Okay I don't set out to be mean on purpose, but I just read this novel and I am not impressed. The book is a forgettable side quest with no lasting repercussions and no major developments. It has internal logical consistency issues, some minor continuity problems, the character interactions feel off, and the dialogue is just awful.
I don't know if Jeffrey Lang reads the forums, so I should probably apologize in advance and try to at least be constructive. It's not the worst Star Trek book I've ever read, but it's the most disappointing one I've read in a while.
I should probably start with my main issue first.
Jeffrey Lang may have a problem with women. Writing women, I mean. And by "may have," I mean that (from this book, at least) it is clear Jeffrey Lang can't write women properly. A problem he seems to get around, apparently, by mostly choosing to omit women from his world wherever possible.
In a sea of men, there are, by my count, a grand total of three female characters who are actually physically present in any scenes in the book... Four, I guess, if you count one that got cut down from spider web but does not otherwise appear. Only two of whom are actually written POV.
One of the two women who actually get POV treatment is in just one expository interlude chapter where her only purpose is to reflect on one of the main character's past development, or infodump on his backstory. Then to cap off that chapter, he has her going off to hook up with a male coworker who had been hitting on her earlier, on some stupid mini-vacation (to his parents cabin or something) that he'd apparently been repeatedly harassing her over to wear her down. This one was a successful Starfleet JAG lawyer, if memory serves. But she was only in the one scene, and half of it was spent deciding she had nothing to lose after all in giving herself to this random man who's been bugging her at work.
If you're having trouble ending a scene for a woman who's just been reflecting on a man's case all afternoon, you could do it by having her snap out of it and realize she's got better shit to do than sit around for hours thinking about boys. Have her go snowboard on the holodeck. Or maybe she's hungry because it's dinner time. Or better yet, she's a lawyer. Hasn't she got important non-gender-specific work to do? Nah, better have her reflect on the fact that only one guy's asked her out lately, and, hey, she's not getting any younger amirite guys?
Some other female characters are mentioned in male dialog but do not actually appear e.g. Keiko, Molly, Ishka, Prinadora (Nog's mom, though her name doesn't appear), but every scene where they come up in conversation has this air of condescending frustration and annoyance at how obnoxious women are for the men to deal with. It's just written as though women are "things" or "obligations" to the men. Nothing substantial is learned about or contributed by women at all in this book.
To hear Miles tell it to his bud Nog on the runabout ride over, Keiko's perpetual angst about moving around to accommodate Miles' career is a huge pain for him to deal with. Molly, at eighteen, is a veritable idiot who can't decide what she wants to do with her life. This month, it's painting large canvasses, a (valueless) exploration of her self-expression. On large, inconvenient physical canvasses, that suitably frustrate Miles (I guess it must be hard to dispose of them or something). Can you imagine! The nerve of her. And Nog laughs along with him. Miles also complains about thirteen-year-old Kirayoshi, although interestingly, the issue with him is his repeated complaints and vocal opposition to being made to live on a space station out in the boonies... An expression of agency, which his father respects, although he disagrees.
The main setting is not DS9, but rather this little privately owned science station called "Robert Hooke" that I think is meant to evoke Regula I (though it looks different on the cover art).
The most significant female character is Nita Bharad, one of the scientists. She is the spider lady (Oh I'm sorry, arachnoform lady; Making that correction is one of the novels running 'gags'). The spiders are either robots, or genetically engineered biological forms, or some type of cybernetic creation; It's insufficiently clear. Probably biological, because I think Nita is described as having a background in genetic engineering (she is also the station's barkeep for unexplained reasons). But her main thing is that she created the spiders, most caringly, and that she loves them very very much (She's a nurturing mother, get it, it's one of the main themes of the book).
The spiders serve as borderline intelligent side-kicks throughout the adventure. They are named Honey and Ginger (both gendered female, because of course they are). Neither one speaks. One is shy and bashful, the other is flirtatious and outgoing. But both of them, in the course of the story, have chosen individual specific men on the station whom they like to run off and be around, watch, and hang out with (Bharad actually refers to this at one point as the spiders having "boyfriends," for whom they have run off, leaving her all alone).
