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Algernon_Asimov's reviews of the Deep Space Nine relaunch novels
These books are set after the end of the 'Deep Space Nine' TV series, following on from the events of the DS9 finale. If you have not watched DS9 to the end, then be warned: HERE BE SPOILERS!
Prequels
The Lives of Dax, edited by Marco Palmieri
This book is not officially part of the relaunch - as the editor writes in the introduction, it was inspired by Jadzia's death at the end of Season 6. Also, most of these stories refer to the earlier hosts of Dax, which means they take place before the 'Deep Space Nine' TV series. However, some of the events in these stories are referred to in the later relaunch novels, so this book has de facto "Season 8" status: it was originally released as a generic Star Trek book, but later editions feature the DS9 relaunch logo and styling on the cover.
It's an anthology of nine short stories, each written by a different author and focussing on a different Dax host.
Ezri: Second Star To The Right ... And Straight On 'Til Morning
This framing story focusses on the current Dax host: Ezri. She's in the holodeck with Vic Fontaine, and starts telling him her history, starting with the story of how Ezri Tegan came to be joined with the Dax host. So, this story has three layers: Ezri Dax in the current day in the holodeck; Ezri Tegan in flashback on the USS Destiny; then the lead-in to the stories of the various previous Dax hosts.
As a framing story, it fulfils its purpose: it sets up the premise for us, the readers. As a stand-alone story, it's not so good.
The scenes in the holodeck with Vic Fontaine are laboured and overly descriptive. We spend way too much time learning that Ezri is wearing a blue-sequined spaghetti-strap cocktail dress with uncomfortable high heels. Vic doesn't talk like the Vic we've seen in the show. But, it's just a set-up.
Then, Ezri starts telling the story of how she came to be joined. And it gets worse: the Ezri Tegan we meet on the USS Destiny is nothing like the Ezri Dax we meet on Deep Space Nine, even allowing for the changes brought about by being joined with Dax. We learn that Ezri Tegan is one of the few Trill who have not been screened for their suitability for joining with a symbiont, which is what we expect based on what we saw in the show: Ezri was a surprise host. However, more than simply neglecting to be screened, Ezri is actively against the concept of joining. She believes that "the whole of Trill society was dedicated to brainwashing its children into believing there could be no higher goal than sacrificing their individuality to a parasitic race of slugs", and thinks of the symbionts as "parasitic brain vampires".
The Ezri Dax we met at the start of Season 7 of 'Deep Space Nine' was confused, lost in her multiple identities, having trouble coping - all these things and more. But there was no sign that she resented having been forced to join with a "parasitic brain vampire". Even if she'd learned the truth about the nature of joining from Dax itself, there should still be some residual hints of this anti-parasite Ezri in the post-joining personality. But, there's none - because the authors of this story have created conflict just for the sake of it, without considering character continuity.
This story does its job competently in framing the book, but it's not great itself. It's clunkily written, it's laboured, and it introduces contradictory characterisation.
Lela: First Steps
The first story naturally centres on Dax's first host: Lela. And, one important thing to note with most of the hosts is that we don't have much first-hand information about these characters - most of them made only one on-screen appearance, in the Season 3 episode 'Facets'. This, plus a few off-hand remarks, is all we know about them. This gives the authors in this anthology more room to move, and makes it less likely that they'll contradict what we know of these characters.
Lela is a junior member of the ruling council of Trill at a time when Trill has only recently learned about the existence of other species. The Trill people's response to their first encounter with the Vulcans has been to withdraw into ignorant isolation, shutting everyone else out. However, an alien ship has now appeared in orbit, making a request that noone can understand...
Each story is prefaced with a quote from the TV show about the relevant host. In this case, the quote is naturally about Lela. However, a more relevant quote would be the one by Captain Sisko in Season 7 when Ezri goes off to search for a lost Worf: "She's a Dax. Sometimes they don't think. They just do." Because Lela does things, when the rest of the council won't. We also learn that the Dax symbiont has a wish to see the stars, which Lela herself did not have before being joined. This shows how the symbiont's qualities influence and are part of the joined Trill's personality.
