I do find it interesting to compare my thoughts to the relevant review thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/tf-revelation-and-dust-by-drgiii-review-thread.223051/ There were some adamant defenders of the book when it came out. It got a little nasty! And some people in this thread have cooled on it since (e.g., @Thrawn), by my estimation.
I see I voted Average at the time and I think I remember I had similar thought as you did. The book was all reflection and repeating stuff we saw before, with little advancement or connection to the larger The Fall plot apart from the assassination. And that doesn't take up a lot of the story.
Yeah, very much so. In one instance where we disagree, I thought Raise the Dawn was just amazing. I felt DRG3 had earned some faith that he was going somewhere. And he did - but it turned out that almost all of Revelation and Dust is setup for a later arc of his own, not really the rest of The Fall. And by the time the next book in that arc came along, Sacraments of Fire, enough other DS9-adjacent books had happened that DRG3 spent most of that book on setup/recap also. The next actual climax in his DS9 tales, Ascendance, is awesome (at least I think so) but I don’t think it was worth two whole books of scene setting and summary. In hindsight, Revelation and Dust doesn’t amount to much and is a supremely awkward fit in The Fall as (aside from the obvious big event) most remaining books in the miniseries ignore almost all of what DRG3 is setting up, leaving those threads for much later.
The Fall: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack Published: October 2013 Time Span: 24 August–4 September 2385 "Make Cardassia great again!" If this sentence is ever actually uttered in The Crimson Shadow, I missed it; the back cover uses "restore Cardassia to its proper place and glory" which seem a bit unwieldy for a baseball cap. Despite being published in 2013, the book has clear echoes of populist movements like Brexit and Trumpism: a yearning for a better past which was actually not better than the present. Institutions designed for democracy are being co-opted for undemocratic purposes. It would be depressing if it wasn't for the fact that Una McCormack is able to see a way out of it all, but more on that in a bit. Just as Revelation and Dust was a Deep Space Nine novel de facto if not de jure, The Crimson Shadow has the Enterprise-E on the cover, and thus seems to be a Next Generation novel de facto. But like a lot of McCormack books, it actually feels like a novel, not a pale reflection of a tv episode. One of the things I really like about her approach is that she picks and chooses her viewpoint characters based on thematic relevance-- every character who we spend time with doesn't just advance the plot, but the ideas of the novel. This means several Enterprise characters don't really appear; the novel gives us the ones we need for the story being told: Picard, Šmrhová, and (in what turns out to be a great surprise, so don't read on if you mind spoilers) Glinn Dygan. On the other hand, we also get a significant storyline featuring Arati Mhevet, a senior investigator in the Cardassian constabulary. And, of course, Elim Garak. Together these characters create a tapestry of post-Dominion Cardassia, and a story about how to behave ethically in the face of institutional pressures to do otherwise. I really liked Mhevet. She's a cop in the new postwar Cardassian constabulary, one that tries to be answerable to the people-- not to the interests of power like prewar Cardassian institutions. But though she does her best, her complacency and short-sightedness do her in at first before her investigations kick into gear. I really liked every scene featuring her as she tries to navigate what is the right thing to do in some tricky situations where she is the only person trying to do right at all. But even when it seems like it's just her against the planet, she sees things through. There's a scene featuring her and Garak near the end that brings the whole novel into focus: Folding his hands around hers, he [Garak] gave her a steady, sky-blue look. "But you understand, don't you, that the institutions don't matter? The Obsidian Order, Central Command, the True Way, Starfleet, empires, unions, federations-- these are names and names only. They are tools. They count for nothing if the purpose is flawed. That was mistake for a long time-- confusing the purpose with the instrument. It took me a long time to learn the truth." "What is the truth?" "The truth?" Garak laughed, softly, as if he had never imagined that he would be asked such a question. "The truth is that the institution flourishes only when the people who comprise it flourish. And if the people are sick, the institution will be sick." He squeezed her hand. "If there's anything I could teach you, I'd teach you that." "I think I knew that. But I became complacent, or frightened, or something.... Whatever it was, I held myself back from what was going on." "Yes," he said, nodding, "that was your mistake, Arati. But it doesn't stop, you understand? It doesn't ever stop. We can never hold ourselves back." (267)Ostensibly this is about Mhevet, but it is also the idea underpinning the strands about Picard and Šmrhová. Cardassia is on the verge of seeing the Federation withdraw when President Bacco is assassinated over in Revelation and Dust, and the new interim Federation president is a Bajoran who is less kindly disposed toward Cardassia. He gives some orders that will cause harm to the planet and its