Novels for a DS9 Rewatch?
- Thread starter Stevil2001
- Start date
My reading has been slow of late, but that's okay; so has my watching! (I'm not convinced we're even averaging an episode per week right now.) Like I said I might, I'm actually doing two novels for Season 6; the first of them is the only episode novelization in this reread, Steven Barnes's novel of Far Beyond the Stars.
Far Beyond the Stars is pretty unique. In the era where Pocket did episode novelizations, typically the only episodes to receive them were multi-parters (so usually finales/premieres): Unification, Descent, The Search, Caretaker. The only real exception to this were TOS crossovers; I feel pretty certain in stating that Relics, Flashback, and Trials and Tribble-ations are the only 45-minutes episodes to be novelized.
Except for "Far Beyond the Stars." This is, of course, one of the greatest, most heart-breaking Star Trek episodes, and as Keith R.A. DeCandido's excellent writeup points out, even sixteen years later, it's sadly still relevant in an era where a man of color is rarely a dramatic lead in genre television. Despite the episode's quality, I have to wonder why this book exists: DS9 produced many excellent hours of television, and it's not like John Ordover called up anyone when the scripts for "In the Pale Moonlight" or "Duet" crossed his desk.
But I'm glad it does. Steven Barnes's novel was actually my original exposure to this story. Watching DS9 in its original run in the late 1990s, "Far Beyond the Stars" was one of those episodes I just happened to miss, and in those days, there wasn't much you could do about that; I didn't see it until sometime after it hit DVD in late 2003. The book caught my eye in the bookstore because of that awesome retro cover, and I purchased it on a whim, and loved it. I loved it so much that when I finally saw the episode on DVD, I was almost disappointed.
To get 45 minutes out to 262 pages, Barnes adds a whole subplot about Benny Russell's childhood; it's essentially a miniature bildungsroman, and once Sisko is subsumed into Sisko's vision, the book shuffles back and forth between Benny coming of age in 1940 and his attempt to publish "Deep Space Nine" in 1953. Perhaps oddly, the 1940 plot probably takes up more of the book. In it, Benny goes on a school trip to the 1939 New York World's Fair, where he encounters an Orb of the Prophets that crashed-landed in Africa centuries ago, which gives him visions: visions of lottery numbers, and of actions people take. Eventually these subside-- until the preacher in 1953 reactivates them-- but in the meantime, Benny gets into fights, makes a windfall, falls in love, and experiences loss. It's a typical coming-of-age narrative in some senses, and I can see why I liked it so much at age 13, even if it didn't quite grip me as much now.
There are a couple of potent scenes here: one of which is Benny's realization upon leaving the World's Fair that the future only contains white people. I have a friend who studies World's Fairs, actually, and one thing she's told me about is the idea that people building fairs often discussed them in terms of literally constructing the future in the present day. As a middle-class, cis, white, straight male, I've never not seen myself in the future-- here, people have gone to great effort to build a future that doesn't contain anyone like Benny Russell. But at the same time he's still captivated by it. Despite the absence of people like him, it's still a world he wants to live in, all glimmering geometric shapes.
One of the most powerful sequences is when 1940 Benny returns to the exhibition hall where he saw the Orb, and he sees all the Bennys who preceded him, all the way back into the mists of prehistory in Africa, and all the Bennys who will follow him, including:
Barnes doesn't add as much to the 1953 sequences, and to be honest, they're not quite as powerful as their television counterpart, lacking Avery Brooks's spell-binding performance. That's the part of the episode I didn't appreciate that when I watched that DVD in 2003 as much as I do now, though what's always gotten to me in both the screen and prose versions is the scene where Benny is beaten by the Dukat and Weyoun cops for no real reason. How awful an indictment of our society it is that things like that still happen over sixty years after this scene takes place. We may be inching into the Star Trek future, but we have a long way to go.
Continuity Note:
Barnes adds a scene where Kira returns from Bajor with word from Shakaar and the Council of Ministers that the Federation will not be allowed to carry out mining operations vital to the war effort on the surface of Bajor. It's the only real addition to the frame story, though it doesn't quite fit with Kira's trip to see Shakaar a few episodes later in "His Way"; no one in that episode acts like Kira has already recently spent a few days on Bajor with Shakaar!
Other Note:
There's a scene in the 1953 segment where Benny imagines his personal future:
He divides Stage Three into three gambits for thinking about the way society develops: a) What if--, b) If only--, and c) If this goes on--. Stage Three-B is basically utopian stories, and Stage Three-C dystopian ones, while Stage Three-A is more detached sociological speculation, without the intention of providing a positive or negative models. It doesn't really have any implication for the scene to know this, I don't think (after all, Benny's Stage Three-C rumination is hardly dystopian!), but I felt smart that I did.
EDIT: Actually, on skimming back through the book, I realized they actually came up for the first time much earlier, when Benny reflects on his first in-person meeting with Pabst, the editor of Incredible Tales. Benny there calls them "the three primary postulates which motivated the entire field."
EDIT EDIT: Googling shows me that these three postulates have been credited to a number of people, including Robert Heinlein. James Gunn calls Stages Three-A and -C "conventional wisdom," and claims that Stage Three-B is Theodore Sturgeon's addition to that. But unless Asimov is plagiarizing in his introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction, this formulation originates with him.