Along the way, she meets a character we have met before: T'Pau. This is another common factor of these stories - they all have some reference to a character and/or event we already know from other Star Trek canon. In a minor digression in a larger conversation, T'Pau tells Lela about a recent species the Vulcans have encountered; even without naming names, we know she's talking about the events seen in the movie 'First Contact'. The reference is awkwardly inserted, even if gratifying, but it sets this story in the 2060s or 2070s.
Overall, this is a good story, and well told.
Tobin: Dead Man's Hand
Tobin, Dax's second host, is an engineer who is socially awkward. He's nervous. The Human captain of the ship he's on gave him a deck of Human playing cards, together with a book on card tricks, "to keep your hands busy. You fidget too much." The victim of his attempts to practice his card tricks is the only other non-Human on board: Skon, a Vulcan mathematician (here's the character from canon - Skon is mentioned as the father of Sarek in 'The Search for Spock'). The two of them, together with other engineers and mathematicians on the ship, are working on a secret prototype. Well, it must be secret, because we the readers don't get to learn what it does until more than halfway through the story. Suffice to say that it's a significant piece of technology that we see a lot of in Star Trek.
The story is prefaced by about a page of dialogue between two characters who are not named or identified in any way, and nor do we understand what they're talking about until later in the story. This preface is awkward, unhelpful, and ultimately unnecessary - it adds nothing to the story. In fact, the paragraphs after this preface make a much better opening to the story.
The story focusses on some Romulans' attempts to gain knowledge of warp drive by hijacking the ship that Tobin and Skon are on, because Romulus only has slower-than-light travel at this time. There is mention "that the humans and Romulans had been engaged in a vicious border war for the better part of three years", which places this story in the mid-2100s. Some of the references to the Human-Romulan war in this story may have been superseded by events in 'Star Trek: Enterprise', which was not even a twinkle in a producer's eye at the time this book was written.
The story operates a bit like a card trick itself: key pieces of information (such as the nature of the prototype) are hidden from the reader to artificially build suspense, and only revealed at the right "wow" moment. It's frustrating. The character of Tobin is written a little too simply: there really does seem to be nothing to him beyond him being an engineer and playing card tricks - the author has not added anything to what we know from on-screen references.
It's an okay story.
Emony: Old Souls
This story is actually told from the point of view of someone other than one of Dax's hosts: a young Leonard McCoy. It's basically an expansion of a brief exchange in the episode 'Trials and Tribble-ations', between Sisko and Jadzia Dax:
JADZIA: McCoy... McCoy... Leonard McCoy! I met him when he was a student at Ole Miss.
SISKO: Who met him - Curzon?
JADZIA: No. My host at the time was Emony. She was on Earth judging a gymnastics competition. I had a feeling he'd become a doctor... he had the hands of a surgeon.
McCoy is "a small-town boy a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday" who goes to a gymnastics competition with his Ole Miss dorm-mate, only to see the famous gymnast Emony Dax acting as one of judges. His mother was a fan of Emony when she won her three latinum medals in the '24 Olympics... twenty-one years ago. This sets the story in 2245, some twenty years before McCoy serves with Kirk on the Enterprise.
It also seems that Emony is old enough to be McCoy's mother! And, yet, they make a romantic connection. Brief, but still real. The romance is set against some interspecies conflict at the gymnastic competition, but this is basically a love story. And, it's nice. The story is short and sweet, like the romance itself.
Andor: Paradigm, by Heather Jarman
This story continues the Andorian-related plot lines from 'Mission Gamma: This Gray Spirit' - both the species-wide issue and the personal issue. And, our Ensign Thirishar ch'Thane ("Shar") is dead-centre of both of these issues: he's the one who discovered something on the Yrythny planet which might help the Andorians, and there's a family event involving his family that he was conspicuously not invited to (but ends up attending anyway, due to requirements of the plot). Shar is accompanied on his trip to Andor by Station Counsellor Lieutenant Phillippa Matthias (who was invited to that family event) and Ensign Prynn Tenmei. The story is told through these three characters' viewpoints.