standing: and Picard and Šmrhová both have to find ways to do good within an institution that inhibits their ability to do it. Šmrhová has been a regular character since Destiny, but like with Bowers in McCormack's Brinkmanship, this was the first time I felt she had a personality, as she takes the action she thinks is right-- violating a presidential order-- and in doing so saves the day. There's a great scene between her and Dygan at the end. Dygan is a serious young man, prone to overthinking everything. He has to participate in some awful stuff here, but he and Šmrhová find solace in each other: her being the Starfleet officer who doesn't think, and knows when to bend the rules, him being the career Cardassian officer who learned to know when his institutions were leading him astray. This is Una McCormack, so on top of all this thematic richness, there's of course Garak and Cardassia. McCormack does a great job of threading the needle with both of those, making them recognizable yet evolved at the same time. I loved a scene where a bunch of Cardassians get discomfited by the idea of peacefully rally. A bunch of people freely stating their opinions in public!? This is a proud people but a stubborn people, too; they are weighed down by their past instead of empowered by it. I also thought McCormack did a good job with the politics of it all, especially in the way Castellan Garan gets pushed into an untenable position. And yeah, Garak. His letters (picking up from A Stitch in Time) are a constant delight, as is his dialogue. McCormack nails his voice; the idea that he had a long-term friendship with Bacco is a great one, as is the way Garak expresses so much of himself through the discussion of literature. (Garak loving Austen isn't a thing I would have expected but it makes so much sense as soon as you are told it.) She even makes the idea of Garak becoming leader of Cardassia plausible! Well, kinda. I buy it from a character perspective; I don't quite buy that Cardassia would vote for a former Obsidian Order agent. But I think this will open up interesting avenues in the future, and I look forward to seeing its ramifications in future books. Like I said, this is a book that anticipated Brexit and Trumpism. But it also anticipated a way out: Cardassia cannot be made "great again" through its institutions. But it can be made great if its people are great, as long as a rose grows in the ruins and someone is willing to speak truth to power. This book is a moving, meaningful celebration of the Cardassian (and human) ability to stop, to say what must be done, and in doing so change both one's self and the world. Other Notes: There are just a lot of nice little touches in this book. The little kid informant with a voracious appetite that Mhevet rescues is one of them; I enjoyed how Šmrhová was punished by Picard with babysitting duty, and how the girl insists she needs to eat breakfast with "the nice old man." And a part where seeing this girl in mortal danger causes Picard to text Crusher to hug René for him was a nice touch, too. There is a great bit of comedy where Garak complains that unlike Picard, Sisko would have let him overthrow a democratically elected leader. I would have loved to have seen Patrick Stewart and Andrew Robinson play some of these scenes on screen. The thing about how coffee has become so popular on Cardassia is great, as is what its unavailability symbolizes. Picard gifts Garak a copy of The Master and Margarita, a book I own but have not yet got around to reading. I must do so! I didn't find a place to mention it in the main body of my review, but man can McCormack write. Above and beyond any other working Star Trek writer, her prose has a real sense of voice. I love those scenes where she does something like move outside of the generic third-person limited perspective that dominates Star Trek fiction, especially when she also plays with tense. The end of Part One, where we get a summation of where everyone is at the moment Picard finds out Nan Bacco is dead (pp. 118-21), for example, is powerful. Continuity Notes: It's not the fault of the book, but my memory of postwar Cardassian history was a bit fuzzy. Specifically, I hadn't realized that "The Calling" from Prophecy and Change had been pinned down chronologically (by The Never-Ending Sacrifice? or maybe A Singular Destiny, going by Memory Beta). That means Alon Ghemor is dead, succeeded by Raken Garan as castellan of the Cardassian Union. And I barely remember The Lotus Flower at all, which is referenced a few times. I did piece it all together eventually. If my sums are right, Garak was Cardassian ambassador to the Federation for more than seven years. It's weird to think he would have lived on Earth longer than he lived on Deep Space 9!* But in this case, I do believe it; Garak has been changed by his time on Earth in a way that was not true of O'Brien's time on Cardassia in Revelation and Dust. Damar and Dukat had no first names on screen; the fiction has dubbed them Corat Damar and Skrain Dukat, respectively. I get why prose needs to do this, but I always find it a bit jarring. (Plus I hate "Skrain.") What particularly jars here is that every time Damar is mentioned (and he's mentioned at a lot, having become a postwar hero for his resistance to the Dominioin), he's called "Corat Damar." Corat Damar this, Corat Damar that. We got through four years of him on tv without his first name being mentioned, but here we can't go four minutes! * Pedants take note that I said "Deep Space 9," not "Terok Nor and Deep Space 9."
