(very good throughout, especially the surprisingly engaging Demons of Air and Darkness)
Gladja liked it! Though I'm curious as to why its engaging-ness (I just made that word up) was such a surprise.....
KRAD has spoken: Engaging-ness is now a word!
But seriously... this may sound silly, but it's actually really cool that you posted and asked me that directly. I suppose that's one of the things that drew me to the TrekBBS during my recent dive into the books, the fact that some of the authors actually post on the board, but still, given that I myself hope to, at some point, not only publish fiction in general, but Trek fiction in particular (among other things, of course), I kinda feel like I'm having a conversation with a celebrity or something.
So! As for your question: I realized when I read your reply that I really didn't word that very well. It kinda sounds like "Man, I totally thought this one was gonna be crap, but it was actually good!" But that's really not how I felt about it, haha. For one thing, the only work of yours I can think of that I've read was
The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned in "Tales of the Dominion War". That was amazing, so I had no reason to think it
wouldn't be good. What I meant was this: the
Avatar books were both very good, as was
Abyss. And knowing some details about what
Demons of Air and Darkness was about (from a friend who's read most of these and mentioned this one to me ages ago), I just kinda figured it wouldn't have quite as much engaging-ness as the others. Whereas
Avatar and
Abyss seemed like they were about very "large" events, continuing the overall story of DS9, I expected
Demons to have a kind of "sidestory" vibe. Ok, so this colony I've never heard of is threatened, and the Iconian gateways are involved, which is kinda interesting, but it just didn't feel like it would grab me as much as the rest of the omnibus books had. Yet, after reading it, I looked back at the whole omnibus, and I have to say (with all due respect to S.D. Perry, David Weddle, and Jeffery Lang; those books were still quite good) that out of all the books contained in it, this one is definitely my favorite. It was no less epic in scope and feel than the others, I thought; hence, a certain degree of surprise given my expectations. But a pleasant one.
Demons of Air and Darkness stands with
Greater Than the Sum as my two favorite Trek novels (ever) at this moment. Granted, I haven't read a ton of them, and there are quite a few more I plan to get to (in the middle of
Mission Gamma: Twilight right now), and to be fair, I kind of lump
Horn and Ivory in as part of the same book (I LOVED that scene near the end, when Kira is actually with the Iconian), but still. Oh, and
The Lives of Dax was also excellent, though it wasn't really a "novel" per se.
Having said all that, it really was fantastic. Considering the fact that Europa Nova
was a colony I'd never heard of before, it really came alive during the course of the story, and the whole unfolding multi-level plotline was very nicely done. Also, I have to mention the rather sudden revelation about the true identity of Quark's dabo girl companion while on the Orion ship. That completely
got me, I didn't see it coming at all. I was on BART (read: commuter train, for those of you who've never been to the San Francisco Bay Area) at the time I read that part, and I remember I had to stifle my sound of shock, lest my fellow commuters think I was some kinda wacko. Which I
am, but I figured they didn't need to know that.
