Wow. I have always thought that Mitra worked pretty well as a villain in The 34th Rule, but I seldom see him mentioned these days (perhaps, I hope, because the novel is a decade old at this point). Anyway, thanks for bringing him up, Allyn; that's very gratifying.
I reread
The 34th Rule about three years ago, not too terribly long before I left Raleigh. What struck me at the time was how prescient it was, that Gallitep could have been Abu Ghraib or Guantanimo, and the treatment of Rom and Quark at the hands of Mitra and his soldiers was not unlike the abuses and the torture subjected to prisoners held in the American Galliteps.
I find it ironic that the people shouting down Congressmen at town halls meetings and comparing the health care bill to Nazism are the very same people who would have condoned, if not outright applauded, the torture in Guantanamo and other prisons, who would have defended the torturers by saying "They were only following orders" and offering the Nuremberg Defense. I wonder if they're aware of the cognitive disconnect of their positions, I wonder if they're aware of their historical tone-deafness. I doubt it.
What will always stick with me from
The 34th Rule is a scene near the end. Nog and Quark have been freed from Gallitep, and they're aboard the
Defiant. Sisko had no idea what had happened to them, Quark is defiantly angry at Sisko's blindness, and Sisko takes Nog into his quarters to talk. The conversation they have isn't described. It doesn't need to be. It's a moment of quiet power that, ten years later, still moves me.
It's no wonder, at least it's not wonder to
me, that people still remember Mitra.
The 34th Rule is that kind of book.