Around the time The Fall came out I made an effort to get back into Trek fiction, which I’d stopped following around 2009. The effort fell apart pretty quickly, so Revelation and Dust and The Crimson Shadow were the only books I actually read. Revelation and Dust was a real disappointment, not least because my preferences in prose style had developed since my last David R. George III book, leaving me unprepared for how stilted and over-formal I would find the language. I had the same feeling after reading One Constant Star (which was otherwise a decent novel) earlier this year: someone needs to take his thesaurus away. What really got to me about the Kira sequences was that this was the third time in the relaunch, after “Horn and Ivory” and Warpath, that she was dumped in/had visions of some version of Bajor’s past. It would be one thing if those sequences had fit together meaningfully, but all they ever feel like is a thematic crutch. Why not have Kira evolve and learn lessons based on events in her actual life? The constant distracting references to the look and logistics of the new DS9 only served to underline that blowing up the station could never feel as impactful in a novel series as it would onscreen (where, ironically, building all new sets would probably have made it cost-prohibitive). Unless you’re going to engage in constant scene-setting, it barely matters which sci-fi satellite your novel takes place in. The novel’s egregious pacing made me feel justified in having lost interest in the DS9 relaunch, which never really adjusted to the switch from 24 to 12 paperbacks a year. When there’s only an average of one relaunch novel a year, it’s got to push the overall story along more than this. I remember enjoying The Crimson Shadow very much, but I don’t recall many details of why, except that, as Steve says, Una’s prose has a sense of voice and style that sets her apart from the average Trek novelist. I haven’t yet read any of her other post-2009 DS9-adjacent novels, though I want to.
I reread The 34th Rule a couple years ago and thought it held up; I'd be curious to reread Twilight or Serpents and learn if George changed, or I did. I remembered "Horn and Ivory" had a Kira Bajora vision, but only that it happened; I didn't remember anything about the details of it. I had forgotten Warpath. Yes, this does seem pretty clunky. Yeah, I feel like as long as the station gets rebuilt and replaced, there's no way destroying it could really change the fundamentals of DS9 storytelling in a meaningful way. It's like when a comic book crossover kills off a minor-but-beloved character to prove the situation is serious... it doesn't prove anything at all, because you know that the next time a writer wants to use, say, Firestorm, he'll be back, and he'll be fine.
I felt pretty much the same way you did about both books. I'll be curious to see what you thought of Peaceable Kingdoms, a lot of people didn't like that one, but I did. In general I seem to like @Dayton Ward's writing more than a lot of other people here, so I guess your feelings will probably come down to how you feel about his writing in general.
I think I might be the only person who still loves Revelation and Dust, but I do; I found it thrilling. But admittedly not as thrilling as The Crimson Shadow, which is just one of the greatest Star Trek novels ever written. I can't really add anything of substance to your review; it's pitch perfect. You even cite some of my favorite passages!
Thank you. But I really genuinely do not understand how someone could find a book of people thinking about things that have happened to them over the last two years thrilling! Unless maybe it was by Julian Barnes.
To me it felt like an interesting set of character studies followed by this sudden mid-narrative crisis that came out of nowhere. Which is very much what real crises like that often feel like.