Far Beyond the Stars is pretty unique. In the era where Pocket did episode novelizations, typically the only episodes to receive them were multi-parters (so usually finales/premieres): Unification, Descent, The Search, Caretaker. The only real exception to this were TOS crossovers; I feel pretty certain in stating that Relics, Flashback, and Trials and Tribble-ations are the only 45-minutes episodes to be novelized.
Except for "Far Beyond the Stars." This is, of course, one of the greatest, most heart-breaking Star Trek episodes, and as Keith R.A. DeCandido's excellent writeup points out, even sixteen years later, it's sadly still relevant in an era where a man of color is rarely a dramatic lead in genre television. Despite the episode's quality, I have to wonder why this book exists: DS9 produced many excellent hours of television, and it's not like John Ordover called up anyone when the scripts for "In the Pale Moonlight" or "Duet" crossed his desk.
But I'm glad it does. Steven Barnes's novel was actually my original exposure to this story. Watching DS9 in its original run in the late 1990s, "Far Beyond the Stars" was one of those episodes I just happened to miss, and in those days, there wasn't much you could do about that; I didn't see it until sometime after it hit DVD in late 2003. The book caught my eye in the bookstore because of that awesome retro cover, and I purchased it on a whim, and loved it. I loved it so much that when I finally saw the episode on DVD, I was almost disappointed.
To get 45 minutes out to 262 pages, Barnes adds a whole subplot about Benny Russell's childhood; it's essentially a miniature bildungsroman, and once Sisko is subsumed into Sisko's vision, the book shuffles back and forth between Benny coming of age in 1940 and his attempt to publish "Deep Space Nine" in 1953. Perhaps oddly, the 1940 plot probably takes up more of the book. In it, Benny goes on a school trip to the 1939 New York World's Fair, where he encounters an Orb of the Prophets that crashed-landed in Africa centuries ago, which gives him visions: visions of lottery numbers, and of actions people take. Eventually these subside-- until the preacher in 1953 reactivates them-- but in the meantime, Benny gets into fights, makes a windfall, falls in love, and experiences loss. It's a typical coming-of-age narrative in some senses, and I can see why I liked it so much at age 13, even if it didn't quite grip me as much now.
There are a couple of potent scenes here: one of which is Benny's realization upon leaving the World's Fair that the future only contains white people. I have a friend who studies World's Fairs, actually, and one thing she's told me about is the idea that people building fairs often discussed them in terms of literally constructing the future in the present day. As a middle-class, cis, white, straight male, I've never not seen myself in the future-- here, people have gone to great effort to build a future that doesn't contain anyone like Benny Russell. But at the same time he's still captivated by it. Despite the absence of people like him, it's still a world he wants to live in, all glimmering geometric shapes.
One of the most powerful sequences is when 1940 Benny returns to the exhibition hall where he saw the Orb, and he sees all the Bennys who preceded him, all the way back into the mists of prehistory in Africa, and all the Bennys who will follow him, including:
In the Obama era, this line takes on an additional overtone which gave me chills, because it only adds to the message that Benny receives in this vision: things will get better. Never as fast or as well as we would like, not in this era of police shootings and the prison-industrial complex, but they can improve. We can build a future that does include people who look like Benny Russell, and Star Trek is part of that.
Barnes doesn't add as much to the 1953 sequences, and to be honest, they're not quite as powerful as their television counterpart, lacking Avery Brooks's spell-binding performance. That's the part of the episode I didn't appreciate that when I watched that DVD in 2003 as much as I do now, though what's always gotten to me in both the screen and prose versions is the scene where Benny is beaten by the Dukat and Weyoun cops for no real reason. How awful an indictment of our society it is that things like that still happen over sixty years after this scene takes place. We may be inching into the Star Trek future, but we have a long way to go.
Continuity Note:
Barnes adds a scene where Kira returns from Bajor with word from Shakaar and the Council of Ministers that the Federation will not be allowed to carry out mining operations vital to the war effort on the surface of Bajor. It's the only real addition to the frame story, though it doesn't quite fit with Kira's trip to see Shakaar a few episodes later in "His Way"; no one in that episode acts like Kira has already recently spent a few days on Bajor with Shakaar!
Other Note:
There's a scene in the 1953 segment where Benny imagines his personal future:
The bits in italics (emphasis in original) actually come from Isaac Asimov's typology of science fiction. I'm not sure if it originated there, but I first encountered it in his introduction to the 1962 anthology More Soviet Science Fiction. Asimov posits that American science fiction had three developmental stages: 1) adventure dominant, 2) technology dominant, and 3) sociology dominant. (This, he says, is ground he covered in the introduction to Soviet Science Fiction, which I've actually never read.)
He divides Stage Three into three gambits for thinking about the way society develops: a) What if--, b) If only--, and c) If this goes on--. Stage Three-B is basically utopian stories, and Stage Three-C dystopian ones, while Stage Three-A is more detached sociological speculation, without the intention of providing a positive or negative models. It doesn't really have any implication for the scene to know this, I don't think (after all, Benny's Stage Three-C rumination is hardly dystopian!), but I felt smart that I did.
