Post-series DS9 book question

[DS9Continuing]

Chronologically, yes, because it's set at the end of the calendar year and ends with a cliffhanger, as with most Trek season finales of that era.

But the point is that either "season" model is equally arbitrary and an equally poor fit to what the novels actually were, because Marco wanted the books to be books, not just copies of TV shows. His whole goal was to embrace the ways that DS9 in novels could be different from DS9 on TV. Which is why I detest the whole "Season 8" nonsense, because I think it disrespects what Marco was trying to achieve.

I have to pretty strongly disagree. I know you're right about how Marco thought of the books and how he wanted them to be, and he how didn't like the "season model" the fans imposed. But as one who has for my own reasons read them and reread them and re-reread them to such an extent that I pretty much know those stories off by heart now, I'd say the books actually follow a season-of-TV model more closely than the DS9 TV show itself ever did.

The DS9 storyline from Avatar to Unity has a very clear beginning middle and end, with consistent themes and character arcs, exactly like a season of genre TV (network TV at least, not so much your modern streaming binge model). The storyline from Unjoined to The Soul Key (what you might call "season 9") is even more so - a remarkable consistency of theme and motif and character arc, I could write a whole dissertation on it.

The DS9 TV show never did that to such an extent - of course it had continuing storylines and longer arcs than any other Star Trek show until Discovery, but to a large extent it was still beholden to the one-episode-at-a-time model of TNG and never did the whole-season-as-one-extended-story thing (basically, a novel for TV) that shows like Buffy, Arrow, Supernatural and Doctor Who have done. The DS9 books, on the other hand, do have that.

Like tomswift says, I don't think it can be convincingly argued that Unity didn't serve the same function that a TV season finale does - if nothing else, they wouldn't have made it the first DS9 hardcover novel in years if they didn't know it was a big conclusion and worth making a big deal out of.

Besides, as much as I respect and thank Marco for everything he did for the Star Trek novel line (I still think it was better under him than it has been under any other subsequent editor), it is the nature of all art that the audience might take away something from it that the creator never intended, and you can't tell the audience they're wrong to do so.

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[Christopher]

The DS9 storyline from Avatar to Unity has a very clear beginning middle and end, with consistent themes and character arcs, exactly like a season of genre TV (network TV at least, not so much your modern streaming binge model). The storyline from Unjoined to The Soul Key (what you might call "season 9") is even more so - a remarkable consistency of theme and motif and character arc, I could write a whole dissertation on it.

Okay, so they form series with plot and thematic unity to them. But that's not what the word "season" means; it refers to a period of a year or a specific span of time. It's only in the past generation -- mostly after DS9's time, really, though it started contemporaneously with Babylon 5 -- that a TV season has been seen as something with a unified, self-contained story arc, rather than just the set of episodes produced within a calendar year. But it's still the set of episodes produced within a calendar year or within a single contiguous release period, which certainly doesn't apply to the DS9 post-finale novels that came out over several years. So I think it's an affectation to use that particular word to mean a unified story arc in this context.

 

[JD]

I've started to think of it as more MCU style Phases. Lives of Dax to Unity is Phase 1, The Worlds of DS9 to The Soul Key is Phase 2, and the Typhon Pact books were the start of Phase 3. I haven't read any of the DS9 books past The Fall, so I'm not sure where I would put the Phase 3/4 split.

 

[Christopher]

I've started to think of it as more MCU style Phases. Lives of Dax to Unity is Phase 1, The Worlds of DS9 to The Soul Key is Phase 2, and the Typhon Pact books were the start of Phase 3. I haven't read any of the DS9 books past The Fall, so I'm not sure where I would put the Phase 3/4 split.

That's a better analogy, though I don't think it was as formal as that. And there are plenty of threads from the first "phase" that continue into the WoDS9 sequence; really, that's basically a series of separate focuses on story threads that were developing together in the earlier books. That's one reason I resist breaking them down into distinct units -- WoDS9 is still a direct continuation of elements set up before, just approaching it in a different way.

Really, it's more complex than just two main stages. It started out with a duology, then a pair of installments that were parts of wider crossovers, then a big tetralogy, then Rising Son telling a story paralleling all the other stuff and leading into Unity (with a side 2-parter in between), then the WoDS9 trilogy (or really a hexalogy, since there were two novels per volume), which led into Warpath as a climax/cliffhanger and a transition to what came next... which was going to be one "split" book but ended up expanding into two, and then whatever was going to come next fell through when Marco lost his job in the crash. So it's a series that experimented with a lot of different formats and approaches, a fact that gets obscured by trying to put blanket labels on larger groups of books. You can't really say that things like Mission: Gamma or Rising Son or WoDS9 were just routine "episodes" like the installments around them, because they were more experimental than that.