And let me tell you, these spiders they are full of surprises. Whether in situations where new and surprising abilities suddenly emerge just in the nick of time, or in situations that seem to have been contrived simply to fit generic spider tropes, if you ever find yourself trapped inside this particular narrative these spiders are your friends.
Also an aside, Lang seems to deliberately fixate on O'Brien's erstwhile arachnophobia as a character trait, while ignoring the fact that O'Brien conquered that fear long ago by keeping a giant tarantula as a pet. It was named Christina, he trolled Barclay with it in Realm of Fear. But now he's uncomfortable with spiders again. Even though they are artificial creations and specifically established as non-bitey. Hmm maybe it's because they're women.
There's a gratuitous backstory scene, set on the U.S.S. Rutledge, where O'Brien wakes up in bed next to Naomi Chao (whom we later learn is the Ops officer on Rutledge and would go on to be the first officer on Phoenix). The gist of it is, he'd like to get relationshippy with her, but she's just into holodecks and chill. They clarify this in dialogue after O'Brien makes an attempt to control what food she chooses to eat when they are together... She explains she is not ready for a relationship serious enough that the man gets to decide what food she is allowed to eat. As the scene draws to a close, they both have a bit of stress caused by wanting different levels of (what passes for) relationship intimacy (in this book). It's what you get for fucking a fellow space officer without first defining boundaries like a mature adult, I guess.
Now, for whatever reason, this character invented for the purpose of being O'Brien's past onboard sex-hookup would-be girlfriend person is... A human asian woman. I don't know if it's supposed to be a coincidence that I'm bad for even pointing out, or if I'm deliberately meant to get the impression that O'Brien has a type, but I just find the creative choice a little bit overly conspicuous.
In a later flashback scene with this same character, where she (as Phoenix's first officer, mind) confronts O'Brien in the ready room after Maxwell has relieved himself and turned himself over to Enterprise Custody... She's so emotionally overcome that he basically needs to walk over and grip her shoulders to get her attention. It's a "significant breach of protocol," he actually reflects to himself in the scene, but gosh darnit this bitch needs to have some sense shaken into her to snap her out of her debilitating emotional fluster fest. This is how it comes off, whether intentionally or carelessly on the part of the author.
This woman, a commander, the first officer, has just found herself suddenly and unexpectedly responsible for her entire ship and crew. And all she can manage to do is wallow in an open expression of emotional weakness. It's ridiculous. And then, like that's not bad enough, she finishes the scene awkwardly by asking O'Brien about his current relationship status (as he's recently married Keiko at this point), and she's like, painfully, "Hmm. Good for you..." and he literally reflects on the discomfort of the situation as he awkwardly extricates himself from the conversation and skulks back to the Enterprise.
What the actual fuck? My takeaway from the chapter is that I think I'm supposed to pity her, for her earlier refusal to let O'Brien get romantically close to her and choose her food and stuff? Like as if not accepting romantic overtures from a man, any man, is a mistake obviously. It's written like, too bad, you had your chance to be happy, now Keiko's the one who gets to wake up next to all this, and your Captain's in jail for murdering Cardassians; Have fun taking over command of the Phoenix in shame AND BEING SINGLE. What even is the point of this character's arc?
Oh! Oh, and then she's so upset with how the court martial rules on Maxwell's case (the OTHER man in her life, I guess), that she just resigns from Starfleet and disappears into the mist? Jesus Christ, you're a Commander in Starfleet. Have some self-respect and get your life together, girl. It's played like she feels guilty because she went along with Maxwell even though she had some doubts he might have been lying about the Cardassians, and this is like some huge personal failure for her. But men lie. Responsibility is on Benjamin Maxwell for the illegal and immoral things that he did and the lies that he told while he was in a position of trust for his crew, not on Commander Naomi Chao for trusting her Captain and friend and somehow failing to see through it. But this is what women do in this book, they orbit the men, serving only to advance the mens' story, and fall on their own swords when necessary. Ugh. I haven't even gotten to the useless Runabout and the inexplicably convenient subspace interference yet.
