But with a lot of TNG characters if I remember correctly
Reading Marathon: The Typhon Pact... and Beyond!
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But with a lot of TNG characters if I remember correctly
I hadn't quite clocked it 'til you said it (about halfway through), but you are right, with Pulaski and Crusher, and then each chapter beginning with an excerpt from Picard's writing. But to be honest, there aren't really many DS9 characters left unless we want to read the ongoing adventures of Starfleet's worst chief of security, Jefferson Blackmer.
Deep Space Nine: The Missing by Una McCormack
Published: January 2015
Time Span: late November 2385
Well, look! Following on from Lust's Latinum Lost, our first DS9-branded book in five years, we now get our first actual DS9-branded novel, shelved right next to The Never-Ending Sacrifice.
But as a Deep Space Nine novel, it might seem a bit odd. Its main characters are Beverly Crusher and Katherine Pulaski, both main characters on The Next Generation. Beyond that, there's a lot of Ro Laren, who appeared in TNG on screen, though she became a DS9 prose character way back in 2001's Avatar, Book One. Plus, it follows up some on the events of Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship, a TNG novel in all but name, and it features chapter openers extracted from Captain Picard's logs!
Yet, I said "it might" because until it was pointed out by @USS Firefly above, I didn't even really notice! It felt like a DS9 novel right from the off. I think this is down to a few reasons. One is that Pulaski, prickly and full of personality, but fundamentally decent, fits right in with the DS9 cast. I really enjoyed the way McCormack wrote Pulaski, which felt a bit redemptive, in that I think it's what TNG might have been going for in season two, but didn't quite accomplish most of the time. I liked her developing friendship with Crusher, and McCormack does a good job of writing her as someone whose personality traits are sometimes weaknesses, but which she knows how to leverage as strengths. I never thought I'd say this, but more Pulaski please.
Another plus is the return of Odo to the fold. I guess he was up to something in The Fall that I didn't remember, but here he comes to DS9 to intervene on behalf of an old Cardassian colleague and ends up drawn into the events of the novel. McCormack excels with Odo just as she does so many other DS9 characters, capturing his dialogue—and his occasional lack of it. The scenes between him and the Tzenkethi asylee Cory were a particular highlight, both when he runs into her in the station temple and when he seeks her ought in the station security cells. Plus there's some great stuff with Quark and Odo. (And just Quark in general; he's not a big part of this book, but all his scenes work well.)
But most of all this works as a Deep Space Nine book because it feels like a Deep Space Nine book. It's about the kind of things Deep Space Nine was about: the legacies of colonialism, empire, and war, the tension between idealism and realpolitik in espionage, and the making of families by people who have none. There's four plotlines here: a group of travellers called the People of the Open Sky come to DS9 and there's something a little suspicious about them, the civilian science vessel Athene Donald launches with a crew including Typhon Pact members and immediately runs into some belligerent aliens, the Tzenkethi expert from Starfleet Intelligence, Peter Alden, comes to DS9 with asylee Cory and she runs away, and Ro and Odo try to track down some Cardassian prisoners who never returned home after the Dominion War. All four plots intersect with those three themes.
Colonialism, empire, and war always run through DS9, of course; here we see them in the People fleeing them, but unable to ever fully leave them behind; Ro must deal with some harsh crimes perpetrated against the people who once did much the same to her people. That tension between idealism and realpolitik is a key one, and the novel keeps it complicated. Should Castellan Garak do what is political or what is right? Is Peter Alden too suspicious for his own good? Is he exploiting Cory? It would be easy to sneer at Peter (some in the original review thread for this book seemed to find him a caricature), but though Pulaski sneers at him, I don't think the novel does; sometimes he's wrong... but he's also right a couple times, and without his know-how Pulaski would have never saved the day... and in the end, it turns out she's been the one who's too pessimistic.
And then we come to family. The "missing" of the title are the children, family, and friends we've lost. Maybe we left them because we had to walk away, maybe they left us. Maybe we were left by them. The People leave their original society, Odo is left by his people, the Cardassians leave prisoners with the Romulans, Cory leaves Ab-Tzenketh, Pulaski and the Athene Donald leave the Federation, Ro left her people way back when. Even Crusher leaves hers. They are all missing. But what goes missing can be found: the People find a new home and a new family, Odo made his own family on DS9, the Cardassians made a new home and so even do Cory and Peter, Ro made a new family in Starfleet even if it took a long time. And at the end Crusher goes back to her family: missing and found.
That's not all; the book plunges into questions of exploration and first contact in ways that feel very Star Trek but also put some pressure on it—surely the most Deep Space Nine of moves. You can see the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin here; her League of All Worlds, later the Ekumen, comes across as influenced by Star Trek's Federation in some ways, and here the influence comes back, some of the questions Le Guin posed being returned to their point of origin. Crusher even cites Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and I found this a much more interesting engagement with its ideas than the somewhat ham-handed take on them in Strange New Worlds.
All of this is wrapped up, of course, in McCormack's deft characterization and strong narrative voice. I often feel that Star Trek novels are written by people who want the words to be as unobtrusive as possible, as though the words get in the way of the story. But the words are the story, and McCormack's playful narrative voice is fun to hang out with. It's not perfect—one occasionally feels something important to the plot has been elided or rushed (is there no Defiant to help the Athene Donald?)—but what is important to the book is always there in full so it's hard to be annoyed with it since you're always being entertained by it.
I keep thinking about a line from the very first chapter, what Picard thinks is the ultimate challenge: "the challenge that one sets oneself: to be pitted against the unknown and to find within oneself the capacity to respond not with fear but with curiosity, empathy, and humility." It's a good summation of what Star Trek teaches us we can do, and what this novel reminds us that we must find in ourselves to do again each day.
