Describing the setting is a "minute detail?" This is a traditional task of all novels.
I wish I felt like arguing with you about this, but I don't. Simply put, a whole lot of writing went into describing the physical details down on the planet. Those details never affected the plot in any manner. I would go back and find a few paragraphs for you, but it's really not worth the effort. And as I said, that was only one example of wasted detail work.
You know, your argument would be stronger if you didn't frame it in terms of, "I didn't like this, so the people who made it are incompetent." I contend that the story was not "chopped up" by the flashbacks -- that the flashbacks were an important part of the story that helped frame the themes and characters.
I agree that the flashbacks were an important part of the story. I just think they were inserted at the wrong spots and at the wrong frequency. Several could have been combined, with no ill effect on the pacing.
What was "comic book villainy" about the mercenaries?
Seriously? How does an elite team of special operatives constantly get foiled by one guy, a couple of security officers, and a couple of doctors? That trap aboard the freighter? I mean, it was like watching Mr Bean, The Spy Who Shagged me.
In a mini-series about the consequences of a presidential assassination, the novel about the assassination itself is unnecessary? I disagree.
And yet, followup novels in The Fall did the job of summing up the assassination in a few paragraphs. The reality is, R&D provided nothing to the rest of The Fall that couldn't be done in a summary. Yes, it has apparently setup a bunch of stuff for a DS9 re-relaunch. But that had absolutely nothing to do with The Fall. The assassination was the only thing that linked the book to the rest of The Fall, and it didn't even start in on that until the 2nd half of the book, then proceeded to bumble its way through a half-hearted investigative mystery without conclusion.
I find this complaint absurd. You're essentially arguing that a novel must only ever either be one extreme or the other -- either completely "standalone," or completely serialized. That hasn't been the way most books in a Star Trek miniseries have been written for going on 15 years now, and it's an arbitrary standard to hold them to.
That is not at all the argument I'm making. The argument I am making is that there was a whole lot of unnecessary content in The Fall. Unnecessary to the plot of individual books. Unnecessary to the overall plot of The Fall. Unnecessary to any sort of character development.
This is not "schizophrenic," nor does it mean they need to be "edited down." These books have no obligation to show the kind of narrow-minded focus you seem to want; these are novels, not television scripts.
You're absolutely correct that the authors and editors have no obligation toward me. I also have no obligation to sugar coat their failings. We've already discussed in the R&D thread my belief that anything not necessary for the advancement of the plot is unnecessary to a novel and should be edited out. I haven't changed my view on that. A "tight" novel, or a "tight" series should be the goal.
If Revelation and Dust was one of the worst novels you have ever read, then you have had a startlingly positive literary history and have managed to avoid a huge percentage of published novels that are far, far inferior.
You're probably not wrong about this. Why would I purposefully go looking to read bad lit when there's so much good out there?
I finished this book last night I was totally surprised of how the mystery was unraveled in this in suprising ways like