EDIT: Actually, on skimming back through the book, I realized they actually came up for the first time much earlier, when Benny reflects on his first in-person meeting with Pabst, the editor of Incredible Tales. Benny there calls them "the three primary postulates which motivated the entire field."
EDIT EDIT: Googling shows me that these three postulates have been credited to a number of people, including Robert Heinlein. James Gunn calls Stages Three-A and -C "conventional wisdom," and claims that Stage Three-B is Theodore Sturgeon's addition to that. But unless Asimov is plagiarizing in his introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction, this formulation originates with him.
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I'm afraid you missed one: Voyager: Day of Honor: The Television Episode. It was novelized as a companion volume to the DoH novel miniseries. I remember reading it once, but I don't remember if anything was added to pad it out.
I've never read More Soviet Science Fiction, but I have encountered that list of story foundations, probably in reading Asimov. I'm not sure whether he was the first to sum it up in those terms, but it seems to me that all the writers you mentioned probably knew each other and talked to each other, so it may be something they worked out over the course of their discussions about their work, rather than something unique to one person. After all, it's really just a description/codification of what SF writers had already been doing for a long time.
Aha, I did miss one!
I remember that it adds a subplot about the Doctor researching holidays while he tries to devise his own traditions. I don't know if it adds anything else; that doesn't seem like it would gain you very many pages.
I remember that it adds a subplot about the Doctor researching holidays while he tries to devise his own traditions. I don't know if it adds anything else; that doesn't seem like it would gain you very many pages.
Excellent review, Stevil2001!
I think it's the best review I've ever read.
Wow, thanks guys!
Anyone interested in this discussion of science fiction story types (
) should check out my most recent blog post, where I explore Asimov's concepts and investigate their afterlives, based on research I initially did for this thread: http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2015/11/isaac-asimovs-typology-of-science.htmlI've also started posting polished and updated versions of the reviews from this thread, though so far only the one for The Siege is up: http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/search/label/subseries: deep space 9
So my second book for Season Six is Una McCormack's Hollow Men, the first of these novels to be written well after the series was over-- six years after in this case-- which means it "fits" very well, coming in between "In the Pale Moonlight" and "His Way," building on some aspects of the former, and setting up some of the latter.
As I rewatch Deep Space Nine, I've been reading the reviews by Zach Handlen at The A.V. Club; Handlen is an intelligent, thoughtful tv critic, and one thing he occasionally brings up is that the series never brings up what Sisko and Garak did together. It doesn't even hint at it. Which he likes, because it lets you imagine that they're each living with it in their own way.
So, I was a little trepidatious as a I reread Hollow Men, wondering if it really made sense to follow up on "In the Pale Moonlight." In this story, Sisko and Garak travel to Earth together for a conference on how the war will be conducted now that the Romulans have joined in. McCormack writes Garak like she was born to do it, and that's the real highlight of this novel. Garak on Earth is an utter delight, from his continual sighing at people's obsession with Shakespeare to his utter disbelief that Starfleet permits antiwar protests. Garak might be fighting with the Federation, but McCormack never lets you forget that this is because he believes in the Cardassian way of life, and wants to preserve it. Living on Deep Space 9 hasn't made him go soft. Andrew Robinson's voice sings off the page with every line.
I'm not are sure about Sisko's throughline, I think because his emotional doubts resolve a tad too easily. I do like that he keeps seeking punishment for what he did, and no one will give it to him (a nice foreshadowing of what we learn about Ross in Season Seven). His conversations with his father, his sister, Garak, and his old friend-turned-peace-activist Tomas Rodier are all handled quite well. But the resolution he reaches at the end is a little too trite to ring true in the context of "In the Pale Moonlight," and I wish McCormack had left him more unsettled.
McCormack has a handle on all the characters, except that I thought they were a little too snippy with each other sometimes; all those years watching Blake's 7 bleeding in, I suppose. But in the meantime, Kira, Odo, Quark, and Bashir are up to some hijinks on the station, and though these foreshadow some turns the series will take in Season Seven, they also fill in some emotional gaps, such as Odo and Kira processing the hurt of the Occupation arc enough for Odo to believe in a relationship. Bashir struggling with playing spy games after learning about Section 31 in "Inquisition" and putting aside Secret Agent for Vic Fontaine is a nice touch.
This is my second time reading it, and I'm not entirely sure what Section 31 was up to in the Rodier plot, but I enjoyed it. Hollow Men is a novel about people finding their moral limits, and Rodier's were much further along than Sisko's-- though not, as we are reminded, anywhere near as far as Garak's. This is a book about compromised people, and what happens when they reach those limits, and how complicated the world turns out to be.
Like a lot of gaps in media franchises, I'm not entirely convinced this one needed to be filled by a tie-in story. But don't let that fool you: this is a great book, and worth reading. Would it be that all continuity gaps could be filled this well. The prose sings much more than in your usual Star Trek novel; McCormack is the best writer of the seven I've read so far, except for maybe Steven Barnes. There's a real style to this, and I enjoyed almost every word of it, and McCormack never fails to make these characters and their world real.