Continuity Notes:
Published: January 2015
Time Span: late November 2385
Well, look! Following on from Lust's Latinum Lost, our first DS9-branded book in five years, we now get our first actual DS9-branded novel, shelved right next to The Never-Ending Sacrifice.
But as a Deep Space Nine novel, it might seem a bit odd. Its main characters are Beverly Crusher and Katherine Pulaski, both main characters on The Next Generation. Beyond that, there's a lot of Ro Laren, who appeared in TNG on screen, though she became a DS9 prose character way back in 2001's Avatar, Book One. Plus, it follows up some on the events of Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship, a TNG novel in all but name, and it features chapter openers extracted from Captain Picard's logs!
Yet, I said "it might" because until it was pointed out by @USS Firefly above, I didn't even really notice! It felt like a DS9 novel right from the off. I think this is down to a few reasons. One is that Pulaski, prickly and full of personality, but fundamentally decent, fits right in with the DS9 cast. I really enjoyed the way McCormack wrote Pulaski, which felt a bit redemptive, in that I think it's what TNG might have been going for in season two, but didn't quite accomplish most of the time. I liked her developing friendship with Crusher, and McCormack does a good job of writing her as someone whose personality traits are sometimes weaknesses, but which she knows how to leverage as strengths. I never thought I'd say this, but more Pulaski please.
Another plus is the return of Odo to the fold. I guess he was up to something in The Fall that I didn't remember, but here he comes to DS9 to intervene on behalf of an old Cardassian colleague and ends up drawn into the events of the novel. McCormack excels with Odo just as she does so many other DS9 characters, capturing his dialogue—and his occasional lack of it. The scenes between him and the Tzenkethi asylee Cory were a particular highlight, both when he runs into her in the station temple and when he seeks her ought in the station security cells. Plus there's some great stuff with Quark and Odo. (And just Quark in general; he's not a big part of this book, but all his scenes work well.)
But most of all this works as a Deep Space Nine book because it feels like a Deep Space Nine book. It's about the kind of things Deep Space Nine was about: the legacies of colonialism, empire, and war, the tension between idealism and realpolitik in espionage, and the making of families by people who have none. There's four plotlines here: a group of travellers called the People of the Open Sky come to DS9 and there's something a little suspicious about them, the civilian science vessel Athene Donald launches with a crew including Typhon Pact members and immediately runs into some belligerent aliens, the Tzenkethi expert from Starfleet Intelligence, Peter Alden, comes to DS9 with asylee Cory and she runs away, and Ro and Odo try to track down some Cardassian prisoners who never returned home after the Dominion War. All four plots intersect with those three themes.
Colonialism, empire, and war always run through DS9, of course; here we see them in the People fleeing them, but unable to ever fully leave them behind; Ro must deal with some harsh crimes perpetrated against the people who once did much the same to her people. That tension between idealism and realpolitik is a key one, and the novel keeps it complicated. Should Castellan Garak do what is political or what is right? Is Peter Alden too suspicious for his own good? Is he exploiting Cory? It would be easy to sneer at Peter (some in the original review thread for this book seemed to find him a caricature), but though Pulaski sneers at him, I don't think the novel does; sometimes he's wrong... but he's also right a couple times, and without his know-how Pulaski would have never saved the day... and in the end, it turns out she's been the one who's too pessimistic.
And then we come to family. The "missing" of the title are the children, family, and friends we've lost. Maybe we left them because we had to walk away, maybe they left us. Maybe we were left by them. The People leave their original society, Odo is left by his people, the Cardassians leave prisoners with the Romulans, Cory leaves Ab-Tzenketh, Pulaski and the Athene Donald leave the Federation, Ro left her people way back when. Even Crusher leaves hers. They are all missing. But what goes missing can be found: the People find a new home and a new family, Odo made his own family on DS9, the Cardassians made a new home and so even do Cory and Peter, Ro made a new family in Starfleet even if it took a long time. And at the end Crusher goes back to her family: missing and found.
That's not all; the book plunges into questions of exploration and first contact in ways that feel very Star Trek but also put some pressure on it—surely the most Deep Space Nine of moves. You can see the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin here; her League of All Worlds, later the Ekumen, comes across as influenced by Star Trek's Federation in some ways, and here the influence comes back, some of the questions Le Guin posed being returned to their point of origin. Crusher even cites Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and I found this a much more interesting engagement with its ideas than the somewhat ham-handed take on them in Strange New Worlds.
All of this is wrapped up, of course, in McCormack's deft characterization and strong narrative voice. I often feel that Star Trek novels are written by people who want the words to be as unobtrusive as possible, as though the words get in the way of the story. But the words are the story, and McCormack's playful narrative voice is fun to hang out with. It's not perfect—one occasionally feels something important to the plot has been elided or rushed (is there no Defiant to help the Athene Donald?)—but what is important to the book is always there in full so it's hard to be annoyed with it since you're always being entertained by it.
I keep thinking about a line from the very first chapter, what Picard thinks is the ultimate challenge: "the challenge that one sets oneself: to be pitted against the unknown and to find within oneself the capacity to respond not with fear but with curiosity, empathy, and humility." It's a good summation of what Star Trek teaches us we can do, and what this novel reminds us that we must find in ourselves to do again each day.
Continuity Notes:
- Doctor Crusher is taking a leave from the Enterprise to replace Bashir as CMO of Deep Space 9 following the events of The Fall. This was a thing I totally did not remember happening. To be honest, I remembered hardly anything about the status quo of DS9 following The Fall, and had to be reminded and/or look a lot of stuff up.
- I read this after Picard: Second Self but of course it was published first; both books focus on the fallout of the Romulan/Cardassian front during the Dominion War, describing it as one of the most brutal. I don't think this derives from anything on screen, so McCormack is carrying over one of her own ideas from the Destiny continuity into the new one.