The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses by David Mack Published: November 2013 Time Span: 31 August–19 September 2385 Clearly it works for other people, but I find David Mack as a writer least interesting in thriller mode. I will admit that I had a number of issues with the Cold Equations trilogy, but I did think that the "Noonien" section of book I, as well as book III, were trying to do something more interesting than his more thriller-y books, like Zero Sum Game and book II of Cold Equations and this one. As I read, I struggled to isolate why this might be. If someone described A Ceremony of Losses to me, I think it would sound quite good. One of the things I like most about Bashir is that moral crusader spirit he has, where his ideals outrun his practical limits; "The Quickening" is one of my favorite Deep Space Nine episodes. This book, then, put that to the ultimate test: Bashir wants to cure the Andorian reproductive crisis, but in doing so must draw on classified information that puts his career and even life at risk. What will he do, especially when he has to go up against his friends and colleagues? But in the execution it's just not that, well, thrilling, and I'm not sure why. I think partly because Bashir honestly doesn't come across as very tested or conflicted by it all; he sets out on his course of action, and that is that. I didn't feel like he was very often making difficult choices. When Bashir makes his big decision to initiate the whole thing, it's because of a weird vision he has of being judged by Anubis, which feels like a writing crutch, as opposed to his decision being motivated by his Bashir-ness. In fact, something that bugged me is that it seems like Bashir makes very few choices on the whole. We have the promise of a genetically engineered genius really stretching his limits... but Sarina sets up most of his plan, and he just sits there; when events converge over Andor at the novel's climax, he doesn't do anything particularly smart or impressive. Captain Dax on the Aventine is tasked with hunting him down because she (paraphrasing) "knows how he thinks," but he scarcely does any thinking at all, he's just along for the ride. (And Dax's big brain move in catching Bashir is to realize the guy who works on Deep Space 9 is probably on a ship that came from Deep Space 9.) I wanted a thrilling book of Bashir pushing his abilities to the limits, but this is mostly limited to him being rude at colleagues. I said in my review of Brinkmanship that in most novels, I struggle to see Ezri Dax in the character called Captain Ezri Dax, and that was true in this book, where Ezri is rulebound in a way that doesn't ring true. Where's the playful Dax who does what's right? In fact, it ends up being lampshaded when Ezri actually asks Bowers why is she so rulebound all of a sudden! Plus the Ezri/Julian thing is back to immature arguments... I would really be glad to never read about an Ezri/Julian argument in a Star Trek book ever again, thank you. I think Mack's characters in general don't have strong voices. Lense is here, but she didn't remind me of the Lense I remembered from S.C.E. She's not not Lense, she's just kind of a person who's there. The same goes for Shar; I remember him being one of my favorite DS9 relaunch characters, but I don't see why that would be based on this. And Andor doesn't feel like a real place in the way it did in previous novels like Heather Jarman's Paradigm. The other thing that bother me is that Mack's Star Trek universe doesn't really feel like the Star Trek universe I know from screen. Everyone is mean and selfish. Andorian politics are a total shitshow of self-interest; one would hope that the Andorian secessionists at least believed they were doing the right thing, but here they are deliberately encouraging species death to hold onto political power. But this seems to go everywhere: this is our first real look at Ishan, the president pro tem of the Federation, and he's a nasty piece of work, willing to let the Andorians die to beef up his election chances. Really!? Even the characters call out that he's so nasty as to be unrealistic. How did this guy even get elected? (As villains go, both he and the Andorian secessionists veer too much into the one note. I would say that they read as implausible, but 2016-20 gave me a real-life leader who is arguably worse... but reality doesn't have to be plausible, you know!) The other Starfleet captains are pretty rotten (one sits around thinking about how great it is that he doesn't have any friends). All of this reduces the ostensible dilemma of the novel: there's no meaningful counterargument put forth, no real sense that Bashir could ever be doing anything wrong. I don't think the Federation has to be a utopia, but I do think it ought to be aspirational. To be honest, Cardassia seemed like a more idealistic place in The Crimson Shadow than the Federation does here. At the end, Bashir is locked up without trial on a dark penal asteroid! Like, c'mon, I don't read Star Trek books to read about how nasty people can be. I guess I will see what we learn about him in the last two Fall books. As I was wrapping up this review, I looked at some others. Over at Tor.com, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro says, "Its construction around a poignant ethical dilemma with far-reaching consequences—do you follow lawful orders, even when those orders will lead to the extinction of a recently allied sentient species that you could possibly save?