David R. George, III

I really felt this was a book of two halves. The first half just didn't keep my interest. Lots of set-up of characters, new ones we haven't met and some new ones just being introduced now. The middle we get a meeting of the Typhon Pact presidents and those of the Khitomer accords, including the newly added Cardassians and Ferengi. Only then does it start to get adventurous and good like a Star Trek Novel should.

The Enterprise, still captained by Jean-Luc now married to Beverly Crusher, who is only mentioned & not seen, goes to the Gamma Quadrent with a Romulan Warbird to explore space together as a sign of peace. U.S.S. Robinson, now captained by Ben Sisko, is doing routine star mapping in the Quadrent including a diplomatic rendezvous with the Vahni Vahltupal, who I personally had been wondering about whatever happened to them just days before I happened to read that part. All while back on DS9 Ro and her crew investigate some strange feelings, hunches, readings, etc. which may be all made up, or may be a terrorist plot to destroy the station by the Adorians, or maybe someone else making it look like the Andorians.

David George is one of the best Star Trek authors eloquently putting together scene by scene unrelated characters just like an episode with several plots.… (more)

Ah, we've finally tied off all the lingering threads of the Deep Space Nine time jump. Now the story can move forward at last! David R. George III set up some new concepts in his previous book, so surely we'll be building on them.

What's that? We never heard the story of Rebecca Sisko's kidnapping? Oh, well, I guess so...

To be honest, I had forgotten this had even happened. It was part, I think, of the litany of bad things that was used in Rough Beasts of Empire to justify Sisko running away from his family, along with "neighbors who the reader never saw died." Because, as we know, the thing good fathers do when their children are kidnapped is spend less time around them. I don't think this was a story that actually demanded to be told.

Original Sin has two parallel plotlines; in the present day, Sisko's command, the USS Robinson, has set out on a journey of exploration in the Gamma Quadrant, but Rebecca is kidnapped (along with a bunch of other children aboard the Galaxy-class starship). This reminds Sisko of the last time she was kidnapped, so we get that filled in, too.

It is dead boring. I can't imagine anyone reading all the post-Destiny DS9 novels up until this point and thinking to themselves, "Gee, I really want more of Sisko sitting around thinking about how worried he is," but that's exactly what we get here. Ad nauseam. It may be realistic that Sisko does nothing to find Rebecca in the flashback while a trained investigator works on it... but that kind of realism is not what I read Star Trek books for! Seriously, he's barely in the flashbacks, it all focuses on some investigator lady who I assume must have been in earlier books but whom I did not remember at all. Like, what's the point of this? It just goes on and on and on. Also, at at least one point, the frame narrative deflates the flashback by telling us something about it before we actually get to see it (p. 142). C'mon, why do this?

In theory, Sisko is the active character in the present-day narrative, but it also feels like little happens here. The kids are kidnapped, the Robinson crew putzes around a lot, they rescue the kids, the end. No plot twists, no character development, no interesting worldbuilding. The whole thing is incredibly linear and dull. Thematically, there doesn't seem to be anything going on, there's just people doing stuff... but why? The original Mission: Gamma novels (see below) largely managed to explore interesting alien cultures and tell gripping character stories, but this does neither.

Other Notes:

• Am I supposed to parse this as a book called Gamma: Original Sin? Or a book called Original Sin in a subseries called Gamma that only lasted one installment? Or was this supposed to be book five of Mission: Gamma but someone screwed up? (This is, after all, the publishing era where Section 31 and The Lost Era were revived for further installments, a decade on.)
• Are the crew of the Robinson the least interesting "leads" to ever grace the pages of a Star Trek book?

I also wrote up some overall thoughts on the Destiny-era DS9 novels on my blog here.… (more)

The Long Mirage picks up from the last David R. George III Deep Space Nine novel, rel="nofollow" target="_top">Ascendance, following up on the stories of Quark, Ro, Nog, Kira, and Odo, most prominently. And this is absolutely going to sound like damning with faint praise, but... it is a book about people with goals trying to accomplish them! After my frustrations with Ascendance ("Can you really write sixty pages of a novel with no clear narrative direction? Apparently so."), this is a blessed relief. Quark wants to find Morn... and sets out to do so. Ro wants to avoid her boyfriend and figure out her relationships with Quark... and sets out to do so. Nog wants to fix Vic Fontaine's program... and sets out to do so. Kira wants to figure out the mystery of the falsework and help with unrest on Bajor... and sets out to do so. Odo wants to find out what's going on with a Dominion ship approaching the station... and sets out to do so! Amazingly competent plotting. I'll tackle each of these in turn, and talk about the extent to which they work.

