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emmejo
, February 03, 2012
(view all comments by emmejo)
Quark acquires a set of alien artifacts in order to sell them, but Odo is, of course, suspicious about how safe they may be. After attempting to examine them, Odo is quickly proven right when Quark and Odo are propelled three days into the future, onto a nearly destroyed DS9 filled with a dead crew. Together the unlikely pair must figure out who invaded the station and how to fix the timeline.
I picked this book up because I had read Dafydd ab Hugh'd excellent DS9 novel, Vengeance, but was rather disappointed by this one. Time travel stories are tricky to do, and this one wasn't particularly interesting. Another tricky element is that this was written in the first season of the show (which was abysmally uneven, anyway), meaning ab Hugh didn't have a lot of material to work with, particularly character backgrounds. He chose to make up a lot of background for some characters, particularly Quark, that ends up clashing badly with "canon" backgrounds provided later in the show. His writing also had a tendency to wander, probably due to the very limited character interaction and somewhat monotonous plot. I was also annoyed at how long and wandering the resolution was. It felt like a slow-moving video game: "Let's go to this corner of the station and pick up one object, chat about what else we need, go get one more object, chat, etc." After a couple stops it just became boring.
I did like O' Brian's characterization. He was a more fleshed out character, having been on TNG, and ab Hugh makes good use of him.
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