Long post ahead. Consider me inspired by the 200,000 word tome I just finished...
Back when Mission: Gamma first came out, I was in high school, and perhaps a bit more impatient, and David R. George III's writing style annoyed the hell out of me. Everything just took so damn long to happen. Even re-reading it a year later, to catch up to Unity, I wasn't looking forward to it because I hadn't enjoyed it before, and so I failed to enjoy it once again. Thankfully, it appears seven years or so is long enough, and I’m finally over my annoyance, because I just finished another re-read of this and I've spent the whole last three days just enthralled with this thing.
It’s true that his pacing gets a little off towards the end, a result I think of an unchanging adherence to both a new chapter every time a POV shifts and alternating chapters between the station and the GQ, creating a kind of fragmented climax. But aside from that, his writing serves more as a change in emphasis; it’s not that he writes too much, but that he writes about characters thoughts and internal conflicts more than about what they do. In fact, in this one I started to notice several places where he actually skipped right over important events, even within a scene, to get to a place where a character would have the chance to mull something over. At the beginning, it results in a lot of perhaps unnecessary recapping, but it serves to get into the heads of everyone and define the conflicts that form the basis of their arcs for the story, and that's about the worst I can say about it.
And those conflicts are where the book starts to shine: everyone has an arc that’s interesting – Vaughn, Prynn, Ro, Quark, Shar, and Kira certainly, but also Taran’atar, Kasidy, Bashir, Ezri, and even Nog in a few scenes early on. It’s remarkable, how well the emotional arcs are realized in this book, actually; usually, Star Trek is at its best when it’s exploring aspects of the human condition in abstract or at intellectual distance, as with characters like Data and The Doctor, or even metaphor-writ-hugely-literal situations like the entire dimension of loneliness that this book presents. But where onscreen Trek, especially TNG, would’ve just used that as the nifty idea for the episode, and maybe had Picard give a monologue about it, this used it as the foundation for some real character growth with Prynn and Vaughn.
It’s deep and genuine growth, too; the reuniting of estranged parents/children is just about as clichéd as stories come, and I can’t imagine it playing this well on any of the actual Trek TV shows, but here it has the force of a lot of introspection behind it and feels absolutely real. The use of the metaphor-writ-hugely-literal, entire-planet-annihilated kind of situation to push the characters towards human reflection is basically the very reason science fiction exists as a form of entertainment in the first place, and rarely have I seen that balance so well struck.
And while we’re at it, he makes Quark and Ro fall in love, and he makes that completely believable and genuine too! I bet if you’d taken any 12 random DS9 fans and told them that was what was going to happen here before Avatar came out, and possibly even before Twilight came out, they’d have laughed in your face about it. But as DRG3 writes it, it’s inevitable, it’s opposites attracting, it’s clearly what’s supposed to happen with both characters. And again, the large scale is used perfectly to counterpoint and motivate the small scale, as the 7.5-year-long story of Bajor’s admission to the Federation finally comes (or begins to come) to a conclusion.
The aforementioned pacing problems do present a bit of an annoyance with this last one, as her scenes sort of interrupt the climax of the other stories, but even Kasidy’s story of slowly becoming friends with her local Bajoran village plays well, and I’ve never really liked her very much.
But aside from all these accomplishments individually, it’s a remarkable thematic unity that is most surprising and powerful here, and this is thing that I had missed completely on earlier reads: every story resonates somehow with the theme of overcoming isolation or loneliness. It’s odd, how perfectly placed this story is; at this point, we’ve established the new status quo and had a couple of adventures to get to know everyone, but it’s still early on enough in the new paradigm that people haven’t really made any friends yet. A lot of the power of WYLB was in the scenes of all the big friendships and romances breaking up to end the show, and here is the balance and acknowledgement of that. He found a theme in the ongoing DS9 narrative that was hidden or only hinted at before, but that was manifest in every character to some degree, and made a story out of exploring that theme from every perspective and in doing so overcoming it for all involved. Even Bajor, really, as it finally overcomes isolation and joins the Federation.
The only thing I can think to compare it to is Lover’s Walk on Buffy, one of my absolute favorite episodes, when suddenly 3 unconnected stories are all about the same thing, and the episode becomes more than just a story, it becomes a canvas upon which the viewer can explore their own feelings. This novel accomplishes the same thing, and the implications of the story will be part of my own introspection for a long time. I'm amazed I missed this thematic resonance before, concentrating too much on the trees rather than the forest, I suppose, but I’m glad I picked up on it now. It’s a wonderful experience to finally understand this book, and to add it as so many others have to my list of all-time favorites.