There are so many awkward expository scenes, with unnecessary lampshading that just makes it so much worse. "Gee I know we both know all this already, but let's discuss it anyway for shits and giggles." And characters regurgitate the same statements to each other over and over again. Like, we get it, Nog. You don't want to leave the station with O'Brien any more, because bad things tend to happen. O'Brien got it too, the first time you made the whole thing into an awkward joke about Empok Nor. Like hurr hurr, remember when half our team died, huh, remember that, I sure hope nothing disastrous like that happens again today, huh, isn't that funny.
Right about the third time they're like "Gee, I wish Bashir were here," I'm like "We all do, buddy. We all do."
And he brings a Runabout with him in the story, apparently for no other reason than it gets the two main characters to the private space station they need to be at, and to give them somewhere private to exchange uncomfortable expository dialogue on their way there... Like, god forbid they have some other ship drop them off and then leave, everyone knows Runabouts are the only way to travel in style.
But then, it pretty much immediately becomes clear that the Runabout is a huge story problem for him because, if used competently, it would resolve about 90% of the conflict in the book. But he obviously thinks of that at some point in the writing process, because he gets rid of the runabout at one point (though way too late in the story, tbh), by sending it off on autopilot to "find help" like a glorified communication buoy. Why? Because we've got all this "localized subspace interference" at the station.
Except, how exactly?? We need to talk about this fucking radiation, or whatever it is. It's treated as though it's directly causally linked with what's going on in the station, but the connection is very tenuous. Let me go through it.
The antagonist is this mad-scientist dick with a fetish for capitalism (in that his motivation, to Nog's delight, appears to be profit for profit's sake), and he's got this genetically engineered blob in a vat that he created by copying from that highly classified illegal magic gene stuff from Vanguard. Data that he seems to have received from what turns out to be a random Romulan farmer (of the growing-things-in-dirt variety), who is also his client wishing to purchase the death blob for reasons of... Farming. Fair enough.
And this blob escapes by growing tendrils through cracks in its vat, and it proceeds to grow out and around and through the station, punching hull breaches as it goes. This gives rise to incredulous gems such as Benjamin Maxwell fist-fighting a literal zombie in zero-g, and Nog and O'Brien's exchanging witty reparte about forgetting that phasers are standard issue for away missions, as they fight off, and I quote, "giant undead rats," one of which O'Brien manages to fight off using (and this is a direct quote from the book) "the club he had fashioned out of a small crowbar, a mallet, and some duct-tape."
The reanimation of dead creatures is, regrettably, established as one feature of the death blob (which is needlessly gendered female and delightfully referred to as "Mother," by the way). However, no explanation for the rats' gigantism is ever offered, despite specific attention being drawn to it where Lang points out that the cages (from where the rats escaped less than thirty minutes previously) are noticeably too small to fit them.
Where was I? Oh yes magic convenient radiation. So about halfway through the book (when the plot finally starts), the blob creature shenanigans begin when it "escapes containment" and starts punching holes looking for radiation sources to eat energy from. Alarms are set off on the station, and the population of scientists are auto-beamed to the hangar bay, so they can board a couple of rickety escape transports. A reasonable safety measure. I'm getting there are approximately 24 scientists, but specific details like this are consistently almost deliberately obfuscated in this book.
This is where I start to get confused. At first, both transports fly away from the station without much trouble.
The first escape transport pops when little "bugs" (microbes? offspring? tendrils?) from the blob creature break into the transport's warp core and destroy its containment, because they sensed yummy radiation when the scientists tried to power it up to go to warp. Damn, but this thing moves fast when it wants to.
The second transport avoids the same fate by instantly figuring out not to power their engines, because the most logical explanation when you see a shoddily-maintained sister shuttle explode is to assume that creatures ate into its warp core and might come for you also. Then they decide they're totally stranded, because sub-light engines might attract the monster too (they seem to guess this out of nowhere). But if sub-light engines attract the monster too then how exactly did they leave the hangar bay in the first place? On a wing and a prayer?
And now, conveniently at this story beat, suddenly nobody can use transporters or subspace communications anywhere in and around the station because of "localized subspace interference." From what!?? From the first explosion? Warp core breaches don't cause "waves of subspace damage" that interfere with transporters and communication for a "minimum of twenty-three minutes," as its stated in the book. Or is the creature somehow arbitrarily creating interference? If so, how and why?