- One would think if there was an ongoing galactic terrorism crisis targeting space stations where the perpetrators seemingly had the ability to just appear anywhere it would come up in this book set on a space station where the villains have the ability to just appear anywhere. One would think.
- I felt like there was a bit of meta shade directed at earlier books when Pulaski observed it didn't make sense for someone in a marriage to work through a problem by temporarily splitting up.
- O'Brien appears very suddenly and very late, almost like two-thirds of the way through the book someone reminded the writer he was back on the station so she started using him as a character from that point on.
- Starfleet's worst chief of security, Jefferson Blackmer, appears in this book. Not even McCormack can totally salvage a character whose entire personality is "likes space stations," but he is more interesting here than in any of his David R. George III–penned appearances. He offers his resignation to Ro, but alas, she does not take it.
- Oh! Garak is in this. He's well written, of course, but my favorite part was how Odo responds to Garak's new position of authority.
- McCormack's inspiration was a tweet from Dan Tostevin, my editor at Unreality-SF, and late of this parish. He showed me this tweet back when the novel came out, but I think his twitter has vanished now.
- I want to know what "excellent speculative novel" about a first contact Picard mentions reading. It sounds Le Guinnish but doesn't map onto anything I can think of from Le Guin.
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IIRC, McCormack did something interesting with the People of the Open Sky, never using a gendered pronoun for any of them, so it was never established what gender, if any, they were. And it exposes our unconscious cultural biases that their entries on Memory Beta and a number of posts in this forum defaulted to assuming they were male. (It took me a while to notice the lack of pronouns myself, but I caught on about midway through.)
Pulaski mentions that the Chain are ungendered. I didn't notice that the three Chain-derived members of the People were as well, though... however, I read that trio as all women. (Probably says something else about my own biases; they are all in caregiving roles.)
It's been a while, but I think at the time I assumed it was a reference to Dayton Ward's runner about Strangers From the Sky being Jean-Luc and René's favorite book to read together.
I don't think that can be it; the book is about humans trying to decide if a new civilization is ready for contact and solving the problem by just asking the civilization what it thinks.
Happy sixth anniversary to this thread... a thread I originally estimated would wrap up in two-and-a-half years! Good thing Picard came along and destroyed the Destiny timeline because otherwise I probably never would have caught up. At my established rate, I estimate Coda, Book III in August 2026!
I finished Takedown last night but my family is doing some traveling so it's unlikely I'll get to write it up soon; in the meantime, I'm on to In the Heart of Chaos, for my sins.
That is a evil thing to say! I think everyone would agree that you should be banned for life!
Wonderful work @Stevil2001 as always! So many fond memories here - you capture so much of what was great about this period in time and the writers' voices.
The Next Generation: Takedown by John Jackson Miller
Publication Date: February 2015
Time Span: late November 2385 (concurrent to The Missing)
The premise of this book sounds fun, and potentially interesting: Admiral Riker has gone rogue, and Captain Picard has to stop him. Picard has spent a career bringing in evil admirals... but what if that evil admiral is the man he trusts most in the universe? Immediate Hunt for Red October vibes. It's a cracker of a premise.
Unfortunately, if you're a writer, you have to work back from and figure out what circumstances would bring this about. And, alas, there's not really any. Riker is not going to become an evil admiral. So it's got to be mind control. And if you're John Jackson Miller, you fish through old Star Trek episodes to find one that's ripe for a sequel. (I feel like every Star Trek book of his I've read has done this, bar The Enterprise War.) "The Nth Degree" is a perfectly logical choice for a follow-up; well, I guess so, anyway, as it's one of those TNG episodes I've never gotten around to! But it seems to have some intriguing loose ends, and the powers of the Cytherians make good sense for giving Riker both a motivation and an advantage.
But once you construct it like that, I feel like the premise is fulfilled only in a purely mechanical way. All this is to say, I thought the first half of the book, where the characters and the reader are trying to figure out what's going on, worked well. It's fast, it's sharp, it's tense.
...but the Picard vs. Riker thing never really materializes. Riker is so smart, no one can really compete with him at all. So what we get instead is more Riker vs. Riker, Riker's conscience vs. Riker's programming. But this is all external, because Riker isn't a viewpoint character once he's possessed. And Riker comes up with plan after plan; we don't see Picard having to do clever things to outwit his old friend. Indeed, the cleverest ploy comes from Dax on the Aventine when she fiddles with the lights.
The second half of the novel, I thought, really fizzled away the potential of the first. Once you find out what's going on, it doesn't even really feel like anything's at stake. In the first half, you're like, who's trying to short out communications across the galaxy? what's this all in aid of? In the second half, the answer is it's not really in aid of anything, it's just an end in itself. There's not actually really any kind of danger coming. The book swerves into making the Cytherian-controlled people other than Riker into a new threat, but this never really convinces; one is a comedy Ferengi whose plan is to sell the Federation mortgages. On top of this, I found the action around the climax fairly confusing.
One of the things tie-in books live or die on is characterization: do the writers capture the characters from the shows? But in reading Takedown I came to realize this actually has two parts. One is, obviously, capturing voices, the feeling that you can imagine the actors delivering the lines. Miller is great at this. But there's another: the feeling that you learned something about the characters you didn't already know. Sometimes this is a change in character, but I think it can be a new situation, a new turn, something you didn't expect. Takedown doesn't really achieve this. (And I know Miller can do this, because I think he did it in both Pike books.) Riker, Picard, Dax... they're all just kind of there, reading their lines as they go through the plot. The non-tv characters feel pretty thin. I think there's potentially a great Riker-as-admiral book to be written, but I still don't feel like I really know that Riker yet. Riker went through this whole experience, but it didn't give me much insight into him; Picard had to potentially do a big thing, but I don't know him any better either.