This is why it's bad to approach putting labels on things as an end goal in itself. Labels are crude. They simplify and homogenize things, obscuring their individual complexities. They can be a convenient place to start thinking about a thing, a rough approximation that you then move beyond as you gain more understanding, but they should never be the end of the process. They do more to inhibit understanding than to enhance it. We waste too much thought trying to figure out what to call things and mistake that for understanding what they are.

 

[indianatrekker26]

Another question, I know that the DS9 relaunch goes into the mirror universe with the war path and fearful symmetry books. Does the MU book Rise Like Lions by David Mack mix into any of that? Or was it its own standalone book?

 

[Christopher]

Another question, I know that the DS9 relaunch goes into the mirror universe with the war path and fearful symmetry books. Does the MU book Rise Like Lions by David Mack mix into any of that? Or was it its own standalone book?

There are some connections, but I think they're mostly later on.

 

[Thrawn]

Another question, I know that the DS9 relaunch goes into the mirror universe with the war path and fearful symmetry books. Does the MU book Rise Like Lions by David Mack mix into any of that? Or was it its own standalone book?

The Mirror Universe trade collections Glass Empires and Obsidian Alliances all take place before Warpath. (If you want to read all the MU stuff, note that the second part of Glass Empires, The Sorrows of Empire, was expanded to a full length novel which should be read in place of the entry in Glass Empires).

After Warpath, Fearful Symmetry, and The Soul Key, at least one of the short stories in Shards & Shadows carries the overall Mirror Universe narrative forwards, and Rise Like Lions finishes it off.

There are some references to the Mirror Universe status quo post-Rise Like Lions in some later books, too; I won't say which directly because it's kind of a surprise. But after you read Soul Key it's worth finishing off the MU stories for the later context, I think.

 

[indianatrekker26]

The Mirror Universe trade collections Glass Empires and Obsidian Alliances all take place before Warpath. (If you want to read all the MU stuff, note that the second part of Glass Empires, The Sorrows of Empire, was expanded to a full length novel which should be read in place of the entry in Glass Empires).

After Warpath, Fearful Symmetry, and The Soul Key, at least one of the short stories in Shards & Shadows carries the overall Mirror Universe narrative forwards, and Rise Like Lions finishes it off.

There are some references to the Mirror Universe status quo post-Rise Like Lions in some later books, too; I won't say which directly because it's kind of a surprise. But after you read Soul Key it's worth finishing off the MU stories for the later context, I think.

ah ok, I will definitely read those then.

 

[Stephen!]

ah ok, I will definitely read those then.

Deep Space Nine also jumps ahead several years during the "Typhon Pact" and "The Fall" novels so that it could catch up with Next Generation. After that, there's some more Section 31 novels involving Bashir, and more DS9 novels.

 

[Damian]

I'm a little late to this thread. I was laid up with bronchitis at the time and wasn't posting for a while.

But yeah, the DS9 relaunches were great and inspired the other relaunches for TNG (which ties into DS9 at points), the Voyager relaunch (which is part of the same narrative but fell behind timewise in the universe) and Enterprise. I loved that there was a continuing narrative that all ties together.

Like Thrawn I would recommend reading the Mirror Universe novels as well. I think if you wanted to solely focus on DS9 you could get away without reading MU novels. It's not critical to figuring out what's going on. The authors always do a good job giving you just enough info about other works. But that was a great series as well. And I too would highly recommend the "Sorrows of the Empire" standalone novel. You won't have to read the story in the trade novel if you have the full length novel. It basically starts right after "Mirror, Mirror" and ends with the fall of the Terran Empire. It was a great novel.

As far as how I look at the relaunches I have heard some refer to the DS9 relaunch early on as a season 8. I guess that's not totally inaccurate to start. It picks up where the series left off. But I quickly stopped seeing it that a few books in. I mean a season in Star Trek, at least at that time, was basically a year in story time. So where would season 8 stop and season 9 start? And is it even really necessary to tie it down like that? It's a continuing story over a period of years.

Deep Space Nine also jumps ahead several years during the "Typhon Pact" and "The Fall" novels so that it could catch up with Next Generation. After that, there's some more Section 31 novels involving Bashir, and more DS9 novels.

I remember at the time I was like whoa. There were a lot of changes and a lot happened during that what I think was 3 year period.

Thankfully, though, later DS9 books filled in some of the blanks of what happened during that 3 year span so it all makes sense now. But at the time it was a bit jarring.

I had a bit of the same feel when the New Frontier books jumped ahead their 2 or 3 years I guess it was. Now, Peter David was clear in the foreword of the novel that jumped ahead that was what he was doing. But that was a bit jarring as well, and in that case he only very loosely filled in some of the gaps. A lot of it you kind of had to infer though.