Continuity Notes:
* Cretak appears here, "before" her first appearance in Season Seven, which is kind of nice. I like Cretak.
* Ben Sisko also gets to see his dad for the second time this year, and of course he'll be back on Earth just a couple months after this too! We also finally meet Ben's sister Judith, briefly mentioned in "Past Tense" and "Homefront," but never seen on screen. She's established to be a concert musician, which I think is meant to explain why we never see her when Ben comes to Earth; she's always on tour! (Retcon why Ben looks forward to seeing her but not his father on his visit to Earth in "Past Tense," though.)
Almost halfway through Season Seven right now, so we're nearing the end! I think I'm gonna do Prophecy and Change for Season Seven, as I think its nuances would benefit from being read in close proximity to the show, and I'll save A Stitch in Time for a putative DS9 relaunch reread I've been toying with.
As I rewatch Deep Space Nine, I've been reading the reviews by Zach Handlen at The A.V. Club; Handlen is an intelligent, thoughtful tv critic, and one thing he occasionally brings up is that the series never brings up what Sisko and Garak did together. It doesn't even hint at it. Which he likes, because it lets you imagine that they're each living with it in their own way.
So, I was a little trepidatious as a I reread Hollow Men, wondering if it really made sense to follow up on "In the Pale Moonlight." In this story, Sisko and Garak travel to Earth together for a conference on how the war will be conducted now that the Romulans have joined in. McCormack writes Garak like she was born to do it, and that's the real highlight of this novel. Garak on Earth is an utter delight, from his continual sighing at people's obsession with Shakespeare to his utter disbelief that Starfleet permits antiwar protests. Garak might be fighting with the Federation, but McCormack never lets you forget that this is because he believes in the Cardassian way of life, and wants to preserve it. Living on Deep Space 9 hasn't made him go soft. Andrew Robinson's voice sings off the page with every line.
I'm not are sure about Sisko's throughline, I think because his emotional doubts resolve a tad too easily. I do like that he keeps seeking punishment for what he did, and no one will give it to him (a nice foreshadowing of what we learn about Ross in Season Seven). His conversations with his father, his sister, Garak, and his old friend-turned-peace-activist Tomas Rodier are all handled quite well. But the resolution he reaches at the end is a little too trite to ring true in the context of "In the Pale Moonlight," and I wish McCormack had left him more unsettled.
McCormack has a handle on all the characters, except that I thought they were a little too snippy with each other sometimes; all those years watching Blake's 7 bleeding in, I suppose. But in the meantime, Kira, Odo, Quark, and Bashir are up to some hijinks on the station, and though these foreshadow some turns the series will take in Season Seven, they also fill in some emotional gaps, such as Odo and Kira processing the hurt of the Occupation arc enough for Odo to believe in a relationship. Bashir struggling with playing spy games after learning about Section 31 in "Inquisition" and putting aside Secret Agent for Vic Fontaine is a nice touch.
This is my second time reading it, and I'm not entirely sure what Section 31 was up to in the Rodier plot, but I enjoyed it. Hollow Men is a novel about people finding their moral limits, and Rodier's were much further along than Sisko's-- though not, as we are reminded, anywhere near as far as Garak's. This is a book about compromised people, and what happens when they reach those limits, and how complicated the world turns out to be.
Like a lot of gaps in media franchises, I'm not entirely convinced this one needed to be filled by a tie-in story. But don't let that fool you: this is a great book, and worth reading. Would it be that all continuity gaps could be filled this well. The prose sings much more than in your usual Star Trek novel; McCormack is the best writer of the seven I've read so far, except for maybe Steven Barnes. There's a real style to this, and I enjoyed almost every word of it, and McCormack never fails to make these characters and their world real.
Continuity Notes:
* Cretak appears here, "before" her first appearance in Season Seven, which is kind of nice. I like Cretak.
* Ben Sisko also gets to see his dad for the second time this year, and of course he'll be back on Earth just a couple months after this too! We also finally meet Ben's sister Judith, briefly mentioned in "Past Tense" and "Homefront," but never seen on screen. She's established to be a concert musician, which I think is meant to explain why we never see her when Ben comes to Earth; she's always on tour! (Retcon why Ben looks forward to seeing her but not his father on his visit to Earth in "Past Tense," though.)
Almost halfway through Season Seven right now, so we're nearing the end! I think I'm gonna do Prophecy and Change for Season Seven, as I think its nuances would benefit from being read in close proximity to the show, and I'll save A Stitch in Time for a putative DS9 relaunch reread I've been toying with.
I am surprised no one suggested reading The Never-ending Sacrifice after season 7. It follows the Cardassian adopted by bajorans from...season 2? Or season 1? And ties into events throughout the series and just after.
It's also so good it almost stands separate from Star Trek as a piece of literature in its own right.
The only other book I have read that covers the war was Battle For Betazed...
Which was good for showing the more nuanced Lwxana we see on ds9 alongside her daughter, and whose cover is both awesome and disproves the IMO insane idea that starfleet has regular ground troops or Maco by the 24th century, or at the very least...that the ground troops we saw on screen in ds9 were just starfleet in different uniforms as seemed to be intended.
It's also so good it almost stands separate from Star Trek as a piece of literature in its own right.
