Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Bloodletter (book #3) - a few thoughts

[PaulECoyote]

DS9 is my favourite Star Trek, and here in Austin TX we have a store called "half price books" that I recently picked up a whole bundle of Star Trek DS9 books for less than $3.

I read a Star Trek: New Frontier book years ago but that had little to do with any established characters I knew and I remember that being fun.

With this DS9 book, and having watched every episode of DS9 multiple times... I'm pretty familiar with characters and canon.

I was hoping for a "lost episode" experience from the book, and it really didn't fulfill that expectation.  Perhaps that expectation is too high!  I have not really ventured in to extended universe stuff very much before.

Where as the story itself is interesting and largely in character... some parts of the book really grated.  Such as referring to Bajorans as humans (not humaniods).  Spelling databases "data bases".  Having it hinted at that Odo could fully copy another humanoid.  Being able to communicate with the gamma quadrant (bare in mind this is book three - so set in the events in season 1).

I suppose these authors probably had strict time limits to try and cash in on the show, and probably worked in isolation.  Still the above things did spoil the experience for me a bit.

The story itself focuses on Kira which I have no problem with.  She is a very interesting character and there are things I would have liked to have seen better explored about it during the series itself.  In classic Star Trek style there are two strong story lines going on plus general progression along the arc.  There is quite a lot of detail in fight scene too - possibly more than what they would have got away with on screen.  The pacing is pretty good - it just looses something on the details.

It has not put me off reading another DS9 novel... but for any other DS9 fans do the books get better?

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Cheers,

Paul

[X]

All of the post series books have been fantastic.

[WillEagle]

Now it's been a while since I read some of these but I do keep a log of books I have read and I give them each a ratting from 1 to 10. So some of the one I rated pretty high are:
#4 - The Big Game - 8. Quark story.
#8 - Antimatter - 8.
#11 - Devil In the Sky - 9. This one involved the Horta!
#17 - Heart of the Warrior - 8.
#18 - Saratoga - 9. Some folks from Sisko's old ship show up.
#27 - A Stitch in Time - 9. A very good Garak story written by Andrew Robinson.
Trials and Tribble-ations - 9. Very good novelation of the episode.
Like I said it's been a while since I read these so hopefully I remembered the details correctly. Check them out if you get the chance.
Skip #7 - Warchild. I have been trying to finish this for months. Just really lost interest in it the father i got into it. I'll finish it someday but I'm in no big hurry.

[Jobydrone]

Was this post interesting to anyone?

Cheers,

Paul

Totally, I love Star Trek fiction and I think so few readers are out there anymore that I am very pleased to see it discussed here.