It seems like this was done as a plot device specifically to make the runabout useless, and to prevent calling for help. This could have been achieved in a much more streamlined manner simply by writing the runabout out of the story entirely (like have them arrive on the station's regular shipment transports that figure prominently elsewhere in the story, these could have come through DS9 given that it's established as a nearby hub), and by rendering the station's subspace transmitter destroyed amidst the other random gratuitous damage that is already going on.
Speaking of the runabout again, conveniently, "someone" has stowed not one, but two, of those EVA thruster packs (like from TMP) on the runabout. These become important in the book for reasons that are not important to mention here. But, Nog even thinks, or says, at one point something like "I'll have to thank" or "I should find out" just who in particular, back at DS9, conveniently chose to stow those two thruster packs on the Runabout that day, since they're not standard equipment. Because as Nog notes, it is pretty randomly convenient. I have a feeling if he does go back and check those records he's going to find it was done by one Lieutenant Jeffrey Lang, with a notation in the log that reads "because reasons."
Here's a crazy idea. Why can't the thruster packs have just come from being part of the equipment from the hangar bay on the station? It's an old Regula-type station, movie-era imagery of the station ties neatly into movie-era imagery of the EVA thruster packs. And two packs has nice symmetry for the two escape transports already established, plus we know there was a workbench and maintenance area in the hangar, and Maxwell presumably has to get around to patch the outside of the station from time to time somehow. Right?
And there's even a stress-out-O'Brien scene where he's out using the pack in space, wondering whether or not he'll have enough juice left in the thrusters to get shit done and save the scientists... Stress and uncertainty which would have made way more sense if they were unreliable outdated packs from the station as opposed to brand new Starfleet-issue units which just happened to be conveniently stashed in that Runabout which shouldn't even have been here complicating your storytelling in the first place.
The book reads like Lang had this cute little mad-scientist alien monster story he desperately wanted to tell and has been working on for a while, and David R. George III (the regular DS9 author) and Margaret Clark (or whoever was editor in charge when this came out) said, at the time, "you can have O'Brien and Nog for a few days at the beginning of January 2386, just don't scuff them up."
I would originally have thought it was mainly "I really desperately want to write a story about what happens to Benjamin Maxwell after The Wounded, what ever happened to him?" but it says in the acknowledgments at the end of the book that including Maxwell in the first place was Clark's idea. I'm forced to wonder what would this book have been without Maxwell in it? About half of the length.
There's an annoying scene earlier on where Nog is chatting with Rom over subspace holo-presence, and there's a third character in the scene that I feel probably started as Vic Fontaine in an earlier draft. Except, somebody told him he can't use Fontaine, because Nog only just finished uploading the program and Vic is still off his meds paranoid and busy running around town hiding from gangsters or whatever (I haven't read chronologically past this point). But instead of reworking the scene properly and paring it down to just Rom, or if he needed another character for dialogue, Quark, or maybe even (god forbid) including that lovely server from Quark's that's taken a liking to him in the past two books (which would have brought up the number of speaking female roles by one)... Instead, he puts in this nondescript holographic lunkhead mook presumably from Bashir '62 as a stand-in for Vic. Why? Because his only friend on the station at this point is a substandard lightbulb? I don't get it. I don't get anything at all about this scene.
I think, somebody on the editorial board at some point noticed "Gee, with Julian either in jail or off being double-oh-seven for all we know, it's a shame we lost that cutesy bromance dynamic with O'Brien. Maybe let's mush Miles and Nog together for a bit and see what comes out of it." And then this nonsense with giant undead rats came out of it, because Jeffrey Lang is just frankly not my cup-of-tea as a Star Trek writer.
As for his other work, I remember really enjoying Immortal Coil and The Light Fantastic. Those were really great. This was not. And now that I think about it, his Voyager String Theory book 1 Cohesion had fucked up interactions between B'elanna and Seven, they couldn't be in a room without catfighting... Like I know they didn't get along well early in season 5, but this was dialed up to 11. Really unprofessional and gender-stereotyped emotions and behaviour. And much as I loved Light Fantastic, I'm just remembering now how Lal was characterized there. Really self-centered, unreasonable bitch-and-a-half.