A long-deferred thread in this series has been what happened to Morn... and to be honest, I don't think what happened to a glorified extra is sufficiently interesting to drag out for years of both publication time and story time. But in this book, instead of getting updates on it from some other character, Quark actually goes to find out for himself, and Ro comes with him. So that's nice, but in the end, the two characters don't really accomplish much themselves; basically, they bump into some other characters also looking for Morn, and those characters tell them everything they want to know, and that's it. So although Quark and Ro are actually taking action, their actions don't really drive the narrative, nor do they really do anything interesting or clever. Their relationship gets a couple good scenes but nothing in it seems to really resolve or develop.

In the Nog plotline, he and Candlewood (DS9's science officer who, like most of the new crew, lacks any kind of personality or character hook) go into Vic's program to unravel its issues once and for all. Okay, so I am glad this has finally happened, but it beggars belief that it took Nog two years to undertake the really obvious action of asking Felix for help. What follows is a fun enough Las Vegas escapade, but like the Quark/Ro plot, it's undermined by someone turning up and explaining everything to Nog rather than Nog piecing anything together himself. On the other hand, Nog does get some good moments of coming up and executing a plan... which does actually work! Of all the book's plots, this is the most successful, though I wish it had felt like something was actually stake for Nog rather than us constantly being told this was the case. I also did appreciate how it turns out that the Morn and Vic plots actually go together.

The Kira plotline is okay. I can't really muster up any enthusiasm for her relationship with Altek Dans, and I refuse to believe there's anyone out there who can. I did like she got a classic Kira moment, in doing the right thing that no one else liked. I didn't find the resolution to the falsework dilemma very compelling; the whole thing about a remembered childhood comet seemed fairly uncompelling and circumstantial.

The Odo plotline is, alas, like the ones from earlier Deep Space Nine books, in that no one is called on to make a choice. The ship of Dominion refugees turns up, they tell Odo what they're doing, the end. There are no interesting decisions or character moments at all. Like, why even do this?

So yes... this is probably the best of the post-Destiny Deep Space Nine novels, in that the characters actually try to do things... but it's still pretty boring and could have been a lot better.

Continuity Notes:

• This does reference The Light Fantastic, but the Nog stuff doesn't have any reference to Force and Motion. We do learn a little bit about what the O'Brien kids are like as teenagers, though, which is nice.

Other Notes:

• Occasionally we get scenes from the third-person limited perspectives of holosuite characters. I don't think this makes any real sense. Surely they do not have interiority?
• Characters in this book are often weirdly skeptical of people's claims to have traveled through time given this is, you know, Star Trek.
• Compared to other DS9 books of this era, this one has surprisingly little recapping; indeed, unlike Ascendance, which constantly recapped itself, this one barely recaps previous novels at all. Thank the Prophets!

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It's sort of a miracle we got an Ascendants wrap-up book, you know? If Deep Space Nine was a comic book, it would have just moved on and forgotten about all this once the big crossover (i.e., Destiny) came along. It certainly wouldn't have spent time wrapping up a dangling plotline from a previous editorial regime. So, maybe we should be grateful?

And yet...

As I said in my previous write-up, it was a long time ago that I read Rising Son and its following books, so I am going off some pretty vague memories at this points. Yet if I recall correctly, what made the Ascendants interesting was the potential for cultural and religious conflict. These were people who had the same gods as the Bajorans but interpreted them differently. What would happen when they met the Bajorans?

This book is somewhat oddly structured. While Sacraments of Fire moved back and forth between 2377 and 2385, using the Kira of 2385(ish) as its focalizing character in 2377, Ascendance is split into half. The first half is all set in 2377; I wonder if you could just read it on its own as the next installment in the OG relaunch after The Soul Key. In this, Iliana Ghemor leads the Ascendant fleet through the Bajoran wormhole. I recently reread my review of The Soul Key from back in the day, and I wrote, "What really bothers me is that Fearful Symmetry gave Iliana Ghemor a complex backstory and strong character... but that felt entirely pointless here, as she became just another sneering madwoman." That continues here; Ghemor decides to blow up Bajor because she's so mad at Kira.

On the surface this has more action than Sacraments, but mostly all the characters seem to do is watch the Ascendant fleet come. Which is unfortunate because there are a lot of characters to do this watching: Kira, Sisko, Ezri, Vaughn. But no one does anything interesting. Basically what happens is that Taran'atar takes the only action of significance. We spent a big chunk of the previous book getting reacquainted with the Even Odds crew, but they're irrelevant here, they don't even show up.

The Ascendants attack... and Taran'atar sucks them all up. That's it? It doesn't feel worthy of the buildup, and it's not the kind of conflict I remember imagining. It fills a gap, but it kinds of feels like that's all it does. Sisko has a good idea, but doesn't feel like he plays an interesting role—weren't the Ascendants the whole reason he came back in Unity? Plus, it continues the thing I hate that all the post-Destiny novels have done with Sisko, which is take him away from being the Emissary.