Maybe I'm being unfair. It has a good zip to it, and the first half is solid. But I feel like a better book with this basic premise exists somewhere in the multiverse, and I wish I'd read it.
Continuity Notes:
Publication Date: February 2015
Time Span: late November 2385 (concurrent to The Missing)
The premise of this book sounds fun, and potentially interesting: Admiral Riker has gone rogue, and Captain Picard has to stop him. Picard has spent a career bringing in evil admirals... but what if that evil admiral is the man he trusts most in the universe? Immediate Hunt for Red October vibes. It's a cracker of a premise.
Unfortunately, if you're a writer, you have to work back from and figure out what circumstances would bring this about. And, alas, there's not really any. Riker is not going to become an evil admiral. So it's got to be mind control. And if you're John Jackson Miller, you fish through old Star Trek episodes to find one that's ripe for a sequel. (I feel like every Star Trek book of his I've read has done this, bar The Enterprise War.) "The Nth Degree" is a perfectly logical choice for a follow-up; well, I guess so, anyway, as it's one of those TNG episodes I've never gotten around to! But it seems to have some intriguing loose ends, and the powers of the Cytherians make good sense for giving Riker both a motivation and an advantage.
But once you construct it like that, I feel like the premise is fulfilled only in a purely mechanical way. All this is to say, I thought the first half of the book, where the characters and the reader are trying to figure out what's going on, worked well. It's fast, it's sharp, it's tense.
...but the Picard vs. Riker thing never really materializes. Riker is so smart, no one can really compete with him at all. So what we get instead is more Riker vs. Riker, Riker's conscience vs. Riker's programming. But this is all external, because Riker isn't a viewpoint character once he's possessed. And Riker comes up with plan after plan; we don't see Picard having to do clever things to outwit his old friend. Indeed, the cleverest ploy comes from Dax on the Aventine when she fiddles with the lights.
The second half of the novel, I thought, really fizzled away the potential of the first. Once you find out what's going on, it doesn't even really feel like anything's at stake. In the first half, you're like, who's trying to short out communications across the galaxy? what's this all in aid of? In the second half, the answer is it's not really in aid of anything, it's just an end in itself. There's not actually really any kind of danger coming. The book swerves into making the Cytherian-controlled people other than Riker into a new threat, but this never really convinces; one is a comedy Ferengi whose plan is to sell the Federation mortgages. On top of this, I found the action around the climax fairly confusing.
One of the things tie-in books live or die on is characterization: do the writers capture the characters from the shows? But in reading Takedown I came to realize this actually has two parts. One is, obviously, capturing voices, the feeling that you can imagine the actors delivering the lines. Miller is great at this. But there's another: the feeling that you learned something about the characters you didn't already know. Sometimes this is a change in character, but I think it can be a new situation, a new turn, something you didn't expect. Takedown doesn't really achieve this. (And I know Miller can do this, because I think he did it in both Pike books.) Riker, Picard, Dax... they're all just kind of there, reading their lines as they go through the plot. The non-tv characters feel pretty thin. I think there's potentially a great Riker-as-admiral book to be written, but I still don't feel like I really know that Riker yet. Riker went through this whole experience, but it didn't give me much insight into him; Picard had to potentially do a big thing, but I don't know him any better either.
Maybe I'm being unfair. It has a good zip to it, and the first half is solid. But I feel like a better book with this basic premise exists somewhere in the multiverse, and I wish I'd read it.
Continuity Notes:
- Somehow in the middle of this galactic terrorism crisis, no one mentions the other galactic terrorism crisis everyone is experiencing right now!
- Riker experiences a holoprogram of the Titan, and one of his clues it's a fake is that some of the ranks are wrong. "Always getting the ranks wrong," sighs the creator of the program. "I forget how closely people pay attention." Miller's Titan novella, Absent Enemies, received some flack for getting the ranks wrong, so it's a cute reference.
- I found the account of the political career of Senator Bretorius totally hilarious, especially the jokes about his biographers and his (lack of) participation in Shinzon's coup. His last line is also great.
Prometheus: In the Heart of Chaos by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg (translated by Helga Parmiter)
Published: September 2016 (German original); November 2018 (English translation)
Time Span: 25 November–5 December 2385
In my review of the audiobook, I praised this installment. Well, I said it was the best one, which isn't the same thing. Indeed, it starts a bit excitingly for once, with some desperate actions by the crews of the Prometheus and Bortas to escape the chaos zone they entered into at the end of the previous book.
Unfortunately, the book is still fully capable of frittering away its narrative energy because then we're back into, buckle up, a meeting scene! A whole chapter is devoted to a meeting where the main takeaway is that Spock thinks they should look something up in Memory Alpha. This should have been two lines of dialogue, tops! No one wants to read a debate about whether or not someone should send an e-mail!
So then we pop over to Memory Alpha of course, and here's your final big cameo for Star Trek's fiftieth anniversary... freaking Kosinski from "Where No One Has Gone Before." Wow, how did they get him back? No, the question is why? Why in the middle of this novel do we have to squander a chapter on this guy updating us on his life story, watching the news, and looking at maps in a library!? (Okay, he's not really the last big cameo, that's Wesley Crusher... a moment that is totally gratuitous... but hey so is everything else in this book.)
The problem is (and here I disagree with my 2019 self when he reviewed the audiobook) that then the Prometheus and Bortas split up, and now all the Prometheus is doing is flying to the origin of the Ancient Reds, picking up one of them, and flying back to Lembatta. You might think, That's not enough content to fill up a 350-page novel, and well, you'd be right. It feels like the Prometheus crew is barely in this one... but maybe that's a blessing in disguise. It certainly feels like they barely do anything in it, basically just being a ferry service. At a time when things should be escalating, there's actually less going on.
So how can they fill up the book's pages? By suddenly giving us the adventures of a new set of boring characters, some Rigellian chelon admiral and the ship he's on. One whole chapter is about trying to figure out a guy's password. None of it is ever really relevant to anything.
