Any of these DS9 books any good?

[Tain]

I'm in a nostalgic mood for early DS9. Been 20 years since I started watching it, mid-season 2. Gun to your head, whats the best one of these? Besides 34th Rule That's my favorite DS9 book, have read it so much i wore out the binding.

Emissary
The Siege
Bloodletter
The Big Game
Fallen Heroes
Betrayal
Warchild
Antimatter
Proud Helios
Valhalla
Devil in the Sky
The Laertian Gamble
Station Rage
The Long Night
Objective: Bajor
Invasion! #3: Time's Enemy
The Heart of the Warrior
Saratoga
The Tempest
Wrath of the Prophets
Trial by Error
Vengeance
The 34th Rule
Rebels #1: The Conquered
Rebels #2: The Courageous
Rebels #3: The Liberated

 

[ICW]

I thought The Big Game was pretty fun.

I've heard The Laertian Gamble is so bad it's good.

 

[Thrawn]

The Siege, Fallen Heroes, Station Rage, Invasion 3 (don't need to read the other Invasion novels either - this is a side-story).

Those are all a blast. Station Rage is maybe a controversial choice, it's sort of Sisko vs. an ancient Cardassian as told in the style of Greek myth or something, a very weird book, but epic as hell.

 

[Greg Cox]

Fallen Heroes is probably the best of the bunch, and that includes mine.

 

[KRAD]

I'd say the best of the bunch are:

The Siege
The Big Game
Fallen Heroes
Devil in the Sky
Invasion! #3: Time's Enemy
The 34th Rule

 

[ronny]

I'd say the best of the bunch are:

The Siege
The Big Game
Fallen Heroes
Devil in the Sky
Invasion! #3: Time's Enemy
The 34th Rule

Good list but I'd replace Devil in the Sky with Bloodletter but then I probably like K.W. Jeter than most people here. My favorite of the bunch is Fallen Heroes.

 

[Christopher]

The Siege: Good, and surprisingly authentic for a first novel -- although a couple of its details were later contradicted.

Fallen Heroes: Really impressive. Has a couple of glaring inconsistencies with the show, notably assuming a 28-hour station day instead of 26 (not a minor detail, since timing is central to the story). But it's still one hell of a powerful tale.

Valhalla, Betrayal: These two actually go together as sort of a loose duology in this order, although Valhalla was postponed and had an anachronistic reference to the Defiant tacked on even though it's clearly meant to be in the first or early second season. These books aren't standouts, but the two-part arc about Cardassian politics is kind of interesting.

Objective: Bajor: This one's fairly interesting, although it's really a story about the guest aliens with the DS9 cast in a supporting role.

Invasion! #3: Time's Enemy: This is one of my favorites. And it's arguably the most standalone of the four Invasion! novels, so you don't need to read the others.

The 34th Rule: This is the only other one that really stands out in my memory. It's a little hard to fit into the chronology of the fourth season because it takes so long, but it's a strong story and it's referenced in the DS9 relaunch.

 

[Dukhat]

I'm pretty sure I've read all those books at one time or another, and while I can't really tell you which one on your list is the absolute best, I can tell you which ones to avoid: The Rebels trilogy. Those books are god-awful, and they read almost like the author hadn't actually watched a single episode of DS9 before writing them (which can't have been the case, since the author was Daffydd ab Hugh, who had previously written "Fallen Heroes", a terrific DS9 book. Curiously, the writing styles of his good book and this trilogy seemed quite different too. Hmmm...).

 

[zarkon]

Objective: Bajor & The 34th Rule are brilliant
Station Rage & The Long Night are pretty fun too, though not on the same level
Antimatter creeped me out when I was younger. lotsa bugs
I would probably avoid The Laertian Gamble and Rebels

 

[PKS8304]

Hi, I read all these in High School. I have Invasion #3 in a set. I know several I liked while I was reading them but the only book off that list I still own is Objective: Bajor. Great read!

 

[Mr Light]

It's been a loooooooooooong time but I remember liking Fallen Heroes and Station Rage. And, of course, 34th Rule and Stitch in Time.

 

[Sho]

Time's Enemy is one of my favorite Trek novels, despite not liking the other Invasion! books much. It has some of the best-written character scenes I've ever read in TrekLit, particularly for Bashir and Dax. The moments in that book ended up shaping how I think of those characters.

 

[DS9forever]

I like Heart of the Warrior as it features the Changeling infiltration storyline of DS9 season four, as well as the Maquis storyline. Oddly, the main storyline with Worf, Odo and Kira in the Dominion seems the weakest. The Changelings in the novel have names, although the novel was released before the Female Changeling specifically said she didn't have a name in "Behind the Lines" so I guess you can't complain about that.

Saratoga by Michael Jan Friedman is pretty good as well; some people found it too similar to Friedman's TNG novel Reunion although I find the characters in Saratoga more realistic.