I think Jeffrey Lang has a problem with women.
I don't know if Jeffrey Lang reads the forums, so I should probably apologize in advance and try to at least be constructive. It's not the worst Star Trek book I've ever read, but it's the most disappointing one I've read in a while.
I should probably start with my main issue first.
Jeffrey Lang may have a problem with women. Writing women, I mean. And by "may have," I mean that (from this book, at least) it is clear Jeffrey Lang can't write women properly. A problem he seems to get around, apparently, by mostly choosing to omit women from his world wherever possible.
In a sea of men, there are, by my count, a grand total of three female characters who are actually physically present in any scenes in the book... Four, I guess, if you count one that got cut down from spider web but does not otherwise appear. Only two of whom are actually written POV.
One of the two women who actually get POV treatment is in just one expository interlude chapter where her only purpose is to reflect on one of the main character's past development, or infodump on his backstory. Then to cap off that chapter, he has her going off to hook up with a male coworker who had been hitting on her earlier, on some stupid mini-vacation (to his parents cabin or something) that he'd apparently been repeatedly harassing her over to wear her down. This one was a successful Starfleet JAG lawyer, if memory serves. But she was only in the one scene, and half of it was spent deciding she had nothing to lose after all in giving herself to this random man who's been bugging her at work.
If you're having trouble ending a scene for a woman who's just been reflecting on a man's case all afternoon, you could do it by having her snap out of it and realize she's got better shit to do than sit around for hours thinking about boys. Have her go snowboard on the holodeck. Or maybe she's hungry because it's dinner time. Or better yet, she's a lawyer. Hasn't she got important non-gender-specific work to do? Nah, better have her reflect on the fact that only one guy's asked her out lately, and, hey, she's not getting any younger amirite guys?
Some other female characters are mentioned in male dialog but do not actually appear e.g. Keiko, Molly, Ishka, Prinadora (Nog's mom, though her name doesn't appear), but every scene where they come up in conversation has this air of condescending frustration and annoyance at how obnoxious women are for the men to deal with. It's just written as though women are "things" or "obligations" to the men. Nothing substantial is learned about or contributed by women at all in this book.
To hear Miles tell it to his bud Nog on the runabout ride over, Keiko's perpetual angst about moving around to accommodate Miles' career is a huge pain for him to deal with. Molly, at eighteen, is a veritable idiot who can't decide what she wants to do with her life. This month, it's painting large canvasses, a (valueless) exploration of her self-expression. On large, inconvenient physical canvasses, that suitably frustrate Miles (I guess it must be hard to dispose of them or something). Can you imagine! The nerve of her. And Nog laughs along with him. Miles also complains about thirteen-year-old Kirayoshi, although interestingly, the issue with him is his repeated complaints and vocal opposition to being made to live on a space station out in the boonies... An expression of agency, which his father respects, although he disagrees.
The main setting is not DS9, but rather this little privately owned science station called "Robert Hooke" that I think is meant to evoke Regula I (though it looks different on the cover art).
The most significant female character is Nita Bharad, one of the scientists. She is the spider lady (Oh I'm sorry, arachnoform lady; Making that correction is one of the novels running 'gags'). The spiders are either robots, or genetically engineered biological forms, or some type of cybernetic creation; It's insufficiently clear. Probably biological, because I think Nita is described as having a background in genetic engineering (she is also the station's barkeep for unexplained reasons). But her main thing is that she created the spiders, most caringly, and that she loves them very very much (She's a nurturing mother, get it, it's one of the main themes of the book).
The spiders serve as borderline intelligent side-kicks throughout the adventure. They are named Honey and Ginger (both gendered female, because of course they are). Neither one speaks. One is shy and bashful, the other is flirtatious and outgoing. But both of them, in the course of the story, have chosen individual specific men on the station whom they like to run off and be around, watch, and hang out with (Bharad actually refers to this at one point as the spiders having "boyfriends," for whom they have run off, leaving her all alone).
And let me tell you, these spiders they are full of surprises. Whether in situations where new and surprising abilities suddenly emerge just in the nick of time, or in situations that seem to have been contrived simply to fit generic spider tropes, if you ever find yourself trapped inside this particular narrative these spiders are your friends.
