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hellsfire's review against another edition
4.0
This book was enormous and took a long time for me to read. The reason for that was These Haunted Seas are two books--Twilight and This Gray Spirit.
If you're a fan of DS9, you will love the so-called Season 8. This wasn't the first Season 8 book I've read so the suspense and tension was somewhat lacking. I knew what was going to happen in certain plot points. I still enjoyed it though.
Twilight was the more emotional book as it dealt with the relationship between Vaughn and Prynn and also Ezri's command. That relationship was the key and very touching. Twilight was also the better written book but it was also the more detailed book. I felt as if the plot didn't move along as fast as a "normal" Star Trek book would. There was a lot of detailed in it. The plot didn't matter as much as Twilight was merely the set-up for all the characters we didn't see on the show.
This Gray Spirit was the more fun read and what you normally get when reading a Star Trek book. As much as I enjoyed it, the problem with it is that it takes place after Twilight. You read about certain characters in Twilight like Prynn and Vaughn but in This Gray Spirit they're background characters. This Gray Spirit dealt with Shar and Kira. It's a bit confusing. Some might say it's like reading two different books. That's because it is.
The great thing about Star Trek books is that you don't need to read them in order. If you're like me and you missed the ones where the Defiant went into the Gamma Quadrant, you can read these and still get a lot out of them. No matter how you read them, they're all like one great book tied together.
If you're a fan of DS9, you will love the so-called Season 8. This wasn't the first Season 8 book I've read so the suspense and tension was somewhat lacking. I knew what was going to happen in certain plot points. I still enjoyed it though.
Twilight was the more emotional book as it dealt with the relationship between Vaughn and Prynn and also Ezri's command. That relationship was the key and very touching. Twilight was also the better written book but it was also the more detailed book. I felt as if the plot didn't move along as fast as a "normal" Star Trek book would. There was a lot of detailed in it. The plot didn't matter as much as Twilight was merely the set-up for all the characters we didn't see on the show.
This Gray Spirit was the more fun read and what you normally get when reading a Star Trek book. As much as I enjoyed it, the problem with it is that it takes place after Twilight. You read about certain characters in Twilight like Prynn and Vaughn but in This Gray Spirit they're background characters. This Gray Spirit dealt with Shar and Kira. It's a bit confusing. Some might say it's like reading two different books. That's because it is.
The great thing about Star Trek books is that you don't need to read them in order. If you're like me and you missed the ones where the Defiant went into the Gamma Quadrant, you can read these and still get a lot out of them. No matter how you read them, they're all like one great book tied together.
dr_matthew_lloyd's review against another edition
3.0
Twilight
Let’s start with the basics: Twilight is far too long. It’s not too long because 600-odd pages is too much for a Star Trek novel; it's too long because it is so painfully obvious that a solid third of those 600 pages were superfluous. There are so many chapters that don’t seem to fit, that waste time on details irrelevant to the current story; meanwhile, there is an utter lack of any attempt to be concise, to achieve more than one or two narrative beats per chapter, and those beats are achieved, generally, only for one character. One of Deep Space Nine’s strengths as a show was its ensemble and the way that ensemble played off one another; in this novel – and others in the series, to be fair – we’re so deep in the characters’ heads that we have to see all the relationships developed extremely tediously from each character’s perspective, mostly while the person they’re developing said relationship with is not around.
As a counterpoint, I want to highlight the relationship between Kira and Taran’atar. This novel has little for Taran’atar to do, besides continue his mission to observe the Alpha Quadrant, but after the injuries he sustained in Demons of Air and Darkness, he’s resting and unable to continue to train – so instead he asks to watch Kira in one of his holosuite programs. In doing so, he and Kira continue their discussion of their respective gods – the Founders and the Prophets – and how they both feel they have been cast out by them. Taran’atar also has a moment with Quark where they discuss Odo – a god to the Jem’Hadar, a nuisance to the Ferengi. Both of these moments are character-building as well as theme-building, in that faith was a major theme throughout DS9.
The two storylines of the novel are both interesting, but I felt they were done a disservice by the structure of the novel. The A plot involves the mission into the Gamma Quadrant that doesn’t begin until a third of the way into the novel, and a mysterious pulse causing devastation to several star systems. The B plot involves Bajor’s petition to join the Federation. There is a C plot in which someone has decided that the ship everyone wants to see in this expansion is Quark/Ro. Chapters alternate between these plots with an occasional cutaway to apparently irrelevant adventures with Kasidy, such that just as one gains momentum, it is cut off. It ends up repeating itself several times, and ultimately not moving the overall story on the equivalent 600 pages.
Which is a shame, because the A and B plots are both good. I’m not that interested in Vaughn, but I’m growing to like Prynn and think that their relationship, given the attention and momentum it deserves, could be a boon to the series. How Kira and Ro feel about Bajor joining the Federation is interesting. It’s just that these elements get dragged out because neither one can be sustained through the alternating chapters and constant interruptions.
