Spoilers DS9: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III Review Thread

I got carried away in my response. I know you like to gently rib as you said yourself, but mis-interpreted it. That is totally my bad. If it's cool with you, I'd like to call it a coming together of bad interpretations on my end. If not, I'm also totally cool with taking it up in private chat and you and me coming to an understanding.

 

Apology accepted.

 

I don't think the DTI would be applicable in the case of RS.

 

Why not?

Spoiler

She seems to be quite capable of reaching back into the near-past, and changing what has already happened.

 

The way she described it in the epilogue, it seems more like it's not that she changes the past, but rather that she pulls herself and other nearby (or connected?) people into another timeline a la Parallels where things happened differently.

Still, the DTI does still seem to cover alternate timelines judging by the alternate Vard from WTC, so I think they'd still cover that situation too.

 

Still working my way through this! I haven't had a lot of time to read lately. I am largely enjoying this book. But it really, really makes me wish for things that I cannot have. It pains me that this isn't two separate books, that the 2380 portions of the book hadn't been released back then as its own standalone story. Moreso than that, I'd LOVE it if the 2386 portions were expanded to its own book where we could get to know Sisko's crew. It's become somewhat of a staple in DS9 to go back and forth in the timeline to fill in those timeline gaps, but I feel like its weakening the overall saga of the series. I hope now that things seem to be pretty filled out, we can get some more GAMMA books in the future that get to shine on their own.

Side note: I really enjoy the tidbits of science explanations in the 2386 section.

 

Hmm. This reminds me of an old Starlog piece, not long after the first Back to the Future movie. It postulated another Marty McFly coming home to a timeline in which his brand new truck had morphed into a skateboard, his affluent family had joined the ranks of the working poor, his mother was an alcoholic, and the toadying Biff had become his father's domineering boss.

Spoiler

If Rebecca had jumped into a timeline in which she'd been saved from the nutjob who was trying to blow her up, and then later jumped into a timeline in which she'd been saved from having her consciousness transferred into a bizarre quasi-mechanical construct, wouldn't the Rebeccas native to those timelines be a little miffed about it?

 

And did I miss any explanation for why none of the Glant can remember when they had organic bodies? They seem to have no idea what mind transfer really entails.

 

I don't think she's changing timelines. I think she 'resets' our to a point before the bad thing happened. She's non linear. To her, there's no changing time, because it's all the same. She just figures 'I don't like that this happens, let's go back to before it did and not let it happen'.

 

I haven't read the book yet, but I don't see how she could just be jumping to a different timeline, because none of the other characters in the Prime timeline would be aware of that. Whatever bad thing she "undid" would still be true in Prime, and we'd just be following her adventures through entirely different timelines, adventures that could have no connection to anything else in the novel continuity.

 

Very curious what you do think of it if/when you read it.

 

Finished the audiobook today. Just average from me. It just never caught fire for me; not bad, but not something I’m ever likely to revisit.

 

Phew, it's a three book month so this is coming a little later than I hoped! My review of Original Sin for TrekCore is now live:

http://trekcore.com/blog/2017/10/book-review-star-trek-ds9-gamma-original-sin/

 

Finished! I voted average. I really enjoyed the stories, and it was nice to finally fill in the gap of Rebecca's disappearance. Been a big fan of the reserved and cool Jasmine Tey in previous books, so to have her backstory complete was probably the most enjoyable part of the book for me.

But overall, yeah, this was average for me. It's taken so long to get Rebecca's first kidnapping story covered, and while the story was good and reasonably compelling, it wasn't blow-me-out-of-my-seat suspenseful to make up for the huge amount of time it took to get here. I feel similarly about the Ascendant storyline. I get that it's a product of the situation with the timeline shuffling of the books, it's just too bad that something like that adversely effects the impact of the stories.

As for Rebecca and her abilities, it doesn't sound like jumping to different/potential timelines at all to me. It seems more like she is creating an AGT style anti-time explosion which throws her consciousness backwards to an earlier point within her own relative timeline. The explosion is detected as it ripples backwards, but the detection itself then changes the course of events which then gets Rebecca rescued, and thus prevents the explosion from happening.

Then it's not so much her going back in time to change her future. She literally creates a temporal explosion powerful enough to be retroactively detected in the past, which happen to work in her favor in both instances. In doing so, somehow her consciousness is also sent back, as she seems to retain her previous memories. All that stuff about leaving markers sounds more like a kids rational of what she's experiencing, and I don't really take it literally based on what we saw from the outside perspective.

 

Voted Below Average on this one. First time in a while I've rated any of the novels lower than Average, but this one just never came together for me.

I felt that the two story structure, even though the stories had a certain resonance with one another, really weakened the book overall. They both wound up getting short shrift. The 2380 story would have been problematic anyway, given that we knew the outcome in advance. I'm pretty sure it had already been mentioned somewhere that Jasmine Tey was the one who rescued Rebecca and formed a subsequent bond with her. I also didn't find Radovan a particularly compelling character, so those parts just felt a bit uninteresting to me. I did find the descriptions of Rebecca's viewpoint of the events to be quite good, but there wasn't that much of that.

Similarly, it felt like there just wasn't that much to the 2386 story, either. It took too long to really get going, and parts were too predictable. I had figured out what the Glant were doing with the children long before Sisko did, so it felt like it took forever for him to figure out something that seemed pretty obvious. I was also disappointed that there wasn't more exploration of who or what the Glant were exactly and why they had chosen to isolate themselves from other species. As someone else noted, they seemed awfully unaware of their own natures for beings that depended upon other organisms' own consciousnesses in order to reproduce.

Finally, I thought that Rebecca really was reversing time, not creating new timelines or jumping from one timeline to another. In trying to wrap my head around that, I decided it must be some sort of a localized effect, rather than the entire universe backing up in time and then moving forward again. The only two examples of it we got involved changes that went back only a few minutes, so it seemed like that would work. It probably doesn't hold up scientifically, but at least it gave me enough of an answer that I could keep on reading.

In the end, it felt like too much of the point of the book was the final revelation about Rebecca. Although that is significant, it seemed like a relatively small point to build an entire novel around.

I really wish we could get more authors involved in the main DS9 storylines and go back to the kind of tightly-plotted, intricately-woven books we were getting in the early relaunch. I know it's probably not realistic in today's economic times, but it's still what I'd like to see.

 

Late to finish. Is it Rebecca doing the time travel/jumping timelines, or is it the Prophets doing the actual displacements?

 

Hmmmm. There's a good question. Seems to me that her thoughts in the epilogue suggest she feels that she has control over what she did, but it also seems clear that her ability is somehow connected to the Prophets - either through the fact that she has some sort of genetic connection with them, or that they act on her behalf because of her identity as the Avatar.

 

I ain't totally clear given that Rebecca has no real understanding of the world.

 

Maybe the Prophets know her life and know when to intervene?