Also an aside, Lang seems to deliberately fixate on O'Brien's erstwhile arachnophobia as a character trait, while ignoring the fact that O'Brien conquered that fear long ago by keeping a giant tarantula as a pet. It was named Christina, he trolled Barclay with it in Realm of Fear. But now he's uncomfortable with spiders again. Even though they are artificial creations and specifically established as non-bitey. Hmm maybe it's because they're women.
There's a gratuitous backstory scene, set on the U.S.S. Rutledge, where O'Brien wakes up in bed next to Naomi Chao (whom we later learn is the Ops officer on Rutledge and would go on to be the first officer on Phoenix). The gist of it is, he'd like to get relationshippy with her, but she's just into holodecks and chill. They clarify this in dialogue after O'Brien makes an attempt to control what food she chooses to eat when they are together... She explains she is not ready for a relationship serious enough that the man gets to decide what food she is allowed to eat. As the scene draws to a close, they both have a bit of stress caused by wanting different levels of (what passes for) relationship intimacy (in this book). It's what you get for fucking a fellow space officer without first defining boundaries like a mature adult, I guess.
Now, for whatever reason, this character invented for the purpose of being O'Brien's past onboard sex-hookup would-be girlfriend person is... A human asian woman. I don't know if it's supposed to be a coincidence that I'm bad for even pointing out, or if I'm deliberately meant to get the impression that O'Brien has a type, but I just find the creative choice a little bit overly conspicuous.
In a later flashback scene with this same character, where she (as Phoenix's first officer, mind) confronts O'Brien in the ready room after Maxwell has relieved himself and turned himself over to Enterprise Custody... She's so emotionally overcome that he basically needs to walk over and grip her shoulders to get her attention. It's a "significant breach of protocol," he actually reflects to himself in the scene, but gosh darnit this bitch needs to have some sense shaken into her to snap her out of her debilitating emotional fluster fest. This is how it comes off, whether intentionally or carelessly on the part of the author.
This woman, a commander, the first officer, has just found herself suddenly and unexpectedly responsible for her entire ship and crew. And all she can manage to do is wallow in an open expression of emotional weakness. It's ridiculous. And then, like that's not bad enough, she finishes the scene awkwardly by asking O'Brien about his current relationship status (as he's recently married Keiko at this point), and she's like, painfully, "Hmm. Good for you..." and he literally reflects on the discomfort of the situation as he awkwardly extricates himself from the conversation and skulks back to the Enterprise.
What the actual fuck? My takeaway from the chapter is that I think I'm supposed to pity her, for her earlier refusal to let O'Brien get romantically close to her and choose her food and stuff? Like as if not accepting romantic overtures from a man, any man, is a mistake obviously. It's written like, too bad, you had your chance to be happy, now Keiko's the one who gets to wake up next to all this, and your Captain's in jail for murdering Cardassians; Have fun taking over command of the Phoenix in shame AND BEING SINGLE. What even is the point of this character's arc?
Oh! Oh, and then she's so upset with how the court martial rules on Maxwell's case (the OTHER man in her life, I guess), that she just resigns from Starfleet and disappears into the mist? Jesus Christ, you're a Commander in Starfleet. Have some self-respect and get your life together, girl. It's played like she feels guilty because she went along with Maxwell even though she had some doubts he might have been lying about the Cardassians, and this is like some huge personal failure for her. But men lie. Responsibility is on Benjamin Maxwell for the illegal and immoral things that he did and the lies that he told while he was in a position of trust for his crew, not on Commander Naomi Chao for trusting her Captain and friend and somehow failing to see through it. But this is what women do in this book, they orbit the men, serving only to advance the mens' story, and fall on their own swords when necessary. Ugh. I haven't even gotten to the useless Runabout and the inexplicably convenient subspace interference yet.
There are so many awkward expository scenes, with unnecessary lampshading that just makes it so much worse. "Gee I know we both know all this already, but let's discuss it anyway for shits and giggles." And characters regurgitate the same statements to each other over and over again. Like, we get it, Nog. You don't want to leave the station with O'Brien any more, because bad things tend to happen. O'Brien got it too, the first time you made the whole thing into an awkward joke about Empok Nor. Like hurr hurr, remember when half our team died, huh, remember that, I sure hope nothing disastrous like that happens again today, huh, isn't that funny.