Overall, this book reads like someone took all the least interesting aspects of Destiny-era fiction—mediocre original characters, tedious political plots, gratuitous continuity references—and amped them up as far as they would go. So I guess it fits in with its era... mission accomplished? But there's a base level of enjoyment in even this era's worst book that I just could not find in Prometheus trilogy, with its stilted dialogue and tedious prose.
Continuity Notes:
Published: September 2016 (German original); November 2018 (English translation)
Time Span: 25 November–5 December 2385
In my review of the audiobook, I praised this installment. Well, I said it was the best one, which isn't the same thing. Indeed, it starts a bit excitingly for once, with some desperate actions by the crews of the Prometheus and Bortas to escape the chaos zone they entered into at the end of the previous book.
Unfortunately, the book is still fully capable of frittering away its narrative energy because then we're back into, buckle up, a meeting scene! A whole chapter is devoted to a meeting where the main takeaway is that Spock thinks they should look something up in Memory Alpha. This should have been two lines of dialogue, tops! No one wants to read a debate about whether or not someone should send an e-mail!
So then we pop over to Memory Alpha of course, and here's your final big cameo for Star Trek's fiftieth anniversary... freaking Kosinski from "Where No One Has Gone Before." Wow, how did they get him back? No, the question is why? Why in the middle of this novel do we have to squander a chapter on this guy updating us on his life story, watching the news, and looking at maps in a library!? (Okay, he's not really the last big cameo, that's Wesley Crusher... a moment that is totally gratuitous... but hey so is everything else in this book.)
The problem is (and here I disagree with my 2019 self when he reviewed the audiobook) that then the Prometheus and Bortas split up, and now all the Prometheus is doing is flying to the origin of the Ancient Reds, picking up one of them, and flying back to Lembatta. You might think, That's not enough content to fill up a 350-page novel, and well, you'd be right. It feels like the Prometheus crew is barely in this one... but maybe that's a blessing in disguise. It certainly feels like they barely do anything in it, basically just being a ferry service. At a time when things should be escalating, there's actually less going on.
So how can they fill up the book's pages? By suddenly giving us the adventures of a new set of boring characters, some Rigellian chelon admiral and the ship he's on. One whole chapter is about trying to figure out a guy's password. None of it is ever really relevant to anything.
Overall, this book reads like someone took all the least interesting aspects of Destiny-era fiction—mediocre original characters, tedious political plots, gratuitous continuity references—and amped them up as far as they would go. So I guess it fits in with its era... mission accomplished? But there's a base level of enjoyment in even this era's worst book that I just could not find in Prometheus trilogy, with its stilted dialogue and tedious prose.
Continuity Notes:
- This book is clearly dated to overlapping with Takedown by a reference to the opening of the Far Embassy. Only here it's called the "Embassy of Distance"—I guess neither translator nor editor picked up on it being a reference, so the term got translated back into English out of German.
- So in my "continuity notes" on all these November 2385–set novels (of which there are a lot), I've been making snarky comments about their lack of mention of the Lembatta crisis. I hope it's clear that this isn't really a rag on those books, as the Prometheus trilogy was written much later. Rather, it's a rag on this trilogy for its totally nonsensical chronological placement. Overlapping with Takedown seals the deal: at no point in the middle of this trilogy do communications go out across the galaxy; when Takedown opens, clearly nothing like a galactic terrorism crisis is underway. Why did the writers pick such a packed month... a month where the events of this trilogy clearly cannot happen? It's an unforced error. Even if it was set one month later in December, that would be fine; the trilogy would only overlap with a couple Deep Space Nine stories that give no sense of the greater galactic situation. Or, though this would require more changes, what if the whole thing took place in the run-up to The Fall, thus neatly explaining why Ishan's more militaristic message might be appealing to the Federation? But placing it here makes no sense.
Deep Space Nine: Rules of Accusation by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann
Published: July 2016
Time Span: 2385
I pretty much bounced off Block & Erdmann's previous DS9 novella, which had little of substance to say about Quark and also not terribly funny jokes. This, of course, makes it of a piece with the Quark/Ferengi television episodes it sought to emulate, which were hit-and-miss at best.* For me, the Ferengi episodes were at their worst when they totally took place within the Ferengi sphere (e.g., "Ferengi Love Songs," "Profit and Lace") and at their best when they involved some element of cultural clash, the intrusion of something from outside Ferengi society (e.g., "The Magnificent Ferengi," "Body Parts," "Little Green Men"). Quark can be a great character, but he is rarely so in the purely Ferengi episodes; the better Quark episodes are ones like "House of Quark" and "Profit and Loss" and "Business as Usual" where Quark is put into unusual situations that test who he is.
At first, Rules of Accusation is a lot like one of the worse Ferengi episodes. Quark has a new wacky scheme to get business; Rom will dedicate the new station bar as the Ferengi embassy to Bajor, and the big attraction will be the first showing of the original handwritten manuscript of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition in decades. There's lots of stuff about Quark planning his scheme, and "funny" Ferengi names and customs and such; basically every Ferengi you ever saw on the show pops up.
This is all set up, but it goes on a bit too long before things finally go wrong, which is when the book kicks into gear; you will not be surprised to learn that the manuscript disappears. But, technically the bar is Ferengi soil so Starfleet's worst security chief, Jefferson Blackmer, has no authority to investigate... so Quark is forced to call upon Odo. Then things get fun, with a series of interviews and investigations and twists. It's fun to have Odo and Quark interacting, and I think I genuinely laughed a couple times.