—makes it quintessential Trek..." I mean, I agree that this should be interesting (though orders versus genocide isn't much of a dilemma, to be honest), but I struggle to recognize the novel Zinos-Amaro describes in the one I read. Continuity Notes: Aha, this is the book where we finally find out what happened to those Andorian transporter duplicates... no? okay... Other Notes: This book introduces zh'Tarash, who states her intention to run for Federation president once Andor is readmitted to the Federation. I know from the Prometheus audiobooks that she does indeed win, but this doesn't seem very plausible to me, and I'm not even sure why she wants to run. I guess I will see how this is handled in the next two Fall books, but the quick rejoining of Andor struck me as pretty unlikely. The first two Fall books were named after in-universe works of literature, a Bajoran religious text and a Cardassian speculative fiction story, respectively. I thought this was a theme and so was disappointed that this was not true for A Ceremony of Losses, which seems to be (it's not explicitly alluded to in the book) a quotation from a 2012 essay about old age by U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall: "I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two" ("Out the Window"). I'm not sure I see the relevance.
I strongly disagree. This is literally a novel about a guy choosing to sacrifice his career, his liberty, and if necessary his life, in order to save the lives of millions of strangers and prevent a species from going extinct. That's the definition of compassionate and selfless. I'm not saying this to be flippant or to start a political argument, but, well, we do live in a world where Donald Trump is President of the United States. After that, I no longer believe that there's a such thing as a villain who's so nasty as to be unrealistic. More earnestly, IIRC we know from the DS9 Relaunch that the Federation Councillor for the Republic of Bajor is appointed by the First Minister with the advice and consent of the Chamber of Ministers. I would assume that Ishan horsetraded his way into the Chamber of Ministers and then found a way to manipulate the First Minister into appointing him to the Council. I think the thing to remember about The Fall is that it is the story of the Federation's own struggle with authoritarianism and, arguably, a form of proto-fascism. And, well, all you need to do is check out the violence in downtown D.C. this past weekend to see what kinds of people are attracted to fascism. Seriously, let's all just pretend that book never happened. It works for me. I mean, for a real-life example, the European Union has made it clear that if the United Kingdom had decided to end Brexit, it would have been allowed back in very quickly. I think the majority of the Federation Council would be more than willing to allow Andor back in, especially since it's now an open secret that the Andorians only withdrew because so many felt betrayed by the Federation's withholding Shedai meta-genome technology; they know full well the UFP owes them a moral debt after causing so much inadvertent passive harm. And this book makes the process by which the Andorian progressive movement seizes power away from Andorian fascists. The biggest obstacle to Andor re-joining would be Ishan himself, and the entire series is about how he doesn't actually have full dictatorial control like he wants to. I thought "A Ceremony of Losses" was supposed to be an in-universe Andorian religious ritual? And I think the theme of age and mortality is pretty clearly applicable to this novel, both on a plot level (the Andorian species going extinct is the equivalent of a person facing death as they grow old) and on a thematic level (Bashir literally has to sacrifice everything for the sake of the Andorians).
That's true, I overstated the case; in addition to Bashir, there are a number of idealistic people who help him do the right thing. I'll revise when I post the final form of this on my blog. Sure, you can justify it, but I don't feel that the Fall novels themselves do, at least not this one. I could see the appeal of a more authoritarian ruler in the Federation after Destiny and everything else, but this book doesn't really lay that groundwork. Ishan also doesn't seem like a very good politician-- he just antagonizes everyone even though he's in a very precarious position! I don't recollect that if so, and I literally just finished the book when I wrote that. The quote, though, is how it's better to live a long life even if you lose your abilities (the full context has Hall talking about how he can't write poetry anymore, and that's okay); I don't see any resonance with what Bashir does.