This Gray Spirit
This Gray Spirit inherits a few of the problems of its predecessor, but from the get-go it was immediately clear that this was going to be a book that I found much more enjoyable to read. There’s fun, character building dialogue – and that dialogue is between more than two people at a time. It’s more dynamic and less broody – things happen, rather than characters thinking about what has happened or what might happen for pages at a time.
While the back-and-forth chapters between Alpha and Gamma Quadrants results in a similar momentum-kill as in Twilight, the thematic parallels between the Alpha and Gamma plots mean that this was not nearly so frustrating (as did the fact that chapters switch between viewpoints of multiple characters). In the Alpha Quadrant, as Bajor continues the process of admission to the Federation, the Cardassians arrive with the hope of normalizing relations between the two planets. Meanwhile, in the Gamma Quadrant, the Defiant encounters a species with an oppressive caste system and must figure out if they can – or should – intervene to improve relations between the two. The thematic questions of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, and what is reasonable behaviour from an oppressed people, cross both narratives.
Alongside this there are further continuing narratives, in particular the question of Andorian sexuality. This plotline is a fascinating one to find in a Star Trek novel – the kind of science fictional plot one might find in the areas of the genre more concerned with sexuality than ‘90s and ‘00s Star Trek has traditionally been, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories set on the planet O. What comes across to us humans as an unusual form of polyamorous relationship ends up being just as rigid and defined by social mores as our monoamorous reproductive rights; there is also, here, a kind of purity culture that creates conflict and tragedy. I’ve not been all that interested in the adventures of Shar and his bondmates in the series up to this point, but as the novel where things actually start happening, This Gray Spirit was capable of drawing me into that narrative more fully.
That being said, elements of this storyline are somewhat dated for the contemporary science fiction reader. A degree of dating applies across much of the novel, too, from some of the counselling (although, this seems better than much of what television Star Trek actually managed) to the idea that new genetic information might solve a caste conflict. As ever with Star Trek, there are hints of progressive ideas about history, by which I mean the outdated colonial idea that ‘civilizations’ pass through universal stages of development in which certain social movements are appropriate; then there is the actual colonization which sits incredibly uncomfortably next to the Cardassia/Bajor storyline – although I note that it is always called the occupation of Bajor by the Cardassians, rather than the colonization of Bajor.
Yet despite all this This Gray Spirit remains an exciting read, closer to the more fun novels earlier in the DS9 continuation than its dreary predecessor. The story is engaging, and the ideas interesting and thought provoking, even if the solutions are not what I would expect in recent science fiction. But Deep Space Nine was never one for pat, all’s-well-that-ends-well conclusions – that’s one of the reasons why the continuation works. And This Gray Spirit does not offer such an ending. We are still in the midst of things, between the complicated past and the uncertain future. We cannot always expect to be left with a clear resolution.
- - -
At the halfway point of the Mission Gamma novels, it strikes me that this arc was devised to make DS9 a little more like the other Star Treks, focusing on exploration and discovery rather than politics, prophecy, and faith. This feels like a disservice to the unique selling point of the series among Star Treks – there’s nothing in the Gamma Quadrant that particularly feels like it wouldn’t have worked as a story in Voyager, for example. This observation is very much not the case for the stories happening in the Alpha Quadrant, but it does make me wish that those were getting more sustained attention.
Overall, while Twilight really damaged my enthusiasm for continuing to read the DS9 continuation, This Gray Spirit revived my interest and reminded me of why I decided to do so in the first place. As such, I’m pretty glad that I read them in an omnibus edition.
Let’s start with the basics: Twilight is far too long. It’s not too long because 600-odd pages is too much for a Star Trek novel; it's too long because it is so painfully obvious that a solid third of those 600 pages were superfluous. There are so many chapters that don’t seem to fit, that waste time on details irrelevant to the current story; meanwhile, there is an utter lack of any attempt to be concise, to achieve more than one or two narrative beats per chapter, and those beats are achieved, generally, only for one character. One of Deep Space Nine’s strengths as a show was its ensemble and the way that ensemble played off one another; in this novel – and others in the series, to be fair – we’re so deep in the characters’ heads that we have to see all the relationships developed extremely tediously from each character’s perspective, mostly while the person they’re developing said relationship with is not around.
As a counterpoint, I want to highlight the relationship between Kira and Taran’atar. This novel has little for Taran’atar to do, besides continue his mission to observe the Alpha Quadrant, but after the injuries he sustained in Demons of Air and Darkness, he’s resting and unable to continue to train – so instead he asks to watch Kira in one of his holosuite programs. In doing so, he and Kira continue their discussion of their respective gods – the Founders and the Prophets – and how they both feel they have been cast out by them. Taran’atar also has a moment with Quark where they discuss Odo – a god to the Jem’Hadar, a nuisance to the Ferengi. Both of these moments are character-building as well as theme-building, in that faith was a major theme throughout DS9.