The only other book I have read that covers the war was Battle For Betazed...
Which was good for showing the more nuanced Lwxana we see on ds9 alongside her daughter, and whose cover is both awesome and disproves the IMO insane idea that starfleet has regular ground troops or Maco by the 24th century, or at the very least...that the ground troops we saw on screen in ds9 were just starfleet in different uniforms as seemed to be intended.
Thanks! I'd like to, because I don't think I ever reread any of the post-2003 books (I think I did a reread of everything that had come out prior to Unity), but I have so much to read, adding over 30 books to my pile I've already read once seems ridiculous!
I think Defcon did. I do want to reread it-- gotta love Una-- but doesn't it go well beyond the series chronologically?
Fifteen months after we started, we've watched the whole show, so I'll shortly be reading Prophecy and Change-- but this has been a heckuva ride. The finale is great. I mean, I would have done a lot of stuff differently (particularly with Dukat/Winn/the Prophets/Sisko, and also why was there no Jake/Nog scene!?), but I like the feeling of a chapter ending, and all these people moving on to do new and different things. It's exactly the opposite of TNG's ending, and each is perfect for its show.
Zack Hadlen's recaps at The AV Club are always good, but his one of "What You Leave Behind" is great:
Zack Hadlen's recaps at The AV Club are always good, but his one of "What You Leave Behind" is great:
I thought we were moving through this show slowly, but I guess one season every two months isn't so bad. (I'm not much of a binger.)
Prophecy and Change! This seemed like a good book to read when the television program was fresh in my memory, since it weaves between its episodes. There are ten stories, plus a frame, though not every season gets a story, as we shall see, as the book is weighted toward the later parts of the series run. Not every character does, either; though the book does a decent job of giving each a tale of their own, poor Worf doesn't receive a tale of his own.
"Ha'mara" by Kevin G. Summers (Sisko and Kira, Season One)
Like a lot of stories in this book, "Ha'mara" slots pretty clearly between episodes, in this case coming shortly after "Emissary." Something my wife and I noticed when (re)watching the series was that Sisko's status as the Emissary goes weirdly unmentioned between "Emissary" and "In the Hands of the Prophets." This is especially a weird omission because the only person Kai Opaka tells about Sisko being the Emissary in "Emissary" is Sisko himself, yet by the time of "In the Hands," it's public knowledge. So when did this revelation happen and what effect did it happen? That's the ground covered by "Ha'mara," where a group of Bajoran terrorists attack Sisko, Kira, and company on a visit to Bajor. Kira and Sisko have to work together to stay alive and save a group of Bajoran children; Kira's personal journey to accepting Sisko as the Emissary (I don't think the show deals with this until Season Three, bizarrely enough, though "Destiny" does try to explain why it's never been mentioned before) is the focus here, presumably a stand-in for the journey the whole planet will undergo. It's kind of an awkward story when it comes to the interpersonal interactions, but I think that's largely because Summers does a good job of capturing the awkwardness of the crew dynamics in Season One. (Bashir is a doofus.)
It was disappointing to me that there was no Season Two story, as I feel like early Season Two is one of the show's best periods.
"The Orb of Opportunity" by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels (Nog and Kai Winn, Season Three)
The team-up you never knew you wanted! When the Maquis steal an Orb that's being returned to the Bajorans, Nog proves to be Kai Winn's best hope of recovering it. It's a cute little tale, especially when Nog receives an Orb vision that opens him up to possibilities he'd never seen before. Martin and Mangels handle this well; the story could easily have drifted into "explaining" where Nog's desire to join Starfleet came from, but instead the Orb unlocks something within Nog that he didn't know was there before. The focus on Winn is a little less successful; she's a difficult character to get right, and Martin and Mangels are better than some, but not as good as others, and she doesn't have a very clearly delineated character arc.
"Broken Oaths" by Keith R.A. DeCandido (O'Brien and Bashir, Season Four)
Definitely another gap-filling tale, in this case: how did O'Brien and Bashir overcome the rift in their friendship that was caused by "Hippocratic Oath"? Keith, as always, captures the character voices well, but I'm not convinced that this is a story that needed to be told. Or rather, that telling it in the tie-in fiction does much good. The show could have done something with this, but didn't; writing a short story about it eight years later doesn't really solve the problem that it seems to have no ramifications for their friendship.
"...Loved I Not Honor More" by Christopher L. Bennett (Quark, Season Five)
It's a bit disappointing that the show never brought Grilka back (or even mentioned her) after her two appearances on the show; Bennett, of course, explains that for us. It's true to the characters, and I like how it points out that Quark was willing to compromise with Grilka, but Grilka was never willing to compromise with Quark, and that proves the divisive point that means they can't have an ongoing relationship. But like "Broken Oaths," I think it feels largely like gap-plugging.
"Three Sides to Every Story" by Terri Osborne (Jake Sisko and Tora Ziyal, Season Six)
Something my wife and I noted is that there's a period on the show where there are tons of kids running around: Jake, Nog, Ziyal, and Alexander are all there in late Season Five / early Season Six. Yet the show never does anything with this: I feel like there ought to have been one episode that brought these characters together. "Three Sides to Every Story" weaves through the Season Six Occupation arc (one of my favorite periods of the show) to invent a relationship between Jake and Ziyal. And it's brilliant. Suddenly these two characters we never saw interact on screen have a deep and meaningful relationship that makes perfect sense. Ziyal's death hits even harder in this context, and both characters get to show their stuff. Jake really falls by the wayside on the show after this arc on the show, which was a real shame, but "Three Sides" is Jake at his best.