Insightful comments. I know that David Mack's work has often been about the biggest challenges to Star Trek's idealism, most notably the existential threat of the Borg in Destiny, and his heroes choose idealism and succeed in Trekkian fashion, but even given that it has started to feel to me like he's kind of... giving up? Losing faith? In the idea of a whole society that works that way. Most of his recent work has featured the kind of cynical view of most of the rest of the Federation you describe; I had similar complaints with Collateral Damage (which for spoiler reasons I obviously won't get into here). I rarely leave his books feeling inspired these days, and I know from his social media that he's had a pretty angry frustrated few years at the American political situation (and who could blame him) but I feel like he might be trying a little too hard to project that cynicism onto a future that's supposed to not contain it. Certainly none of these tropes is unrealized in Star Trek somewhere - bad actors trying to usurp the Federation; admirals who have lost the path; cynical politicians ... they all exist - but it's a question of number and emphasis. I see where you're coming from, certainly; you're not the only one who's found some of his recent work a bit hollow in this way. (To be clear, I didn't have much of a problem with Ceremony of Losses itself, but I think it marked the point at which Mack's writing started to tend in this direction, something which has gotten stronger since and bothered me more and more.)
I think it's fair that it would have been nice if earlier books had gone into the rise of Federation authoritarianism as a movement more. But I also think it's kind of a limitation of the form -- these books focus on Starfleet, not domestic politics, and, well, no one knew they were going to be writing books dealing with Federation authoritarianism until they were writing The Fall. Within those constraints, I think Mack's portrayal of Ishan works very well; Mack has said he based Ishan on Rudy Guiliani's tenure as Mayor of the City of New York, which, well, makes the whole thing weirdly prescient... And yet...! I could have sworn it was on the opening quotations page, but I just pulled out my copy and it wasn't there. I did a quick Google Books search, and I figured out where my memory of it as a religious ceremony came from. Page 69: Though she [zh'Tarash] was not a religious person, she found herself reflecting upon an oft-quoted line from The Liturgy of the Temple of Uzaveh: "The Path of Light can be found only by those who brave the Road of Storms and weather its ceremony of losses." So, my memory wasn't quite right -- it's not a religious ceremony, but it appears to be a religious turn of phrase in Andorian Uzaveh..-ism. So, in a way your preferred pattern of The Fall installment titles being taken from in-universe literature still holds! All I can say here is that I have consistently found Mack to strike the right balance between a greater level of political realism and Trekkian idealism. I loved how positively Roddenberrian his ending to Collateral Damage was, and his depiction of the Federation's flaws makes it feel more real to me.
Sure, but Trump didn't end where he is because he's good at politics. It doesn't feel consistent that Ishan is a career politician, and savvy enough to end up an apparent shoo-in for interim president, but not savvy enough to not antagonize the entire Palais within two weeks. Ah, thanks. When I did that, all I got was the appearance of "A CEREMONY OF LOSSES" on the top of every page!
Well, not to get this too far away from the topic of the books, but I don't agree that Trump isn't good at politics. But I'm gonna put my argument here behind the spoiler code because it's really tangential to the topic at hand: Spoiler: Is Trump Bad At Politics? Trump entered the Republican primary as a novice facing 16 opponents. Shortly after he entered the race on 16 June 2015, polls showed him with about 11% support among Republican voters. Over the course of the next year, he figured out how to exploit existing cleavages within the Republican Party to knock off his opponents. By the time his last opponent, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, suspended his campaign, Trump was polling at 60%. From there, he was able to figure out a path to Electoral College victory by combining his existing white supremacist base of support with a tactic to take advantage of a cleavage within the Democratic Party between Great Lakes Basin voters and the party leaders over the effects of free trade on the Basin's economy. He has, of course, lost this year, because you cannot win re-election when going into denial about a quarter-million corpses. But even then, he has managed to mobilize the Republican Party base to vote at much higher levels than they did in 2016. Donald Trump is very bad at governance, but he is distressingly good at campaigning. He has real skill at seizing upon his opponents' electoral weaknesses and conveying simple, memorable, emotionally affective messages. Being good at