As @Jarvisimo was linking to the 2017 schedule of @8of5 's Trek Collective, he probably just interpreted too much into the highlighted parts of the Control entry there:
Spoilers DS9: Ascendance by David R. George III Review Thread
- Thread starter Defcon
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It was actually the 'the book is no longer contracted' section, but it is nice to know it might still be on the cards. But equally if David's Tor.com trilogy takes him to new pastures, it might be not on the cards, to be taken over by someone? Still this is good news that the Bashir novels won't just dangle into nothing
That the book "is no longer contracted" wouldn't worry me that much, as there seem to have been an agreement to do the novel between Clark/Schlesinger and Mack, it just was moved out of his current three book contract to have him be part of Legacies.
Ironic for this thread, which i know i've taken off-topic.I gave it above average. It felt like two books that climaxed at the middle and end. Although the climaxes felt anticlimatic. It was quick paced and gave varied viewpoints. To me this book felt like the author was tying up loose ends, which is a good thing. It was enjoyable, not amazing. Not bad.
I had a harder time with the prior book because of real life interruptions and was worried about loss of momentum after the first half of Ascendance. I was very pleasantly engrossed by the second half but reminded that life is unfair that the Ascendants essentially get what they want in spite of killing their way towards their goal. Regardless what one thinks of their "gods" and how the Ascendants will spend eternity; it seems a little dark. Still rated "Above Average."
Initially I had seen it this way too then I re-thought it....
I don't really think the Ascendants ever intended to achieve their stated goals, why? Because achieving their goal is the end of their fanaticism. Had they not been all sucked into subspace by Taran'atar's action, it is very likely the one of handful left would have simply started it all up again. The wormhole would have been deemed a false god, probably try to destroy it too. What the Ascendants were all about was mass murder and genocide. They liked it, hell, they loved it! And if the goal is always just out of reach, but if you kill this planet and those aliens, you get that pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow. Couple of genocides later, damn, still not there? Oh well, guess what's needed?
Instead the Prophets have practically imprisoned the psychotic bastards for all eternity. I can go with that.
I don't know, I choose more to think of it as a Caeliar/Borg situation; that the Prophets have helped to bring these beings out of their mass murdering and psychopathy, giving them a situation in which they can be healed. Giving them peace of mind and bringing them to a better state of being not as a reward, but more as a means by which they can atone. Holding them for the safety of others, perhaps in part, but in a manner by which they can move beyond what they once were.
I look forward to stories set in the Gamma Quadrant again; Mission Gamma predated Titan & VGR in exploring new frontiers and having it undertaken by a Galaxy class starship avoids any fan or author perceived limitations that the Defiant has for such missions.
I just finished it and gave it an "above average" score. I found the first part quite the slog. I prefer books with denoted chapters, but DRG3 most assuredly does not, so i found the 138 page part one a bit hard to get through...but after that, i sailed through. Maybe it was just me and not the writing of part one. After the Ascendants part was done, I found I couldn't put it down. I can't wait for Jeff Lang's Nog/O'Brien story in a few months, and for whatever DS9 comes afterwards. I hear DRG3 has got at least one more coming down the line in the next few years, and hopefully it's as good as this one 
And hey! That final line and who came out of the wormhole! Nice! Can't wait for the follow-up
And hey! That final line and who came out of the wormhole! Nice! Can't wait for the follow-up
Here's a question, does Kira not remember her vision from "Warpath"? She doesn't remember the Ascendants when they invade.
I found this book to have been rather anti-climatic. Sure we saw the Ascendance storyline, but I felt it kind of fell flat compared to the big build up that had occurred years ago. I guess, had it come out back in the 2009-2011 timeframe, it would've been different, but I felt like this novel didn't offer a satisfying conclusion.
So again, obviously I have somewhat of a complicated relationship with this story considering I wrote my own version of it already. (See sig.) It's like all the same puzzle pieces are there but just arranged in a different pattern, so it's interesting to compare and contrast. In some cases this was very good, an interesting and fascinating solution to the puzzle. In other cases... well I can't help but feel I did it better myself.
The actual Ascendant conflict seemed to fizzle out pretty quick. Iliana's character basically ended with "ship go boom" and she never learned anything or had any revelations. No explanation of what the Wa was after all this time. Raiq worked well. I did like the tying things in all the way back to the Progenitor from Olympus Descending, that was clever. I couldn't figure out what this mysterious shapeshifter was for a long time. I even considered the Silver Blood from Voyager, although I couldn't see an entire DS9 trilogy being built around one of the worst Voyager episodes ever. But the Progenitor made sense. I had said in the review for Sacraments of Fire that it felt like a sequel to Olympus - now I know I was right.
