Reading Marathon: The Typhon Pact... and Beyond!

[David cgc]

Wait, where can you get "The Dream Box"?

Someone scanned and transcribed a copy of the script with permission a while ago. The script is titled "The Nexus," but it's the same thing.

Direct links:

Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/143qdkbvOWCMoO5Q3A41kr8f_fxTP3jH-asV01eY666I/edit

Raw scans: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ea_6GHlGZzPJ5ic0PROpQeJOQuSc20SP

As far as it and "The Calling" go, I am trying to reach back and remember how everything fit together with the larger novelverse. I remember Alon Ghemor did still end up dead, but I think the plague Bashir (or "Bashir"?) cures didn't end up being quite as apocalyptic as presented, and I'm not sure if Bashir/"Bashir's" shadowy masters were tied in with his larger Section 31 plot, nor do I recall if that time Garek's associates tried to assassinate him by stranding him in the Hebetian version of an Orb experience and he willed himself back to Cardassia from across the quadrant came up again in any detail.

Star Trek gets wild sometimes, huh?

 

[Una McCormack]

I'm partway into The Lotus Flower. I'm planning to do Never-Ending Sacrifice next (I know it's a bit of a side-trip, but I remember really liking it and haven't read it since it came out), then Crimson Shadow and Enigma Tales so I can appreciate what going on in Business when I make it there.

You might also want to take another look through Brinkmanship and The Missing. At least, that's what Eleta Preloc suggests.

 

[Smiley]

I've read the first two chapters and the second epilogue (had to make sure it had a satisfying ending) of Business. The writing is some of the best Trek since The Missing and The Ashes of Tomorrow.

 

[NStephenH]

Looking forward to reading the end of this day's business and your review!

 

[David cgc]

But The End of This Day's Business. It mostly focuses on Garak and Bashir, but we get cameos from the O'Briens among others, and we even get a resolution to the Pulaski/Alden strand, which delighted me no end. If the book is gentle, that's because it's the wish fullfillment I think I wanted to begin with: a finite ending to the infinite story of the version of Star Trek I grew up with. It's something that serves to round out, conclude, and summarize what we've been reading.

You might call it... a coda.

Well, it took a while, but I finally made it through my personal Cardassian-focused relaunch recap and to The End..., and I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. During the Great Coda Colloquium, at one point I argued that in order to be a satisfying ending, Coda would need to know where it began, so it would reflect and contextualize the whole epic breadth of Star Trek as it's pseudo-conclusion, whether that be "Broken Bow," "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Avatar, The Entropy Effect... really, any choice could work as long as the choice was made. A Stitch in Time turns out to work a treat as a "beginning" for what has now come to its end. One of the first post-series books striking out into the narrative unknown (I'm not going to double back and check if it, or The Lives of Dax, or the Millennium framing story came first). Garak is a hell of a character, and he works as an avatar of the whole Star Trek ideal, someone coming from a violent, fractious background, raised in it, bound by it, but then transcending it to make a better world free of the inadequate dogmas of the past. It's a dramatization of Roddenberry's whole "evolved humanity" thing boiled down to one man, and with a bit less smug hypocrisy.

Garak also goes from being obsessed with a manic pixie dream girl to being officially partnered with at least one man, which I suppose also reflects something about the evolution of Star Trek over the last sixty years.

Spoiler: A Stitch in Time

On that note, as I got to Enigma Tales and TEoTDB, and vaguely remembered something about Robinson wanting to make ASiT queerer but getting pushback, I started to wonder if Garak might've been playing some of his beloved games with memory in his letter to Bashir, and maybe Palandine and her husband/Garak's rival Barkan Lokar might've, in reality, been the same person. That might work with ASiT by itself, but it's more of a stretch incorporating "The Dream Box" and "The Calling," where Palandine continues to appear long after Lokar's death.