 

[tomswift2002]

Fallen Heroes: Really impressive. Has a couple of glaring inconsistencies with the show, notably assuming a 28-hour station day instead of 26 (not a minor detail, since timing is central to the story). But it's still one hell of a powerful tale.

Valhalla, Betrayal: These two actually go together as sort of a loose duology in this order, although Valhalla was postponed and had an anachronistic reference to the Defiant tacked on even though it's clearly meant to be in the first or early second season. These books aren't standouts, but the two-part arc about Cardassian politics is kind of interesting.

Don't forget, Fallen Heroes also had a door on the turbolift in Ops.

Valhalla, if you were wondering what happened to "Pup" from The Forsaken, is the sequel to the episode. And, from what I recall of both Valhalla & Betrayal occur between In The Hands Of The Prophets and the Circle Trilogy.

Warchild also takes place just before Valhalla and is the first book of the three-part arc the was being told in Warchild-Valhalla-Betrayal. The Revanche party first appears in Warchild and then reappears in Valhalla.

Heart Of the Warrior is also good, although I remember that after I read the book I saw the episode that featured the crew reusing the hijacked Dominion ship in a story that was very similar to this book.

I just read The Long Night recently and I found that it was a very interesting story; the weakest part of this story is probably the Prologue.

But, avoid The Laertian Gamble, unless you want to keep having a new Chapter start after every three sentences.

 

[Garrovick]

Yes, I always wondered how The Laertian Gamble made it through editing like that - 70-some odd chapters in a 270 page book? That's nuts - and a number of those chapters were less than a page long. Although, even without that flaw I didn't like it very much - I kind of got the feeling that the author was going for a Douglas Adams-esque feel but it didn't work.

I really liked Devil In The Sky - I remember thinking that it would have made a great two-part episode in the early seasons of the show.

 

[Reanok]

I really like Time's enemy it's areally exciting story.It has great character development for Julian Bashir& Jadzia Dax in this novel. I also like Fallen heroes and Devil in the sky.Emissary is another book I like this novel a lot. it's been awhile since I've read this list of ds9 books.Some books stories were better written others were okay Laertian gamble is better tan Warped that novel is least favorite of all ds9 novels..

 

[Greg Cox]

I really liked Devil In The Sky - I remember thinking that it would have made a great two-part episode in the early seasons of the show.

Thanks! That was my very first Trek novel (co-written with John Betancourt, of course.)

 

[Christopher]

Yes, I always wondered how The Laertian Gamble made it through editing like that - 70-some odd chapters in a 270 page book? That's nuts - and a number of those chapters were less than a page long. Although, even without that flaw I didn't like it very much - I kind of got the feeling that the author was going for a Douglas Adams-esque feel but it didn't work.

There's no "right" or "wrong" chapter length -- it's at the discretion of the author. It's not a "flaw," it's a choice. I've read plenty of books with dozens of very short chapters, and plenty of books with only a few extremely long chapters. Authors who use short chapters often do so in order to create a sense of a faster pace.

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7820.Books_with_short_chapters

And for your information, the author of The Laertian Gamble, Robert Sheckley, began his career as an acclaimed writer of absurdist and comedic science fiction before Douglas Adams even started grade school. Sheckley was the person Adams based his style on, not the other way around.

 

[Greg Cox]

Yes, I always wondered how The Laertian Gamble made it through editing like that - 70-some odd chapters in a 270 page book? That's nuts - and a number of those chapters were less than a page long. Although, even without that flaw I didn't like it very much - I kind of got the feeling that the author was going for a Douglas Adams-esque feel but it didn't work.

There's no "right" or "wrong" chapter length -- it's at the discretion of the author. It's not a "flaw," it's a choice. I've read plenty of books with dozens of very short chapters, and plenty of books with only a few extremely long chapters. Authors who use short chapters often do so in order to create a sense of a faster pace.

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7820.Books_with_short_chapters

And for your information, the author of The Laertian Gamble, Robert Sheckley, began his career as an acclaimed writer of absurdist and comedic science fiction before Douglas Adams even started grade school. Sheckley was the person Adams based his style on, not the other way around.

Basically, The Laertian Gamble happened because John Ordover, who was editing the Trek books at the time, is the world's biggest Sheckley fan and couldn't resist giving one of his all-time favorite writers a shot at writing a Star Trek novel. It was an experiment that perhaps didn't pan out as well as everyone hoped.

 

[tomswift2002]

I've read plenty of books with dozens of very short chapters, and plenty of books with only a few extremely long chapters.

I guess we could always look to Melissa Scott's two Trek novels. The Garden, if I remember correctly had only 6 chapters at about 40-50 pages per chapter, while her DS9 novel Proud Helios had about 17 chapters in the more normal range of 15-25 pages.

But with TLG, even the "everything including the kitchen sink" plot was odd. The DS9 episode Rivals told a better story in relation to the concept of chance.