The two storylines of the novel are both interesting, but I felt they were done a disservice by the structure of the novel. The A plot involves the mission into the Gamma Quadrant that doesn’t begin until a third of the way into the novel, and a mysterious pulse causing devastation to several star systems. The B plot involves Bajor’s petition to join the Federation. There is a C plot in which someone has decided that the ship everyone wants to see in this expansion is Quark/Ro. Chapters alternate between these plots with an occasional cutaway to apparently irrelevant adventures with Kasidy, such that just as one gains momentum, it is cut off. It ends up repeating itself several times, and ultimately not moving the overall story on the equivalent 600 pages.
Which is a shame, because the A and B plots are both good. I’m not that interested in Vaughn, but I’m growing to like Prynn and think that their relationship, given the attention and momentum it deserves, could be a boon to the series. How Kira and Ro feel about Bajor joining the Federation is interesting. It’s just that these elements get dragged out because neither one can be sustained through the alternating chapters and constant interruptions.
This Gray Spirit
This Gray Spirit inherits a few of the problems of its predecessor, but from the get-go it was immediately clear that this was going to be a book that I found much more enjoyable to read. There’s fun, character building dialogue – and that dialogue is between more than two people at a time. It’s more dynamic and less broody – things happen, rather than characters thinking about what has happened or what might happen for pages at a time.
While the back-and-forth chapters between Alpha and Gamma Quadrants results in a similar momentum-kill as in Twilight, the thematic parallels between the Alpha and Gamma plots mean that this was not nearly so frustrating (as did the fact that chapters switch between viewpoints of multiple characters). In the Alpha Quadrant, as Bajor continues the process of admission to the Federation, the Cardassians arrive with the hope of normalizing relations between the two planets. Meanwhile, in the Gamma Quadrant, the Defiant encounters a species with an oppressive caste system and must figure out if they can – or should – intervene to improve relations between the two. The thematic questions of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, and what is reasonable behaviour from an oppressed people, cross both narratives.
Alongside this there are further continuing narratives, in particular the question of Andorian sexuality. This plotline is a fascinating one to find in a Star Trek novel – the kind of science fictional plot one might find in the areas of the genre more concerned with sexuality than ‘90s and ‘00s Star Trek has traditionally been, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories set on the planet O. What comes across to us humans as an unusual form of polyamorous relationship ends up being just as rigid and defined by social mores as our monoamorous reproductive rights; there is also, here, a kind of purity culture that creates conflict and tragedy. I’ve not been all that interested in the adventures of Shar and his bondmates in the series up to this point, but as the novel where things actually start happening, This Gray Spirit was capable of drawing me into that narrative more fully.
That being said, elements of this storyline are somewhat dated for the contemporary science fiction reader. A degree of dating applies across much of the novel, too, from some of the counselling (although, this seems better than much of what television Star Trek actually managed) to the idea that new genetic information might solve a caste conflict. As ever with Star Trek, there are hints of progressive ideas about history, by which I mean the outdated colonial idea that ‘civilizations’ pass through universal stages of development in which certain social movements are appropriate; then there is the actual colonization which sits incredibly uncomfortably next to the Cardassia/Bajor storyline – although I note that it is always called the occupation of Bajor by the Cardassians, rather than the colonization of Bajor.
Yet despite all this This Gray Spirit remains an exciting read, closer to the more fun novels earlier in the DS9 continuation than its dreary predecessor. The story is engaging, and the ideas interesting and thought provoking, even if the solutions are not what I would expect in recent science fiction. But Deep Space Nine was never one for pat, all’s-well-that-ends-well conclusions – that’s one of the reasons why the continuation works. And This Gray Spirit does not offer such an ending. We are still in the midst of things, between the complicated past and the uncertain future. We cannot always expect to be left with a clear resolution.
- - -
At the halfway point of the Mission Gamma novels, it strikes me that this arc was devised to make DS9 a little more like the other Star Treks, focusing on exploration and discovery rather than politics, prophecy, and faith. This feels like a disservice to the unique selling point of the series among Star Treks – there’s nothing in the Gamma Quadrant that particularly feels like it wouldn’t have worked as a story in Voyager, for example. This observation is very much not the case for the stories happening in the Alpha Quadrant, but it does make me wish that those were getting more sustained attention.
Overall, while Twilight really damaged my enthusiasm for continuing to read the DS9 continuation, This Gray Spirit revived my interest and reminded me of why I decided to do so in the first place. As such, I’m pretty glad that I read them in an omnibus edition.
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