Right about the third time they're like "Gee, I wish Bashir were here," I'm like "We all do, buddy. We all do."
And he brings a Runabout with him in the story, apparently for no other reason than it gets the two main characters to the private space station they need to be at, and to give them somewhere private to exchange uncomfortable expository dialogue on their way there... Like, god forbid they have some other ship drop them off and then leave, everyone knows Runabouts are the only way to travel in style.
But then, it pretty much immediately becomes clear that the Runabout is a huge story problem for him because, if used competently, it would resolve about 90% of the conflict in the book. But he obviously thinks of that at some point in the writing process, because he gets rid of the runabout at one point (though way too late in the story, tbh), by sending it off on autopilot to "find help" like a glorified communication buoy. Why? Because we've got all this "localized subspace interference" at the station.
Except, how exactly?? We need to talk about this fucking radiation, or whatever it is. It's treated as though it's directly causally linked with what's going on in the station, but the connection is very tenuous. Let me go through it.
The antagonist is this mad-scientist dick with a fetish for capitalism (in that his motivation, to Nog's delight, appears to be profit for profit's sake), and he's got this genetically engineered blob in a vat that he created by copying from that highly classified illegal magic gene stuff from Vanguard. Data that he seems to have received from what turns out to be a random Romulan farmer (of the growing-things-in-dirt variety), who is also his client wishing to purchase the death blob for reasons of... Farming. Fair enough.
And this blob escapes by growing tendrils through cracks in its vat, and it proceeds to grow out and around and through the station, punching hull breaches as it goes. This gives rise to incredulous gems such as Benjamin Maxwell fist-fighting a literal zombie in zero-g, and Nog and O'Brien's exchanging witty reparte about forgetting that phasers are standard issue for away missions, as they fight off, and I quote, "giant undead rats," one of which O'Brien manages to fight off using (and this is a direct quote from the book) "the club he had fashioned out of a small crowbar, a mallet, and some duct-tape."
The reanimation of dead creatures is, regrettably, established as one feature of the death blob (which is needlessly gendered female and delightfully referred to as "Mother," by the way). However, no explanation for the rats' gigantism is ever offered, despite specific attention being drawn to it where Lang points out that the cages (from where the rats escaped less than thirty minutes previously) are noticeably too small to fit them.
Where was I? Oh yes magic convenient radiation. So about halfway through the book (when the plot finally starts), the blob creature shenanigans begin when it "escapes containment" and starts punching holes looking for radiation sources to eat energy from. Alarms are set off on the station, and the population of scientists are auto-beamed to the hangar bay, so they can board a couple of rickety escape transports. A reasonable safety measure. I'm getting there are approximately 24 scientists, but specific details like this are consistently almost deliberately obfuscated in this book.
This is where I start to get confused. At first, both transports fly away from the station without much trouble.
The first escape transport pops when little "bugs" (microbes? offspring? tendrils?) from the blob creature break into the transport's warp core and destroy its containment, because they sensed yummy radiation when the scientists tried to power it up to go to warp. Damn, but this thing moves fast when it wants to.
The second transport avoids the same fate by instantly figuring out not to power their engines, because the most logical explanation when you see a shoddily-maintained sister shuttle explode is to assume that creatures ate into its warp core and might come for you also. Then they decide they're totally stranded, because sub-light engines might attract the monster too (they seem to guess this out of nowhere). But if sub-light engines attract the monster too then how exactly did they leave the hangar bay in the first place? On a wing and a prayer?
And now, conveniently at this story beat, suddenly nobody can use transporters or subspace communications anywhere in and around the station because of "localized subspace interference." From what!?? From the first explosion? Warp core breaches don't cause "waves of subspace damage" that interfere with transporters and communication for a "minimum of twenty-three minutes," as its stated in the book. Or is the creature somehow arbitrarily creating interference? If so, how and why?