There's some unnecessary adventure and derring-do in this story, which at times felt like action just for the sake of it. I found the family-related plot quite interesting - which was lucky, because it was front and centre of the story. The species-related plot mostly happened in the background, which was a little disappointing; I would have liked to have seen more discussion about the implications of Shar's Yrythny discovery and what it meant for the Andorians.
It was good to be on Andor and see this four-gendered culture up close and personal. We even get a glimpse, through Prynn's eyes, of the indoctrination young Andorians face in order to keep breeding more Andorians and stave off the extinction of the whole species. It's little touches like this, and like meeting the young zhei and talking to "her", which show us the life of Andorians. Although it was a little bit too coincidental that the zhei also just happened to be married to some key plot-drivers - umm... characters - in the story. This felt forced.
Overall, it's an interesting read.
Trill: Unjoined, by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels
This is the third 'Worlds' novella in a row to feature terrorists as a plot point. Even though I'm sure each story's writer(s) could justify their own terrorists for their own reasons, I think a watchful editor could have (should have?) avoided this repetitiveness. By the time you get the third scenario involving a terrorist attack, or the threat of a terrorist attack, it just feels like lazy writing: using the same trick over and over again to excite interest in readers. I'll have to be honest and say that the outcome of the terrorist attack in this story was probably the most interesting and most necessary to the plot.
That's not to say I liked the plot, though - especially the massive changes to the Trill species which occur as a result of this story. I felt cheated and betrayed. The background we learn about the Trill species - humanoids and symbionts - is fascinating. I'm not sure I like the retcon about how they're involved with the antagonists in 'Unity', though. And, the outcome of the story simply changed the Trill species forever (to the same degree as if we learned that Vulcans had given up logic, or if the Klingons turned into a race of artists). It was certainly dramatic, but it felt wrong.
This story was told primarily through the eyes of Lieutenant Ezri Dax and Doctor Julian Bashir - with some random chapters from other Trills' viewpoints. This included two chapters from a totally irrelevant character, two from a relevant character, and one from someone who had a secret... which made for some very awkward writing while we were talked through this person's thought processes while the writers dodged around the secret at the centre of those thought processes.
This was an uneven story: strange points of view, some awkward moments, a lot of fascinating backstory, thoughtful conflict between Bashir and Ezri, and a resolution that changed the Trill species.
Bajor: Fragments and Omens
There were two big flaws with this story.
First, while the previous stories had been told from only two or three characters' points of view, this story has eleven protagonists, seven of whom are the viewpoint character for only one chapter each. At the other extreme, one character is the central voice for seven chapters - a whole third of the novella. This switching between multiple characters' points of view has some benefits, such as being able to follow a particular plot from the surface of Bajor to Deep Space Nine to the Defiant on a deep-space chase. However, it makes for very disjointed reading, jumping from one character to another to another to another...
The other main flaw doesn't become apparent until late in the novella, when I realised that the action plot (the one which starts on Bajor and goes via DS9 to the Defiant) actually had no resolution. I'm not sure if this loose thread will be resolved in a future 'Worlds of Deep Space Nine' novella, or a different novel, or never at all - but it was frustrating to not even have a clear idea of the implications of this unresolved plot. It just petered off into nothing about three-quarters of the way through.
In the meantime, the character whose viewpoint we follow for seven chapters is basically just having a romance with one of our main characters. It's an interesting trick: following the romance from the other character's point of view, rather than from the main character's point of view. It allows us to learn how other people see this main character - which, surprisingly, works quite well.
And, in the background, all these other characters popping in and out of the narrative spotlight are basically just setting the players in place for future stories: a new Liaison Officer on Deep Space Nine between the Bajoran and Starfleet, and a new Bajoran representative on the Federation Council.