"The Devil You Know" by Heather Jarman (Jadzia Dax, Season Six)
Jadzia is another character who fell by the wayside on the television series sometimes. The stories that deal with her as a Trill in the first couple seasons ("Dax," "Invasive Procedures," "Equilibrium") always make her a bystander in her own tale, subject to the minutiae of space biology. Later in the show, episodes that are ostensibly about her really become about her and Worf; her best moments really come as a side character in other stories. Like, she's great as a member of the ensemble, but the writers struggle to give her her own episodes. "The Devil You Know" falls into none of these traps, however, giving us a story that is very Jadzia and very Trill in a way that's revelatory: Jadzia Dax is tired of death. The war hits her even harder than it hits everyone else because she has already seen centuries of death by this point, and she is fed up with it. What she will do to stop this from happening gives us a side of Jadzia we never saw on screen, but one entirely consistent with it, and I appreciated this plumbing the depths of Jadzia's soul. Plus this story contains a surprisingly sexy Jadzia/Worf scene. Like, whoa. Way to go, Heather Jarman, and too bad the show never ever pulled that off.
"Foundlings" by Jeffrey Lang (Odo, between Seasons Six and Seven)
Lang's story reunited Odo with his predecessor as chief of security on Terok Nor, Thrax, a man we never actually met because in "Things Past," Odo substituted Thrax for himself in his memories. I like their interactions, and I'm a sucker for any DS9 story with an "Odo investigates" plot; like all of the writers in this book, Lang has a good command of his chosen characters. But the ending of the story reveals a plot too convoluted to believe; I don't buy why all the subterfuge was necessary.
"Chiaroscuro" by Geoffrey Thorne (Ezri Dax, Season Seven)
Geoffrey Thorne is a very distinctive writer of Star Trek fiction, with out-there, cosmic plots that function more on an allegorical level than a literal one. Sometimes it works for me (Sword of Damocles is the best Titan novel, and if you disagree with me, I will fight you over it) and sometimes it does not ("Chiaroscuro"). This is a weird story, where Ezri discovers that on a pre-DS9 mission Jadzia found a key to resetting the universe, set up a maze to access based on Dante's Inferno and knowledge of her past hosts, and then wiped the whole incident from her own memory. There's a lot of great imagery here, but it's used in service of a series of weird and arbitrary puzzles. Plus for some reason everyone in this story gives mission briefings that omit essential information, which may build suspense, but is hard to believe.
"Face Value" by Una McCormack (Kira and Garak and Damar, Season Seven)
Una McCormack can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and this story confirms it. Set during the Season Seven Kira-on-Cardassia arc, this story expands on its events, and lets us see more of how Kira and Garak were able to work with the man who killed Tora Ziyal. McCormack is famous for her capturing of the voice of Garak, but here she shows that she also gets Kira and Damar perfectly as well. A great story about how three people from very different walks of life can come together under a common cause they never even thought they'd have in common. (Also it has a shifty fellow in it named "Vilar," who is so totally Blake's 7's Vila, played by the excellent Michael Keating.)
"The Calling" by Andrew J. Robinson (Garak, long after Season Seven)
This is a weird story, and I'm not convinced it makes sense. I like a lot of the individual components (the deterioration of Cardassia, Garak visiting Paris), but the story doesn't always successfully integrate them: if Garak is going to Paris to get help for Cardassia, why does he assume a cover identity and need to get a job while he's there? Robinson is, of course, the only person better at capturing Garak's voice than McCormack, so the story is worth it for that if nothing else, and it's filled with lovely Garakian insights into the human (and Cardassian) condition. I haven't yet read any Star Trek novels that take place after The Next Generation: Losing the Peace; do they deal with any of what's going on in here? I know Bashir becomes a Section 31 agent, which I guess could explain why Garak can't make contact with him.
"Revisited" by Anonymous (Jake Sisko, even longer after Season Seven)
The whole book has a nice little frame sequence that shows how "The Visitor" played out in the Prime timeline, where Jake wasn't warped by losing his father at a young age. (I shall remain convinced it was written by Marco Palmieri until someone comes forth to prove otherwise.) It's pretty nice, except that the whole thing is premised on a statement Melanie makes to Jake: "In all your writings, you never talk about the station where you grew up. About Deep Space 9." But Jake's first book is, according to "You Are Cordially Invited," a set of stories about the Dominion Occupation of the station!
During Marco Palmieri's time at Simon & Schuster, he edited four anniversary anthologies: Prophecy and Change for Deep Space Nine's tenth anniversary in 2003, Distant Shores for Voyager's tenth in 2005, Constellations for the original's 40th in 2006, and The Sky's the Limit for The Next Generation's twentieth in 2007. Together, they constitute one of my favorite parts of Star Trek fiction, and though Constellations is probably my favorite, Prophecy and Change is next. The richness of the Deep Space Nine tapestry means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it's great to see the characters grow and change all over again.