This is good, enjoyable stuff... but then the novel fizzles out. Neither Odo nor Quark actually solve their own problems. Worst of all, the book doesn't really tell us anything about Quark: the best Quark episodes showed us something about his values. As happened too often in the early seasons of the show, this is just another wacky Quark scheme that goes horribly wrong and leaves everything exactly as it was before. What's disappointing is that I really enjoyed the second half of the book up until that ending; I feel like it wouldn't have required much rewriting to give this overly frothy novella the exact right amount of oomph.
Continuity Notes:
Published: July 2016
Time Span: 2385
I pretty much bounced off Block & Erdmann's previous DS9 novella, which had little of substance to say about Quark and also not terribly funny jokes. This, of course, makes it of a piece with the Quark/Ferengi television episodes it sought to emulate, which were hit-and-miss at best.* For me, the Ferengi episodes were at their worst when they totally took place within the Ferengi sphere (e.g., "Ferengi Love Songs," "Profit and Lace") and at their best when they involved some element of cultural clash, the intrusion of something from outside Ferengi society (e.g., "The Magnificent Ferengi," "Body Parts," "Little Green Men"). Quark can be a great character, but he is rarely so in the purely Ferengi episodes; the better Quark episodes are ones like "House of Quark" and "Profit and Loss" and "Business as Usual" where Quark is put into unusual situations that test who he is.
At first, Rules of Accusation is a lot like one of the worse Ferengi episodes. Quark has a new wacky scheme to get business; Rom will dedicate the new station bar as the Ferengi embassy to Bajor, and the big attraction will be the first showing of the original handwritten manuscript of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition in decades. There's lots of stuff about Quark planning his scheme, and "funny" Ferengi names and customs and such; basically every Ferengi you ever saw on the show pops up.
This is all set up, but it goes on a bit too long before things finally go wrong, which is when the book kicks into gear; you will not be surprised to learn that the manuscript disappears. But, technically the bar is Ferengi soil so Starfleet's worst security chief, Jefferson Blackmer, has no authority to investigate... so Quark is forced to call upon Odo. Then things get fun, with a series of interviews and investigations and twists. It's fun to have Odo and Quark interacting, and I think I genuinely laughed a couple times.
This is good, enjoyable stuff... but then the novel fizzles out. Neither Odo nor Quark actually solve their own problems. Worst of all, the book doesn't really tell us anything about Quark: the best Quark episodes showed us something about his values. As happened too often in the early seasons of the show, this is just another wacky Quark scheme that goes horribly wrong and leaves everything exactly as it was before. What's disappointing is that I really enjoyed the second half of the book up until that ending; I feel like it wouldn't have required much rewriting to give this overly frothy novella the exact right amount of oomph.
Continuity Notes:
- The "Historian's Note" places this novel after The Missing and before Sacraments of Fire. The Missing takes place in late November 2385, but Sacraments of Fire actually takes place September through December 2385. Presumably this really means before part II of Sacraments, which is when the action jumps to December. The details kind of, but don't totally, line up. Odo is chilling on the station—he came aboard in The Missing and decided to stick around, so that fits. On the other hand, Sisko is on the station (though he leaves with the Robinson partway through the story), and part II of Sacraments indicates he's been gone from DS9 for three months. Also, we're told Odo is waiting for Sisko to be free to take him to see the Changeling, but in fact Sisko doesn't say he'll be taking Odo until part II of Sacraments; at the time this is set, Odo knows the Federation found a Changeling-like life-form but doesn't know where it is or have an indication of how he'll get there.
- Nog is not on the station, he's said to be "away on assignment." This basically makes him the only Ferengi DS9 character to not appear in the book... a book where his dad comes and visits for the first time in like a decade! To be honest, I kind of felt like the line was slipped in at the last minute because the writers forgot about Nog; it's not a continuity reference (as I thought it might be at first), because Nog is there throughout Sacraments.
- When the characters need to check something on Ferenginar, it's decided Odo will do it because it's quicker for him to shapeshift into a spacegoing life-form than to take a shuttle... though then we're told Odo's form can "move at a rapid clip, just shy of warp speed"! So just a few decades to Ferenginar and back? One might infer the writers of this book don't know much about the Star Trek universe.
- Morn is in this... quite a lot actually. He technically doesn't speak, because the book uses indirect speech to describe what he says, but this goes on quite a bit, to the extent of whole conversations. I didn't like it; might follow the letter of law, but it breaks the spirit. When it comes to Morn, less is more. All of the Morn scenes could have been substantially trimmed.
I do enjoy how you always refer to Blackmer as Starfleet's worst security chief because I really can't argue - not only is he bad at his job but he's such a non-entity as a character. That's part of why, when I was adapting Plagues of Night / Raise the Dawn, I removed him altogether and replaced him with Rwogo, the Ferengi woman investigator mentioned in Satisfaction Is Not Guaranteed, who comes aboard as the Ferengi exchange officer after the Alliance joins the Khitomer Accords and acts as the new security chief. Come to think of it, that would fit perfectly with this story by adding another Ferengi character and one who's a competent investigator.
I think the Nog off the station thing is a reference to Force and Motion, the Nog-and-O'Brien buddy movie novel by Jeffrey Lang, yet another story that takes place around the same time. It doesn't surprise me if the continuity doesn't line up perfectly because, as you've well established, that is clearly not a priority for them around this time.
I quite like these Ferengi novellas for the light fluff they provide amongst all the heavy drama of the other novels. There's often little room for comedy or general lightness in those books, so these smaller bites offer that. It's true though that they could still say something substantial about the characters while doing that. And I still don't get the point of the Schmenge character, that's why I replaced him with Rwogo as well when I adapted Lust's Latinum Lost.
I think the Nog off the station thing is a reference to Force and Motion, the Nog-and-O'Brien buddy movie novel by Jeffrey Lang, yet another story that takes place around the same time. It doesn't surprise me if the continuity doesn't line up perfectly because, as you've well established, that is clearly not a priority for them around this time.