politics means you have to be good at governance and campaigning; obviously Trump is bad at the former, but his skill at the latter is such that, well, I don't think he's bad at politics per se. Well, I think this is where your argument about Trump presents a very fair counter-point to mine: While Trump was very good at campaigning to get himself into office, he was so bad at actual governance that it overwhelmed his otherwise-good campaigning skills once it was time for him to seek office again. I would say that with Ishan we do actually see an in-universe explanation on two levels for how he managed to keep accruing power during his rise in spite of his abrasiveness. The first part is his association with Galif jav Velk. Velk is described as a former businessman who became militant after the Borg Invasion. While Bajor is part of the Federation, it has only recently embraced Federation economics; I wonder if it's still transitioning, and if therefore the influence of money may still be felt during campaigns for seats in the Chamber of Ministers? Velk may well have bought off enough favors for Ishan to secure the First Minister appointing him as Federation Councillor. The other direction we could go with is this: Velk is described as turning much more hawkish and paranoid as a result of the Borg Invasion. It's entirely plausible that Ishan was not as overtly hostile before the Invasion, but became so afterwards, and that they parlayed that with an electorate whose levels of hawkishness had also increased (without their necessarily realizing the full scale of his aggression). There's a third possibility as well: Ishan's political career is mostly unestablished. Perhaps he took a route similar to his original inspiration, Rudy Guiliani; maybe he was an elected prosecutor who made his own adversarial tendencies part of his "brand," and used it and a 24th Century Bajoran version of tough-on-crime rhetoric to get himself appointed Federation Councillor. Hell, given that Krim Aldos supported the Circle during their attempted coup in 2370, I could plausibly imagine Ishan uncovering some sort of dirty deal he made around the time, publicly shaming Krim, and getting the First Minister to recall him. Public opinion might well run towards "appoint Ishan" if he pulls something like that off. I did too! I just kept skimming through them out of pure stubbornness. " Edited to add: Side-note: I re-read the 2385 chapters of the first half of Revelation and Dust last night, and, well... I still really enjoyed it! *shrugs* I enjoyed slowing down, setting the places, just kind of living with the characters and their relationships for a bit, set against the backdrop of impending doom. And Bacco's death sequence is still incredibly well-done in my view -- going from triumphal celebration to pure confusion to losing consciousness. It's gut-wrenching, and really effective with how sudden it is and how it leaves so many of the emotional conflicts of Bacco's life unresolved. (My experience with death in real life tells me this is very real -- death is the cessation of life's tensions, not their resolution.)
The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice by James Swallow Published: December 2013 Time Span: 20 September–12 October 2385 The Fall is back in thriller mode for The Poisoned Chalice-- a mode I knew James Swallow was pretty successful at from his earlier Cast No Shadow. I complained that I found David Mack's attempt at a thriller in A Ceremony of Losses weak; reading The Poisoned Chalice left me better able to understand why. I don't read a lot of governmental thrillers, but I do like those stories where someone has to turn against their own government because it's corrupt. A good thriller is disconcerting, and I think I respond well to that, arguably for the same reason that I like science fiction, and cosmic horror, and mystery stories, and Victorian novels: a good thriller is a story of epistemological crisis. The world does not work the way you thought it did. In A Ceremony of Losses, it was all too clear how the world worked: Bashir was good and Ishan was evil. The Poisoned Chalice is more complicated. Our protagonists-- Riker, Vale, and Tuvok most prominent among them-- don't just not know who to trust, they don't really even know what they should be trying to do because they don't have enough context. Will Riker is promoted to admiral here. I have a feeling that this is going to mean the Titan series once again is dragged away from its original remit of exploration, but I also have a feeling that a good writer can do something with this, and Swallow does here, as Riker tries to figure out what kind of actions he can take on Fleet Admiral Akaar's behalf to save the heart of Starfleet. It's engaging stuff, though how much Akaar kept Riker in the dark ultimately turned out to be kind of contrived, as once Riker tracks Akaar down, Akaar just tells him what's going on and doesn't really have a clear reason to not have told him earlier. This leaves the disconcerting nature of the earlier parts ringing a little hollow, even as they were