Wow, I got a co-author to reply.
Happy to do it, Jeff. One of these days, maybe I'll dig out my notes and see if I can find my rationale for the figure Kira employed. I might have calculated it, as I suggested, but it also occurs to me that I simply might have had Kira being hyperbolic. I don't recall, to be honest, though I do take pains with my details, one way or the other.
That would be nifty, but really I wouldn't think it necessary. Your following paragraph really summarizes a very good point against your bothering with such details. If I've got you reminiscing or something, though, please do check!
You know, one thing I always found interesting with encyclopedic Star Trek works is that reference makers, no doubt out of necessity, essentially assume that all characters tell the truth all the time (unless a story has them explicitly lying), and that everything they say is not only not a lie, but accurate. In real life, people fudge details all the time, or misremember them. Of course, if you start viewing a fictional world through that lens, you can never get anywhere with a reference work.
I've thought about that in the past, myself. I try to think of points in sci-fi shows in which this doesn't happen, and everything I can think of leads to deliberate lying. If John Crichton from the television series
Farscape tells someone it's going to take seven hours to get somewhere and it doesn't, he was lying. Hyperbole is erased in the brightest space operas and in the darkest space operas!
Or maybe I just haven't seen enough of the genre...
At any rate, I finished this book yesterday evening. What a ride it was. I'd say it was one of the best Trek novels I've ever read, but it was also only the second Trek novel I've read, so I won't bother.
I loved the examination of racism in a new and exciting light, and I absolutely adored the notion that Benjamin Sisko, a black man, is dealing with it because he feels
he's going through it. It really reinforces the goodness that the franchise's creators had in mind when crafting it: so far removed is humanity from many people feeling that way toward
his culture that no mention of it (other than, perhaps, the baseball player, or am I reading too much into things?) is ever really made. It's very much about him dealing with
his racism, or rather, the bias he's understandably formed.
The Gallitep plot was chilling. Poor Quark and Rom, I can't think of much that happened to them on-screen that ever rivaled that. And the climax was satisfying.
If there were one issue I had with the book, it's the fact that it felt a little... well... apocryphal. Which considering it's non-canonical is perfectly justifiable, but it fits very nicely into the established canon as a 'after reading this, it's easy to think it happened' way apart from the idea that a Ferengi-Bajor conflict, however short-lived, is never mentioned again. That's somewhat hard to swallow, but it's not
too hard to swallow. After all, there were zero fatalities involved.
Damn fine book, sir. You and Armin did a great job.