I quite like these Ferengi novellas for the light fluff they provide amongst all the heavy drama of the other novels. There's often little room for comedy or general lightness in those books, so these smaller bites offer that. It's true though that they could still say something substantial about the characters while doing that. And I still don't get the point of the Schmenge character, that's why I replaced him with Rwogo as well when I adapted Lust's Latinum Lost.
That would be fun. I'll talk about this when I write up Sacraments of Fire, but George really dropped the ball when it came to repopulating the station with interesting characters following the Destiny time jump. There are a lot of a humans whose main personality attribute is "Starfleet officer."
I think Force and Motion (I am three books away) is set in January.
Seriously! How we have the whole crew of the station and the whole crew of the Robinson, and there's not a memorable character among them. I'm not quite sure how it's even possible to do that.
Perhaps this worth digging into/analysing with the benefit of hindsight. How does one crew of novel characters become memorable but another one forgettable? Like DS9 Relaunch vs DS9 Re-relaunch.
Deep Space Nine: Sacraments of Fire by David R. George III
Published: July 2015
Time Span: September–December 2385 (plus time travel to December 2377)
The Ascendants storyline was first introduced in Rising Son in January 2003; its last appearance prior to now was in August 2009's The Soul Key, to which this book makes a number of references. Then, with the Destiny time jump, it seemed to vanish entirely, with some vague references to it having happened during the missing years. Finally with July 2015's Sacraments of Fire it returns for an explanation at long last–six years since its previous appearance, over twelve since it first began. And here am I reading it eight years after that. It's been two decades since Rising Son!
Little wonder, then, that this book is filled with exposition and reminders. Who is Iliana Ghemor, what happened to Taran'atar, what did the Ascendants do, who were the Eav'oq, what was the Even Odds? So many threads from the first eight years of the relaunch get woven together here. Yet even though there's a lot of reminding, I often found myself slightly confused anyway, unable to discern what was significant new information and what was mere reminding of old information. What had happened to Taran'atar? He died? Was this during the Destiny time jump, or was this something that happened in The Soul Key but I forgot about in the past fourteen years?
Probably some of this was my fault. Probably also some of it was unavoidable. If George was going to finally wrap this storyline up, then how could he not interact with the details of twelve-year-old novels?
Yet like many of George's recent Star Trek novel's, it has a fundamental flaw. I said of his last one, Revelation and Dust, that it was "a book where almost nothing happens for the first 250 pages," adding "[n]o one is trying to accomplish anything and encountering obstacles." Exactly what bugs me about George's recent novels crystallized while reading Sacraments of Fire; to build on my line about Revelation, this is not a book where anyone has a goal. Rather things happen, then people react; more things happen, then people react; still more things happen, then people react. No one is trying to do anything. There's a whole multi-chapter escapade where Sisko is sent on the Robinson to intimidate the Tzenkethi and has to figure out what happened to a Starfleet ship—it has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, but worse, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It just takes up pages. Things keep happening involving a Bajoran moon and some religious fundamentalists, but our characters don't do anything, they just witness it. Odo spends the entire book looking at a Changeling artifact and thinking about it. The characters are never proactive... not even in their own heads, where they mostly just think about things that have happened to them in other books or between books. There's no drive or energy here. Blanks are being filled in, but no story is being told. Who are these people? I couldn't tell you. What is this book actually about?
Yet, you know, it's fairly clever. Following her utterly tedious (and still of no clear relevance) wormhole experience in Revelation, Kira is deposited in, it turns out, 2377, just prior to the Ascendant attack on Bajor. This means that what happened in the Destiny time jump isn't just a flashback, but it happens in the "present" for her. This takes what has been a "bug" of the DS9 novels and turns it into a feature.
Yet, Kira's dilemma about how to act in the past is too abstract; since we as readers don't really know what happened to the Even Odds, it's hard to perceive the issues in changing its history. It's hard to feel any suspense when all that Kira does in the past is continually be introduced to characters from Rising Son. I remember loving the Even Odds crew in Rising Son, eager for more adventures with them. Well, I finally got my wish... and it's so boring?
To add to all this, the book is often a plod in its prose and in its plotting. Prose-wise, I know we need some recapping, but there's often too much of it; the book indiscriminately recaps stuff we don't actually need to know. Many scenes would have benefited from a slash of the red pen. For example, when Ro and Cenn Desca discuss whether Altek Dans reminds them of Akorem Laam, Ro says she doesn't rememeber him because, "Thirteen years ago, I was living on Galion." The narrator then says:
The plot also plods. The conversation above is one that about happens about fifteen times. Is Altek Dans from the past like Akorem Lans? People wonder about this again and again. This is annoying because 1) everyone who read Revelation and Dust knows the answer is "yes" and 2) the characters make no progress in this question, and eventually decide the answer is probably "yes." Why did we have to spend all this time debating it? Isn't there some kind of Star Trek science test that could tell us he's from the past? On p. 190, this is still being debated!? Why are there interminable scenes about Ro trying to decide if Altek should be extradited or not extradited?
This book leads right into Ascendance, but the station present-day plotline doesn't even have a cliffhanger; it just stops. The cliffhanger is about what is happening eight years in the past!
Continuity Notes:
Phase Eight: 2386
41. Deep Space Nine: Ascendance by David R. George III
42. Section 31: Disavowed by David Mack
43. Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang
44. The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward
45. Titan: Sight Unseen by James Swallow
Published: July 2015
Time Span: September–December 2385 (plus time travel to December 2377)
The Ascendants storyline was first introduced in Rising Son in January 2003; its last appearance prior to now was in August 2009's The Soul Key, to which this book makes a number of references. Then, with the Destiny time jump, it seemed to vanish entirely, with some vague references to it having happened during the missing years. Finally with July 2015's Sacraments of Fire it returns for an explanation at long last–six years since its previous appearance, over twelve since it first began. And here am I reading it eight years after that. It's been two decades since Rising Son!