It seems like this was done as a plot device specifically to make the runabout useless, and to prevent calling for help. This could have been achieved in a much more streamlined manner simply by writing the runabout out of the story entirely (like have them arrive on the station's regular shipment transports that figure prominently elsewhere in the story, these could have come through DS9 given that it's established as a nearby hub), and by rendering the station's subspace transmitter destroyed amidst the other random gratuitous damage that is already going on.
Speaking of the runabout again, conveniently, "someone" has stowed not one, but two, of those EVA thruster packs (like from TMP) on the runabout. These become important in the book for reasons that are not important to mention here. But, Nog even thinks, or says, at one point something like "I'll have to thank" or "I should find out" just who in particular, back at DS9, conveniently chose to stow those two thruster packs on the Runabout that day, since they're not standard equipment. Because as Nog notes, it is pretty randomly convenient. I have a feeling if he does go back and check those records he's going to find it was done by one Lieutenant Jeffrey Lang, with a notation in the log that reads "because reasons."
Here's a crazy idea. Why can't the thruster packs have just come from being part of the equipment from the hangar bay on the station? It's an old Regula-type station, movie-era imagery of the station ties neatly into movie-era imagery of the EVA thruster packs. And two packs has nice symmetry for the two escape transports already established, plus we know there was a workbench and maintenance area in the hangar, and Maxwell presumably has to get around to patch the outside of the station from time to time somehow. Right?
And there's even a stress-out-O'Brien scene where he's out using the pack in space, wondering whether or not he'll have enough juice left in the thrusters to get shit done and save the scientists... Stress and uncertainty which would have made way more sense if they were unreliable outdated packs from the station as opposed to brand new Starfleet-issue units which just happened to be conveniently stashed in that Runabout which shouldn't even have been here complicating your storytelling in the first place.
The book reads like Lang had this cute little mad-scientist alien monster story he desperately wanted to tell and has been working on for a while, and David R. George III (the regular DS9 author) and Margaret Clark (or whoever was editor in charge when this came out) said, at the time, "you can have O'Brien and Nog for a few days at the beginning of January 2386, just don't scuff them up."
I would originally have thought it was mainly "I really desperately want to write a story about what happens to Benjamin Maxwell after The Wounded, what ever happened to him?" but it says in the acknowledgments at the end of the book that including Maxwell in the first place was Clark's idea. I'm forced to wonder what would this book have been without Maxwell in it? About half of the length.
There's an annoying scene earlier on where Nog is chatting with Rom over subspace holo-presence, and there's a third character in the scene that I feel probably started as Vic Fontaine in an earlier draft. Except, somebody told him he can't use Fontaine, because Nog only just finished uploading the program and Vic is still off his meds paranoid and busy running around town hiding from gangsters or whatever (I haven't read chronologically past this point). But instead of reworking the scene properly and paring it down to just Rom, or if he needed another character for dialogue, Quark, or maybe even (god forbid) including that lovely server from Quark's that's taken a liking to him in the past two books (which would have brought up the number of speaking female roles by one)... Instead, he puts in this nondescript holographic lunkhead mook presumably from Bashir '62 as a stand-in for Vic. Why? Because his only friend on the station at this point is a substandard lightbulb? I don't get it. I don't get anything at all about this scene.
I think, somebody on the editorial board at some point noticed "Gee, with Julian either in jail or off being double-oh-seven for all we know, it's a shame we lost that cutesy bromance dynamic with O'Brien. Maybe let's mush Miles and Nog together for a bit and see what comes out of it." And then this nonsense with giant undead rats came out of it, because Jeffrey Lang is just frankly not my cup-of-tea as a Star Trek writer.
As for his other work, I remember really enjoying Immortal Coil and The Light Fantastic. Those were really great. This was not. And now that I think about it, his Voyager String Theory book 1 Cohesion had fucked up interactions between B'elanna and Seven, they couldn't be in a room without catfighting... Like I know they didn't get along well early in season 5, but this was dialed up to 11. Really unprofessional and gender-stereotyped emotions and behaviour. And much as I loved Light Fantastic, I'm just remembering now how Lal was characterized there. Really self-centered, unreasonable bitch-and-a-half.
I think Jeffrey Lang has a problem with women.
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