I quoted a well-known statistic in programming that regardless of programming language, purpose of project, size of project, or number of eyes on the code, there are between 10 and 50 errors of some magnitude for every 1000 lines. Given that this is fairly consistent regardless of context, you can take it as a basic measure of human fallibility, and so it's likely universal in anything. (It's likely even higher in other contexts, in fact, given the number of errors that would prevent something from running, filtering out a number of such errors that would otherwise have been missed by those writing or reviewing the code. )

It doesn't matter how many editors you have on a book, something will always get through, because brains are just really good at internal auto-correcting based on expectation rather than fact. After all, how many people have posted in this thread already and no one else caught it until your post?

 

I don't buy that, because it was extremely rare for an error to make it all the way through all the steps of publishing a book to the finished product, especially for a first-level mainstream publishing house until around the turn of the century or so. In fact, it's only been since the advent of e-books that I've been seeing these errors in the final product. It's almost like the publishers are relying solely on spell check, rather than human proofreaders, because this error, and another I found in the following chapter (using "erstwhile", when the context of the sentence called for "aforementioned"), were not errors of spelling, but properly spelled words used in the wrong context.

I'm not criticizing the author, as everyone makes errors in the original writing process, but the current way publishing houses are run, which has made errors become more common in the final product in the last 15 years or so.

 

You've never seen an errata addendum for an older textbook? It's literally standard practice going back decades. And I don't mean "this thing we thought was true isn't", I mean "this was a mistake in the textbook and here is the correction".

 

Not "never", but far more rarely than now. Now, it's very common to see them. I'm guessing that publishing houses are trying to save money by cutting corners by employing fewer people on the proofreading and editorial staffs, probably don't take as much time preparing new books for publication as they did years ago, and rush them into print as soon as possible. In fact, if I were the author, I'd be pissed that they'd not taken sufficient time and care preparing my book for publication.

 

I don't see where this is worth getting that worked up over, mistakes happen, and sometimes stuff slips past people.

 

I'm not getting "worked up": I'm just having a conversation with Idran. Having opinions and disagreeing with others is surely permitted here.