Little wonder, then, that this book is filled with exposition and reminders. Who is Iliana Ghemor, what happened to Taran'atar, what did the Ascendants do, who were the Eav'oq, what was the Even Odds? So many threads from the first eight years of the relaunch get woven together here. Yet even though there's a lot of reminding, I often found myself slightly confused anyway, unable to discern what was significant new information and what was mere reminding of old information. What had happened to Taran'atar? He died? Was this during the Destiny time jump, or was this something that happened in The Soul Key but I forgot about in the past fourteen years?
Probably some of this was my fault. Probably also some of it was unavoidable. If George was going to finally wrap this storyline up, then how could he not interact with the details of twelve-year-old novels?
Yet like many of George's recent Star Trek novel's, it has a fundamental flaw. I said of his last one, Revelation and Dust, that it was "a book where almost nothing happens for the first 250 pages," adding "[n]o one is trying to accomplish anything and encountering obstacles." Exactly what bugs me about George's recent novels crystallized while reading Sacraments of Fire; to build on my line about Revelation, this is not a book where anyone has a goal. Rather things happen, then people react; more things happen, then people react; still more things happen, then people react. No one is trying to do anything. There's a whole multi-chapter escapade where Sisko is sent on the Robinson to intimidate the Tzenkethi and has to figure out what happened to a Starfleet ship—it has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, but worse, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It just takes up pages. Things keep happening involving a Bajoran moon and some religious fundamentalists, but our characters don't do anything, they just witness it. Odo spends the entire book looking at a Changeling artifact and thinking about it. The characters are never proactive... not even in their own heads, where they mostly just think about things that have happened to them in other books or between books. There's no drive or energy here. Blanks are being filled in, but no story is being told. Who are these people? I couldn't tell you. What is this book actually about?
Yet, you know, it's fairly clever. Following her utterly tedious (and still of no clear relevance) wormhole experience in Revelation, Kira is deposited in, it turns out, 2377, just prior to the Ascendant attack on Bajor. This means that what happened in the Destiny time jump isn't just a flashback, but it happens in the "present" for her. This takes what has been a "bug" of the DS9 novels and turns it into a feature.
Yet, Kira's dilemma about how to act in the past is too abstract; since we as readers don't really know what happened to the Even Odds, it's hard to perceive the issues in changing its history. It's hard to feel any suspense when all that Kira does in the past is continually be introduced to characters from Rising Son. I remember loving the Even Odds crew in Rising Son, eager for more adventures with them. Well, I finally got my wish... and it's so boring?
To add to all this, the book is often a plod in its prose and in its plotting. Prose-wise, I know we need some recapping, but there's often too much of it; the book indiscriminately recaps stuff we don't actually need to know. Many scenes would have benefited from a slash of the red pen. For example, when Ro and Cenn Desca discuss whether Altek Dans reminds them of Akorem Laam, Ro says she doesn't rememeber him because, "Thirteen years ago, I was living on Galion." The narrator then says:
Cenn knew that, at that time, the planet Galion had fallen within the Demilitarized Zone established by a treaty between the Federation and the Cardassians. If he recalled correctly, many of the Maquis leadership—and apparently Ro Laren—had settled there. He also remembered that, during the Dominion War, Jem'Hadar forces had wiped out most of Galion's population. All of which suggested why Ro might not have learned about the lightship that traveled out of both the wormhole and Bajor's past.
You probably don't need most of that paragraph, which provides way more detail than is needed to communicate the fact that Ro wasn't in Starfleet thirteen years ago. You certainly don't need the last sentence, which makes obvious an inference that anyone who had read the rest of the paragraph could have made. But it's typical of the book. In fact, in part II, there are these little recaps of part I, written as though it's recapping a previous book. Quark, I know who Altek Dans is and how he got onto the station because it happened in this book!The plot also plods. The conversation above is one that about happens about fifteen times. Is Altek Dans from the past like Akorem Lans? People wonder about this again and again. This is annoying because 1) everyone who read Revelation and Dust knows the answer is "yes" and 2) the characters make no progress in this question, and eventually decide the answer is probably "yes." Why did we have to spend all this time debating it? Isn't there some kind of Star Trek science test that could tell us he's from the past? On p. 190, this is still being debated!? Why are there interminable scenes about Ro trying to decide if Altek should be extradited or not extradited?
This book leads right into Ascendance, but the station present-day plotline doesn't even have a cliffhanger; it just stops. The cliffhanger is about what is happening eight years in the past!
Continuity Notes:
- When Nog tries to access the Vic Fontaine holoprogram, he notices someone else accessed it. I think this is supposed to be a reference to The Light Fantastic, but the timing doesn't line up, as this scene occurs in part I, which is set during book 3 of The Fall, whereas Light Fantastic is after The Fall.
- Blackmer offers his resignation to Ro again, but there's no acknowledgement he already did this in The Missing.
- You can write paragraph upon paragraph about how Cenn Desca and Kira were friends, David R. George III, but you can't make me feel it.
- Speaking of which, Cenn Desca is boring, like all of the other new station characters. I don't think they've really been designed as main characters; they're names and species and jobs and that's it. They don't have hooks or desires. But they're too often focused on like they are main characters. Indeed, I actually forgot Cenn Desca even existed, because I don't think he's even mentioned in The Missing or Rules of Accusation. Probably those authors forgot about him too!
- The back cover blurb is a very detailed description of the first scene and it gives little sense of most of what the novel is about. I would not be at all surprised to learn it was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of George's outline.
Phase Eight: 2386
41. Deep Space Nine: Ascendance by David R. George III
42. Section 31: Disavowed by David Mack
43. Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang
44. The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward
45. Titan: Sight Unseen by James Swallow
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