"Ha'mara" by Kevin G. Summers (Sisko and Kira, Season One)
Like a lot of stories in this book, "Ha'mara" slots pretty clearly between episodes, in this case coming shortly after "Emissary." Something my wife and I noticed when (re)watching the series was that Sisko's status as the Emissary goes weirdly unmentioned between "Emissary" and "In the Hands of the Prophets." This is especially a weird omission because the only person Kai Opaka tells about Sisko being the Emissary in "Emissary" is Sisko himself, yet by the time of "In the Hands," it's public knowledge. So when did this revelation happen and what effect did it happen? That's the ground covered by "Ha'mara," where a group of Bajoran terrorists attack Sisko, Kira, and company on a visit to Bajor. Kira and Sisko have to work together to stay alive and save a group of Bajoran children; Kira's personal journey to accepting Sisko as the Emissary (I don't think the show deals with this until Season Three, bizarrely enough, though "Destiny" does try to explain why it's never been mentioned before) is the focus here, presumably a stand-in for the journey the whole planet will undergo. It's kind of an awkward story when it comes to the interpersonal interactions, but I think that's largely because Summers does a good job of capturing the awkwardness of the crew dynamics in Season One. (Bashir is a doofus.)
It was disappointing to me that there was no Season Two story, as I feel like early Season Two is one of the show's best periods.
"The Orb of Opportunity" by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels (Nog and Kai Winn, Season Three)
The team-up you never knew you wanted! When the Maquis steal an Orb that's being returned to the Bajorans, Nog proves to be Kai Winn's best hope of recovering it. It's a cute little tale, especially when Nog receives an Orb vision that opens him up to possibilities he'd never seen before. Martin and Mangels handle this well; the story could easily have drifted into "explaining" where Nog's desire to join Starfleet came from, but instead the Orb unlocks something within Nog that he didn't know was there before. The focus on Winn is a little less successful; she's a difficult character to get right, and Martin and Mangels are better than some, but not as good as others, and she doesn't have a very clearly delineated character arc.
"Broken Oaths" by Keith R.A. DeCandido (O'Brien and Bashir, Season Four)
Definitely another gap-filling tale, in this case: how did O'Brien and Bashir overcome the rift in their friendship that was caused by "Hippocratic Oath"? Keith, as always, captures the character voices well, but I'm not convinced that this is a story that needed to be told. Or rather, that telling it in the tie-in fiction does much good. The show could have done something with this, but didn't; writing a short story about it eight years later doesn't really solve the problem that it seems to have no ramifications for their friendship.
"...Loved I Not Honor More" by Christopher L. Bennett (Quark, Season Five)
It's a bit disappointing that the show never brought Grilka back (or even mentioned her) after her two appearances on the show; Bennett, of course, explains that for us. It's true to the characters, and I like how it points out that Quark was willing to compromise with Grilka, but Grilka was never willing to compromise with Quark, and that proves the divisive point that means they can't have an ongoing relationship. But like "Broken Oaths," I think it feels largely like gap-plugging.
"Three Sides to Every Story" by Terri Osborne (Jake Sisko and Tora Ziyal, Season Six)
Something my wife and I noted is that there's a period on the show where there are tons of kids running around: Jake, Nog, Ziyal, and Alexander are all there in late Season Five / early Season Six. Yet the show never does anything with this: I feel like there ought to have been one episode that brought these characters together. "Three Sides to Every Story" weaves through the Season Six Occupation arc (one of my favorite periods of the show) to invent a relationship between Jake and Ziyal. And it's brilliant. Suddenly these two characters we never saw interact on screen have a deep and meaningful relationship that makes perfect sense. Ziyal's death hits even harder in this context, and both characters get to show their stuff. Jake really falls by the wayside on the show after this arc on the show, which was a real shame, but "Three Sides" is Jake at his best.
"The Devil You Know" by Heather Jarman (Jadzia Dax, Season Six)
Jadzia is another character who fell by the wayside on the television series sometimes. The stories that deal with her as a Trill in the first couple seasons ("Dax," "Invasive Procedures," "Equilibrium") always make her a bystander in her own tale, subject to the minutiae of space biology. Later in the show, episodes that are ostensibly about her really become about her and Worf; her best moments really come as a side character in other stories. Like, she's great as a member of the ensemble, but the writers struggle to give her her own episodes. "The Devil You Know" falls into none of these traps, however, giving us a story that is very Jadzia and very Trill in a way that's revelatory: Jadzia Dax is tired of death. The war hits her even harder than it hits everyone else because she has already seen centuries of death by this point, and she is fed up with it. What she will do to stop this from happening gives us a side of Jadzia we never saw on screen, but one entirely consistent with it, and I appreciated this plumbing the depths of Jadzia's soul. Plus this story contains a surprisingly sexy Jadzia/Worf scene. Like, whoa. Way to go, Heather Jarman, and too bad the show never ever pulled that off.