Something in particular that struck me going through these eight-plus books is Garak's relationship with his father. Not Tain, Toban Garak, the man that actually raised him. Elim doesn't talk about him much, but every time he circles back to his gardens and his cities, it's what Toban taught him, the foundation he sunk into the earth of Elim's soul. While he continues to obsess about Tain (or obsess about not obsessing about him), Tain's judgement, Tain's approval, he's Toban's son, down to the way Toban's lessons to him are quiet, unassuming, they just do his job in Elim's psyche without making a big dramatic production of it all. Elim doesn't have to worry about if Toban loved him or would be proud of him, there's no spyish ambiguity there. I admit, I was on the lookout for any overt reference to him in the last couple books of this cylce, proving that I wasn't entirely reading too much into that backstory informing what came later, so I felt vindicated near the end when we found out Elim's final secret was that he carried Toban's legacy with him as his middle name.

You might also want to take another look through Brinkmanship and The Missing. At least, that's what Eleta Preloc suggests.

That was a good idea, definitely. Well, she would know.

I guess this is part of the reason for the Great TrekLit Flowchart, but even though it took a bit longer than I was expecting (I should go back to what they made us do in grade school and wall off a specific minimum time every day for reading an actual book), rereading a small chunk of novels by plot arc was really rewarding. The novelverse long ago got too unwieldy to reread the whole thing, or even a single series, but I should probably revisit it from time to time, and deciding to just do all the Cardassia books, or all the mirror universe books, or all the Klingon books is probably the smarter choice. Even at the time, with months or years between storylines, I'm sure I got less out of, say, The Missing for the first time, since it had been so long and there'd been so much other stuff since I'd been introduced to Alden and Corazame, than I did reading it immediately after their introduction.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I recently finished my own Cardassia-focused readthrough. Most of it was rereading, but the ones with asterisks were new to me. I also read all of Prophecy and Change and the other novel in the Worlds of DS9 volume since I had them out anyway.

1. A Stitch in Time
2. The Nexus*
3. Prophecy and Change
4. Worlds of Deep Space Nine Volume One
5. Hollow Men
6. The Never-Ending Sacrifice
7. Brinkmanship*
8. The Crimson Shadow
9. The Missing*
10. Enigma Tales
11. The End of This Day’s Business*

You definitely see more of the continuities reading through all of them in a short span of time, and of course there was key context in the ones I hadn’t read. It wasn’t until most of the way through The Missing that I realized Peter Alden was the foil to Pulaski I faintly remembered from Enigma Tales.

I think my favorite of these books (all of which I loved, of course) was actually The Missing, which is at once part of the larger story told by the others and a slightly different kind of science fiction, and shows that Una is as good at writing Odo as she is with Garak.

I think the answer to this is partially in something Una herself points out in her end notes, that what she originally planned as the emotional core of the novel, the story of the terrible thing Garak did on Bajor, ended up in Second Self, and nothing replaced it here. (Even though Second Self takes place in a totally different continuity, I think The End of This Day's Business very much benefits from you having already read Second Self.)

I think this is true, and I also think that the (possibly related) decision to skip entirely over the years Garak spends on Bajor doing restorative justice plays a role. If it’s dramatically necessary that Garak, even after all the good work he’s done in prior novels, atone further (and I think it is), that’s probably worth showing on the page. In some parallel universe all these elements probably got fitted into one novel, and it’s an absolute belter… but in this universe we got two excellent novels out of it, so who’s to say which universe is luckier?

If the book is gentle, that's because it's the wish fullfillment I think I wanted to begin with: a finite ending to the infinite story of the version of Star Trek I grew up with. It's something that serves to round out, conclude, and summarize what we've been reading.

You might call it... a coda.

The use of the Romulan supernova is interesting in this respect. In addition to closing out the arc of relaunch Cardassia by showing the Union moving from receiving humanitarian aid to providing it, it subtly integrates and nods to the new canon without detracting from the resolution of different strands of the novel continuity.