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

I like a lot of the ideas that come up in his books, but he's largely hit or miss for me. I kind of wish there were other writers involved in the 'main story' for DS9.

 

Seems to be the trend at the moment to have single author series.

Dayton Ward has done the last few TNG novels; Kirsten Beyer is doing Voyager and Christopher Bennett is doing Enterprise.

 

I haven't read any of DRGIII's stuff since the first The Fall book, but I did find that one a huge drop in quality from pretty much everything he'd written before that. From most of what I've seen on here, it seems like that drop pretty much continues. I have to wonder what happened between his Typhon Pact books, which I still enjoyed a lot, and The Fall.

 

Revelation and Dust was hampered by being part of the Fall series. Ascendance was particularly excellent.

 

A lot of things contribute to my opinion of DS9's downfall under DRGIII. After finally getting back into DS9 proper, the destruction of the station was really hard on the story. I felt like a lot of things that made the previous era of DS9 books great were largely missing. A lot of his books, while well written, just kind of become really long bouts of table setting and trying to create an entirely new world for these characters to play in. Some of his work can be painfully descriptive with very little happening. I mean, I'm fine with a plot that is slower or more sensitive, but I expect the characters to have great arcs and development on a personal scale. Pretty much my entire experience with DS9-II has been hearing about everything on it in painful detail, and I still imagine it as the original station.

But, then when the story is progressing, the last few books of his were all just tying up loose ends. Ending the Ascendants story, the EvenOdds disaster, bringing Kira back, and now Rebecca's kidnapping. We've seen the outcome for all these stories already and the setting in which they take place in have all moved on. I know it can't be helped when there was that pesky time jump, but we spend exactly half the time reading his new books experiencing something that we've seen the results for, and the other half actually moving forward. While it's nice to finally get the answers to the question of those stories, its been years since those questions have been asked. So DS9 moves forward at a crawl and I think that greatly impacts them.

Then there is the problem with DS9 characters. Tenmei, Shar, Vaughn, and Ro were so seamlessly added into DS9 relaunch I have a hard time remembering they weren't on the TV show. Now, all have been either sidelined, transferred to crossover-stories only, killed, or turned two-dimensional. Instead we have a whole new set of senior officers who are bland as bland or have really obvious and quick story arcs (I'm looking at you, Desca). Blackmer, Slaine, Stinson, and Candlewood. Anyone else have a hard time remembering their names?

But again, I like a lot of the ideas present (aside from the whole Kira, Falsework, and Altek storylines; they're not working for me and have been the most uninteresting part of new DS9). I just wish they had all come out chronologically and not in flashback or time travel form. It's made DS9 just very, very confusing,

 

I must say, it’s probably been close to a month since I last read anything from this novel, and really, I have no desire to finish it.

 

Because it's what's always been done and it's the polite thing to do. Stop trying to start something that doesn't need to be started.

 

Yeah, Ascendance was strong.

I think a large part of the problem for me has been, lately, his books' tendency to feel like smaller pieces of longer novels. Not serialized as much as... incomplete. I bet reading Revelation and Dust, Sacraments of Fire, Ascendance, and The Long Mirage all right in a row would be much more awesome than reading them separately.

 

I'm having a déjà vu...

 

I fixed that for you.

 

I have to agree with the sentiment that it's time for the DS9 novels to move away from the A/B plots of Present/Filling in the Time Jump. I feel like the best approach to relaunching the DS9 relaunch novels would have been to do something like Voyager's second relaunch, Full Circle, and covered the major events of 2377-2381 (Post-Soul Key, Pre-Rough Beasts of Empire) in one or two novels before the Typhon Pact series was launched.

But we can be armchair publishers all we want when we have the benefit of hindsight.

 

Well, at this point, all of the gap is covered now pretty much, right? I must say I am super excited for stories that don't have to be past/present.

 

I seem to recall a Marco Palmieri-edited book establishing that 24th-century hand phasers no longer had a vaporize setting for ethical reasons or something, to explain why TNG-era shows didn't use the vaporization effect much. Well, I guess that policy could've been changed back after the Borg Invasion or something.

 

I always thought that 24th century phasers just had multiple levels of stun and kill, with the highest kill settings being the ones that would vaporize, like we saw Riker do in “The Gathering”, where he finally had to vaporize Yolanda.

 

Do you mean Yuta in "The Vengeance Factor"?

Anyway, I tracked down the origin of the "no disintegrations" idea. It's in Heather Jarman's story "The Devil You Know" in Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change, on p. 252-3 of the trade paperback edition. Bashir talks about how "not all that long ago," Starfleet phasers could dematerialize their targets, and once Starfleet realized that such "clean" disintegrations wtih no visible consequences to deal with afterward made people more likely to shoot to kill, so they removed the setting. I was made aware of it because phaser/disruptor disintegration was a plot point in my own P&C story "...Loved I Not Honor More," and Marco tweaked a line in my story to specify that it applied to old-style phasers, so it wouldn't contradict Heather's story.

As I said, I think this was an in-story rationalization for the fact that TOS tended to use disintegration heavily while the TNG-era shows did not, because censorship standards were stricter in the '60s so there was more incentive to show "clean" deaths that left no bodies.

 

Yeah I was thinking of Yuta from Vengeance. But with the disintegration, it just seemed like it only occurred on the highest setting (plus if you needed to remove an object, like a boulder, the disintegration would be better than blowing it up in a confined space).
Also, the Borg weren’t disintegrated when Worf set his phaser to the high kill levels.

 

In sci-fi terms, yeah, but realistically, complete disintegration/vaporization would be about as blowy-uppy as you could get short of direct conversion of matter to energy. After all, instant vaporization is what an explosion is in the first place -- solid or liquid is turned to gas, which has a much larger volume, so it has to expand outward really fast and really forcefully. I actually used "...Loved I Not Honor More" to explain why phaser/disruptor disintegration didn't cause explosions, and that explanation was a central plot point in the story.

Discovery is trying to split the difference, it seems. Its visual effect for Klingon disruptors is a messy-looking disintegration as if the body is blown apart in a burst of green vapor, but there's none of the blast-wave effect on the surrounding environment that there'd realistically be if that happened.

 

Aside from 45 minutes of episode uno, I haven’t watched Discovery yet.

 

That's 45 minutes more than I saw, because I didn't keep track of the (multiply postponed, as I recall) broadcast airing thereof.

As to disintegration, well, obviously Riker's disintegration of Yuta, being unquestionably canonical, means that there are exceptions to Jarman's (unquestionalby non-canonical) assertion, assuming we don't dismiss it outright as pure bovine scat.