"Foundlings" by Jeffrey Lang (Odo, between Seasons Six and Seven)
Lang's story reunited Odo with his predecessor as chief of security on Terok Nor, Thrax, a man we never actually met because in "Things Past," Odo substituted Thrax for himself in his memories. I like their interactions, and I'm a sucker for any DS9 story with an "Odo investigates" plot; like all of the writers in this book, Lang has a good command of his chosen characters. But the ending of the story reveals a plot too convoluted to believe; I don't buy why all the subterfuge was necessary.
"Chiaroscuro" by Geoffrey Thorne (Ezri Dax, Season Seven)
Geoffrey Thorne is a very distinctive writer of Star Trek fiction, with out-there, cosmic plots that function more on an allegorical level than a literal one. Sometimes it works for me (Sword of Damocles is the best Titan novel, and if you disagree with me, I will fight you over it) and sometimes it does not ("Chiaroscuro"). This is a weird story, where Ezri discovers that on a pre-DS9 mission Jadzia found a key to resetting the universe, set up a maze to access based on Dante's Inferno and knowledge of her past hosts, and then wiped the whole incident from her own memory. There's a lot of great imagery here, but it's used in service of a series of weird and arbitrary puzzles. Plus for some reason everyone in this story gives mission briefings that omit essential information, which may build suspense, but is hard to believe.
"Face Value" by Una McCormack (Kira and Garak and Damar, Season Seven)
Una McCormack can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and this story confirms it. Set during the Season Seven Kira-on-Cardassia arc, this story expands on its events, and lets us see more of how Kira and Garak were able to work with the man who killed Tora Ziyal. McCormack is famous for her capturing of the voice of Garak, but here she shows that she also gets Kira and Damar perfectly as well. A great story about how three people from very different walks of life can come together under a common cause they never even thought they'd have in common. (Also it has a shifty fellow in it named "Vilar," who is so totally Blake's 7's Vila, played by the excellent Michael Keating.)
"The Calling" by Andrew J. Robinson (Garak, long after Season Seven)
This is a weird story, and I'm not convinced it makes sense. I like a lot of the individual components (the deterioration of Cardassia, Garak visiting Paris), but the story doesn't always successfully integrate them: if Garak is going to Paris to get help for Cardassia, why does he assume a cover identity and need to get a job while he's there? Robinson is, of course, the only person better at capturing Garak's voice than McCormack, so the story is worth it for that if nothing else, and it's filled with lovely Garakian insights into the human (and Cardassian) condition. I haven't yet read any Star Trek novels that take place after The Next Generation: Losing the Peace; do they deal with any of what's going on in here? I know Bashir becomes a Section 31 agent, which I guess could explain why Garak can't make contact with him.
"Revisited" by Anonymous (Jake Sisko, even longer after Season Seven)
The whole book has a nice little frame sequence that shows how "The Visitor" played out in the Prime timeline, where Jake wasn't warped by losing his father at a young age. (I shall remain convinced it was written by Marco Palmieri until someone comes forth to prove otherwise.) It's pretty nice, except that the whole thing is premised on a statement Melanie makes to Jake: "In all your writings, you never talk about the station where you grew up. About Deep Space 9." But Jake's first book is, according to "You Are Cordially Invited," a set of stories about the Dominion Occupation of the station!
During Marco Palmieri's time at Simon & Schuster, he edited four anniversary anthologies: Prophecy and Change for Deep Space Nine's tenth anniversary in 2003, Distant Shores for Voyager's tenth in 2005, Constellations for the original's 40th in 2006, and The Sky's the Limit for The Next Generation's twentieth in 2007. Together, they constitute one of my favorite parts of Star Trek fiction, and though Constellations is probably my favorite, Prophecy and Change is next. The richness of the Deep Space Nine tapestry means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it's great to see the characters grow and change all over again.
Another fascinating and well-written review, Stevil2001. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks! I'm sad this project is over, which is why I might reread the relaunch against my better judgement...
If I remember right, this is a followup to a play that Robinson and Siddig would perform at cons that itself was a followup to "A Stitch in Time". I've never really understood "The Calling" either, and I assume it's because it ties heavily into that play.
I agree -- this story always felt to me like the missing second episode of the series. Although it really only seems that way in the context of the later seasons, because it fills in the ideas about the Emissary and Bajoran faith that were only developed later in the series, but that made a story like this necessary to bridge that divide.
In our defense, that was pretty much what Marco Palmieri asked of us. The idea was that DS9 was a series defined by its strong continuity, but it still had gaps and oversights in that continuity, so our brief was to add the continuity links that the series itself skipped or glossed over. Hence the title -- the stories were meant to either foreshadow future events or to explore changes in the status quo.
No, it makes sense as a brief. Gap-filling can yield some good tie-in stories, but when it does, it doesn't feel like gap-filling. "Ha'mara" and "Face Value," I felt, succeeded as standalone stories with their own purposes outside of gap-filling, even if they had the same roots as "Broken Oaths" and "...Loved I Not Honor More." I found that those ones didn't transcend their origins, if that makes sense. The difference might be that I felt I learned something new about Kira and Sisko from "Ha'mara," but "Broken Oaths" largely confirmed what I already knew about Bashir and O'Brien.
I hadn't thought about the title in that way, though. Thanks for that nugget of insight!
I hadn't thought about the title in that way, though. Thanks for that nugget of insight!
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