And now I think I may finally tackle Crucible
Back when Mission: Gamma first came out, I was in high school, and perhaps a bit more impatient, and David R. George III's writing style annoyed the hell out of me. Everything just took so damn long to happen. Even re-reading it a year later, to catch up to Unity, I wasn't looking forward to it because I hadn't enjoyed it before, and so I failed to enjoy it once again. Thankfully, it appears seven years or so is long enough, and I’m finally over my annoyance, because I just finished another re-read of this and I've spent the whole last three days just enthralled with this thing.
It’s true that his pacing gets a little off towards the end, a result I think of an unchanging adherence to both a new chapter every time a POV shifts and alternating chapters between the station and the GQ, creating a kind of fragmented climax. But aside from that, his writing serves more as a change in emphasis; it’s not that he writes too much, but that he writes about characters thoughts and internal conflicts more than about what they do. In fact, in this one I started to notice several places where he actually skipped right over important events, even within a scene, to get to a place where a character would have the chance to mull something over. At the beginning, it results in a lot of perhaps unnecessary recapping, but it serves to get into the heads of everyone and define the conflicts that form the basis of their arcs for the story, and that's about the worst I can say about it.
And those conflicts are where the book starts to shine: everyone has an arc that’s interesting – Vaughn, Prynn, Ro, Quark, Shar, and Kira certainly, but also Taran’atar, Kasidy, Bashir, Ezri, and even Nog in a few scenes early on. It’s remarkable, how well the emotional arcs are realized in this book, actually; usually, Star Trek is at its best when it’s exploring aspects of the human condition in abstract or at intellectual distance, as with characters like Data and The Doctor, or even metaphor-writ-hugely-literal situations like the entire dimension of loneliness that this book presents. But where onscreen Trek, especially TNG, would’ve just used that as the nifty idea for the episode, and maybe had Picard give a monologue about it, this used it as the foundation for some real character growth with Prynn and Vaughn.
It’s deep and genuine growth, too; the reuniting of estranged parents/children is just about as clichéd as stories come, and I can’t imagine it playing this well on any of the actual Trek TV shows, but here it has the force of a lot of introspection behind it and feels absolutely real. The use of the metaphor-writ-hugely-literal, entire-planet-annihilated kind of situation to push the characters towards human reflection is basically the very reason science fiction exists as a form of entertainment in the first place, and rarely have I seen that balance so well struck.
And while we’re at it, he makes Quark and Ro fall in love, and he makes that completely believable and genuine too! I bet if you’d taken any 12 random DS9 fans and told them that was what was going to happen here before Avatar came out, and possibly even before Twilight came out, they’d have laughed in your face about it. But as DRG3 writes it, it’s inevitable, it’s opposites attracting, it’s clearly what’s supposed to happen with both characters. And again, the large scale is used perfectly to counterpoint and motivate the small scale, as the 7.5-year-long story of Bajor’s admission to the Federation finally comes (or begins to come) to a conclusion.
The aforementioned pacing problems do present a bit of an annoyance with this last one, as her scenes sort of interrupt the climax of the other stories, but even Kasidy’s story of slowly becoming friends with her local Bajoran village plays well, and I’ve never really liked her very much.
But aside from all these accomplishments individually, it’s a remarkable thematic unity that is most surprising and powerful here, and this is thing that I had missed completely on earlier reads: every story resonates somehow with the theme of overcoming isolation or loneliness. It’s odd, how perfectly placed this story is; at this point, we’ve established the new status quo and had a couple of adventures to get to know everyone, but it’s still early on enough in the new paradigm that people haven’t really made any friends yet. A lot of the power of WYLB was in the scenes of all the big friendships and romances breaking up to end the show, and here is the balance and acknowledgement of that. He found a theme in the ongoing DS9 narrative that was hidden or only hinted at before, but that was manifest in every character to some degree, and made a story out of exploring that theme from every perspective and in doing so overcoming it for all involved. Even Bajor, really, as it finally overcomes isolation and joins the Federation.
The only thing I can think to compare it to is Lover’s Walk on Buffy, one of my absolute favorite episodes, when suddenly 3 unconnected stories are all about the same thing, and the episode becomes more than just a story, it becomes a canvas upon which the viewer can explore their own feelings. This novel accomplishes the same thing, and the implications of the story will be part of my own introspection for a long time. I'm amazed I missed this thematic resonance before, concentrating too much on the trees rather than the forest, I suppose, but I’m glad I picked up on it now. It’s a wonderful experience to finally understand this book, and to add it as so many others have to my list of all-time favorites.
And now I think I may finally tackle Crucible