This story feels like a prologue, rather than a story in and of itself. I didn't like it.
Ferenginar: Satisfaction is Not Guaranteed
Here's a disclaimer up front: I like the Ferengi. Let me rephrase that: I dislike the Ferengi themselves, but I like episodes about the Ferengi. I know many people disliked the Ferengi episodes of DS9, but I enjoyed them. And, if you disliked the Ferengi episodes of the show, you'll probably dislike this story, because it feels just like a Ferengi episode.
It has almost every Ferengi character we've ever seen - Quark, Rom, Zek, Ishkar, Nog, Brunt (of course: what's a Ferengi episode without Brunt?), Nilva, Gaila - plus a couple of new ones. There's also Maihar'du, and Leeta (she's pregnant with Rom's child!), and even Ro Laren. It has scheming and plotting and sneakiness. It has humour, and lightheartedness, and silly Ferengi being silly Ferengi. It feels just like a Ferengi episode.
That said, not much actually happens. The plot is foiled (of course), and the status quo is maintained. But, it's fun. Just like a Ferengi episode.
I liked it. Just like a Ferengi episode.
The Dominion: Olympus Descending
This story started out with lots of promise, then went in a direction I did not like at all.
Firstly, unlike the other five stories in this series, this story is not set primarily on a single planet. But, then, the Dominion isn't a single planet. However, we follow three main threads here: Odo with the Great Link; a Vorta, Vannis, who has errands to run for the Dominion which take her to a few different places within the Gamma Quadrant; Taran'atar, the Jem'Hadar that Odo sent to the Alpha Quadrant. Taran'atar's story is set entirely in the Alpha Quadrant, but is still focussed on the Dominion. Having this story set across all these different locations doesn't feel like a flaw.
The flaws are with the plot itself. For one thing, the Founders have a religion. While they've genetically engineered the Vorta and Jem'Hadar to worship them as gods, they themselves worship a god. That's new. And not only do they have a religion and a god, but this story retcons their origins. There's a very metatextual moment in Chapter 3, when Odo is learning about the Founders' origins from another changeling he has named "Indurane" (Founders don't have names, but Odo is used to individuals having names so he made one up for this Founder): "Odo remembered questioning the changeling leader about whether the Founders had always been able to shapeshift, and her response that, eons ago, their people had been like the solids. Indurane's contentions did not contradict that." It's like the author is trying to convince us readers that he's not breaking the rules. Well, no, this new origin story doesn't contradict the on-screen origin story, but it surely does subvert it and change it beyond recognition. I found this new version of the Founders' origin to be gratuitous and awkward. It's one thing to change the future direction of a species, like the Trill story in this sextet did, but it's another thing to re-write the history we've learned on screen.
Then there's the whole chapter that turns out to be a dream sequence (unfortunately, not the aforementioned chapter with the Founders' new origin story). That felt cheap. Very cheap and gimmicky. After the fact, I understood what the author was trying to do, but it still felt like cheating the reader.
The Ascendants, a species we encountered in 'Rising Son' (Jake's adventures in the Gamma Quadrant) take on a more ominous role in this story and are obviously being set up to become important in future stories.
Finally, the resolution of this story was a game-changer: not only for the Dominion, but for the whole DS9 post-television series. I found it a bit shocking, and I suspect it was intended to be. Whether this massive change is worth it will depend on future books.
Summary: Worlds of Deep Space Nine
Apart from a couple of major plot points, like: the staff changes on Bajor; the new direction on Trill; the shocking changes in the Dominion; this series is not necessary reading. Some of the stories are enjoyable, such as the Cardassian one and the Ferengi one, but they're not needful. They're also not excellent reading material in and of themselves. The only one of this sextet of novellas I would rate "Engage!" is the Dominion story - and that only because of the significant event at the end of the story. Other than that, these are all "Just for fun" or "Meh" stories. Read them if you've got some time to kill.