engaging as I read them. I did like the subplot about Troi and the Andorians; the Titan series made Deanna chief diplomatic officer, and The Poisoned Chalice shows her putting her empathy (like, normal empathy, not space-talent empathy) to good diplomatic use. I think the Tuvok plot also suffers a little in retrospect even if it's engaging while you read it. Tuvok, Nog, and Tom Riker are among those assigned to a secret unit of both Starfleet and non-Starfleet personnel trying to track down the killers of President Bacco. This is more action-y than the Riker subplot, and Nog especially gets to show off a bit (which is good, given how David George's Deep Space Nine novels had sidelined him), and I always like a bit of Tuvok. Swallow does a good job with Tom Riker, too, balancing the line of making you believe this is someone Will Riker could have been-- or rather that he is Will Riker, just one who lived a different life. But what doesn't quite work for me is the end of the story reveals why Tuvok and Nog were chosen for this mission: the assembler of the group thought they were both the kind of people who might put ends about means and be willing to countenance extreme measures in bringing down Bacco's assassins. This actually makes sense; the novel highlights Tuvok's time as a spy in the Maquis (where I feel certain he must have done some morally dubious things), but I kept thinking of "Prime Factors," where Tuvok is the one who breaks Janeway's orders in an effort to bring Voyager home. Nog has a pragmatic edge thanks to his Ferengi upbringing (seen in, for example, "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River"). But there's never a point where you think Tuvok or Nog might actually do something ethically dubious, and I wish there had been; I think it would sell the themes of both the book and the whole series better. Vale's subplot-- she's made brevet captain of a medical transport as an excuse to get her near the prison where Bashir is being held-- is the least complicated of these, but it works well enough. Like Tuvok and Nog, the book mentions the idea that she's actually sympathetic to the Ishan/Velk political axis. There's a lot of characters in this book who are, and unlike in A Ceremony of Losses, they're not all obviously evil. Much moreso than in the last book, I understood how Ishan could have had some actual political success... though I do think The Fall would have benefited if previous books had laid this groundwork more. My favorite part of the book, though, is really nothing to do with the thriller elements. There's a bit where the Titan crew discover a piece of sensitive information has been transmitted as an encoded holo-matrix. If you know the right code, it will tell you want you need to know; give the wrong one, or trying to de-compile it, and it will delete itself. (Shar actually used a similar method of reaching Bashir in Ceremony.) The Titan crew has the most delightfully Star Trekkian solution to this dilemma: if they uplift the program to sentience, they can reason it into giving them the information they need! It's so out there I love it. Continuity Notes: Like in Cast No Shadow, Swallow references some very old-school continuity elements: the Triangle from FASA and the Mann class from the Spaceflight Chronology. Vale's first officer, Commander Atia, is from 892-IV of "Bread and Circuses" fame; The Poisoned Chalice draws on The Captains' Honor in its references, including calling the planet "Magna Roma." The book has to clarify that Tom Riker is not dead; I think Titan: Fallen Gods was the first book to indicate that he was. I skimmed back through Fallen Gods; it was done in a passing reference when the Titan's transporter officer is thinking about transporter duplicates (p. 321), so it's easily retconned by having Riker say every was just misinformed. The Poisoned Chalice also brings up the fact that Tom Riker had been having sex with Sela in Peter David's Triangle: Imzadi II, a thing I would have been happy to not recall. Other Notes: "The Poisoned Chalice" is an expression from Macbeth. I guess technically Macbeth is a work of literature in the Star Trek universe, but this does rather break the pattern of the titles of the first couple The Fall installments for sure. Vale frets that she wants to be helping investigate Bacco's death, but "she knew that the best investigative minds in the UFP were already finding answers" (21). You're wrong, Vale; they assigned Jefferson Blackmer instead. The book uses the adjective "Magna Romanii" when referring to Atia. No, just... no. Latin might be a dead language, but Swallow murders it all over again ever time he uses that. There are currently 58 books in my Destiny-era reading list; The Poisoned Chalice is #29, meaning I am now exactly halfway! I read #1, The Original Series: From History's Shadow, in June 2017, meaning I might hope to read #58, The Next Generation: Collateral Damage in March 2024!
I always like what James Swallow does with Titan*, they are usually my favourite books in the series. *although parts of Sight Unseen are beyond creepy.