Then we get an overly long double epilogue about Kira and Ezri, setting up the former's switch to religious life (still not sold on this) and the latter's transfer to the Aventine. Like so many George moments of "characterization," it's just someone sitting around thinking about something, not something that happens in the actual story.

Then we jump back to the present of Deep Space Nine narrative. This happens on p. 171... and the first inkling we get of something approaching a plot is p. 229. For sixty pages, people think about things and people have meetings. What will happen to Cenn Desca? I couldn't care less. Nog thinks about Vic, Ro thinks about Altek Dans, Quark thinks about Ro, Sisko thinks about exploring. Can you really write sixty pages of a novel with no clear narrative direction? Apparently so. I was so continually frustrated by this. One of my problems is that the main characters so very rarely interact with each other. Everyone seems lost in their own thoughts all the time; the real strength of DS9 on tv (and the original relaunch) was in how the members of its ensemble interacted. Whenever something like that does happen (Kira/Taran'atar in Sacraments, Ro/Taran'atar here) it actually is pretty good, but it so rarely happens. Every now and then there's a moment of characterization that actually does shine; I liked Quark asking if Nog was okay following the events of The Poisoned Chalice a lot. Even with Quark/Ro, it's never Quark and Ro interacting, but rather Quark scenes where he thinks about Ro and Ro scenes where she thinks about Quark. But originally it was George who made Quark/Ro into a believable thing back in Twilight!

Finally things come into focus. When Odo linked with the mysterious shapeshifter at the end of Sacraments, it came to life; now it begins flying through space faster-than-light toward the Bajoran system and the Defiant must intercept it. There is some nicely creepy stuff, but once again, I can't shake the feeling that our characters are just watching the story, not participating in it. Only Ro does anything that matters, when she opts to board the shapeshifter (which has by this point formed a duplicate DS9) against everyone else's objections. Even now, though, I am wondering why this is in the same book as the first half. What does it have to do with anything?

Here, we learn that when Taran'atar and the Ascendants blew up they merged into a weird collective life form but it was inert until it learned how to shapeshift from Odo. The Ascendants want to complete their ascension, so they fly into the wormhole and become the "planet" from "Emissary" whose existence I was dubious about back in Revelation and Dust. And... that's it?

Here, I feel the the ingredients existed to do something interesting. George is clearly trying to explore faith, in particular Taran'atar's, who in the end tragically cannot break free of the need to worship. I did like the return of Raiq and wonder if future novels will find anything interesting for her to do. But again, few characters have moments they make choices.

Moreover, from an ongoing storyline perspective, it's a bit of a fizzle. I think the ingredients are here—the merged Ascendant entity is like a Founder because of something one Ascendant did with the Founder god corpse in Olympus Descending. But, is there some kind of connection between the Founders and their god and the Prophets? But these are ideas in my head, not ones the novel explores or even raises. Instead, we are treated to a scene about which boring nonentity will replace another boring nonentity as the first officer of DS9. Will it be—checks notes—uh, Stinson, who I guess has been in four previous novels but left no mark at all and who we are treated to a two-page backstory infodump about? No, it's Jefferson Blackmer, Starfleet's worst chief of security. Well, at least he's been promoted to a position where he's no longer responsible for stopping sabotage or assassination, I guess.

The gaps are filled, I guess, the storyline tied off. But what was the point? What was it actually about? This one read much better than Sacraments, with more action... but very little of it seemed to matter in the end.

Continuity Notes:

• A long time ago, I read the original series novel Allegiance in Exile. Thirty-nine books later that finally paid off when someone looked up the Ascendants in the computer and found the Memory Beta entry on Allegiance in Exile. Result!
• No one in this book knows where Bashir is. Meanwhile over in Section 31: Disavowed (which I read just after this and takes place roughly at the same time, and was published over a year earlier) he's been pardoned and commended and is living publicly on Andor.

Other Notes:

• What is up with Altek Dans? As in, what is the purpose of this character? Why is he in this series. Two 300-page books later and I have no idea. How is he a vehicle for new stories? I cannot fathom it. The "romance" with Ro comes from nowhere and nothing. Just why? I also don't get why no one just shows him a map of Bajor and asks him where his city was. Even if he's from 500,000 years ago, there should be enough familiar geographical features for him to answer this question.
• Odo spends basically the whole book unconscious, then he leaves.
• The station's new senior staff is largely so boring. Candlewood is fine if your requirement is "after Jadzia died, we need to say someone is doing science stuff," but he was never designed to be a focal character and it shows, and that goes for most of these people, and whenever the Defiant goes somewhere, its crew is almost entirely made up of people like that.
• Like Sacraments of Fire, the back cover blurb fails to describe the book in any meaningful way, feeling like someone just pasted in the first two paragraphs of George's outline.

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