I didn't feel like Kira or Sisko's role in the events were anything like as important as they should have been. Based on hints in Unity and Fragments and Omens, Sisko's entire reason for returning from the wormhole was to handle the Ascendants problem. But here he basically watched it unfold on a screen and then told them to turn off the lights. Hardly an Emissary-worthy moment. Kira herself even acknowledged, "well, that was a thing that happened and that I had nothing to do with." Ro did more than either of them. So that aspect of things was definitely a disappointment.
Cenn - it was weird to me that his story from Sacraments, one of the strongest aspects of that book, fizzled out to nothing here. Nothing major happened with the falsework on Endalla - this is still to come I guess? I don't like Ro's development - there is a tendency in American entertainment and media to assume that having a religious faith is the default position, and that anyone who doesn't is 'weird'. So it was always nice to have a character who didn't give a shit about religious mumbo jumbo and felt no guilt about it. I guess that's gone now. And Altec Dans - three frickin books and we still don't know what's going on with this guy? If you write an entire trilogy of novels and still can't actually get to the damn point, what the hell is going on? At least the Nog and Vic story is apparently a set-up for Force and Motion, even though its inclusion in this book was again irrelevant and pointless.
So that's all bitter and miserable. I did enjoy reading it in the moment, and the way of tying in the past events with current events was clever (although cleverer in Sacraments). I'm glad the story has been told, but I'm also happy to stick with my own version.
The actual Ascendant conflict seemed to fizzle out pretty quick. Iliana's character basically ended with "ship go boom" and she never learned anything or had any revelations. No explanation of what the Wa was after all this time. Raiq worked well. I did like the tying things in all the way back to the Progenitor from Olympus Descending, that was clever. I couldn't figure out what this mysterious shapeshifter was for a long time. I even considered the Silver Blood from Voyager, although I couldn't see an entire DS9 trilogy being built around one of the worst Voyager episodes ever. But the Progenitor made sense. I had said in the review for Sacraments of Fire that it felt like a sequel to Olympus - now I know I was right.
I didn't feel like Kira or Sisko's role in the events were anything like as important as they should have been. Based on hints in Unity and Fragments and Omens, Sisko's entire reason for returning from the wormhole was to handle the Ascendants problem. But here he basically watched it unfold on a screen and then told them to turn off the lights. Hardly an Emissary-worthy moment. Kira herself even acknowledged, "well, that was a thing that happened and that I had nothing to do with." Ro did more than either of them. So that aspect of things was definitely a disappointment.
Cenn - it was weird to me that his story from Sacraments, one of the strongest aspects of that book, fizzled out to nothing here. Nothing major happened with the falsework on Endalla - this is still to come I guess? I don't like Ro's development - there is a tendency in American entertainment and media to assume that having a religious faith is the default position, and that anyone who doesn't is 'weird'. So it was always nice to have a character who didn't give a shit about religious mumbo jumbo and felt no guilt about it. I guess that's gone now. And Altec Dans - three frickin books and we still don't know what's going on with this guy? If you write an entire trilogy of novels and still can't actually get to the damn point, what the hell is going on? At least the Nog and Vic story is apparently a set-up for Force and Motion, even though its inclusion in this book was again irrelevant and pointless.
So that's all bitter and miserable. I did enjoy reading it in the moment, and the way of tying in the past events with current events was clever (although cleverer in Sacraments). I'm glad the story has been told, but I'm also happy to stick with my own version.
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I haven't read a DRGIII book in a while so I thought I'd give this a chance - I thought it was just the right side of mediocre - the Ascendant stuff I found a tough slog and as others have pointed it it just fizzes out. I also thought there are far too many storylines that go nowhere in this book - the Altec Dans story, Endalla, the story with Vic. Yes it's fine to set up threads for future novels but you have to balance that out with an actual story in the here and now with the reader.
I also think that there are other pacing issues - I cannot work out if it is an editorial mandate or if DRGIII thinks his readers are idiots because you would get recaps of events that had happened on the previous couple of pages (such as the kiss between Ro and Altec Dans)...
I also think that there are other pacing issues - I cannot work out if it is an editorial mandate or if DRGIII thinks his readers are idiots because you would get recaps of events that had happened on the previous couple of pages (such as the kiss between Ro and Altec Dans)...
Finished up a couple of my reading goals for this year, read the 8 SNW books so I could finish that series off and then everything left over from 2015 I hadn't read yet so now I can start in on 2016.
This one isn't the best but still pretty good. This isn't the authors fault but I just can't help but think this would have been a better story if the first half had been published when it should have been years ago instead of being shoe horned into something now. Above Average but a low above average.
This one isn't the best but still pretty good. This isn't the authors fault but I just can't help but think this would have been a better story if the first half had been published when it should have been years ago instead of being shoe horned into something now. Above Average but a low above average.
