Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Sacraments of Fire
by David R. George III
The Ascendants storyline was first introduced in Rising Son in January 2003; its last appearance prior to now was in August 2009's The Soul Key, to which this book makes a number of references. Then, with the Destiny time jump, it seemed to vanish entirely, with some vague references to it having happened during the missing years. Finally with July 2015's Sacraments of Fire it returns for an explanation at long last—six years since its previous appearance, over twelve since it first began. And here am I reading it eight years after that. It's been two decades since Rising Son!
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Published: 2015 Acquired: June 2021 Read: June 2023 |
Probably some of this was my fault. Probably also some of it was unavoidable. If George was going to finally wrap this storyline up, then how could he not interact with the details of twelve-year-old novels?
Yet like many of George's recent Star Trek novel's, it has a fundamental flaw. I said of his last one, Revelation and Dust, that it was "a book where almost nothing happens for the first 250 pages," adding "[n]o one is trying to accomplish anything and encountering obstacles." Exactly what bugs me about George's recent novels crystallized while reading Sacraments of Fire; to build on my line about Revelation, this is not a book where anyone has a goal. Rather things happen, then people react; more things happen, then people react; still more things happen, then people react. No one is trying to do anything. There's a whole multi-chapter escapade where Sisko is sent on the Robinson to intimidate the Tzenkethi and has to figure out what happened to a Starfleet ship—it has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, but worse, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It just takes up pages. Things keep happening involving a Bajoran moon and some religious fundamentalists, but our characters don't do anything, they just witness it. Odo spends the entire book looking at a Changeling artifact and thinking about it. The characters are never proactive... not even in their own heads, where they mostly just think about things that have happened to them in other books or between books. There's no drive or energy here. Blanks are being filled in, but no story is being told. Who are these people? I couldn't tell you. What is this book actually about?
Yet, you know, it's fairly clever. Following her utterly tedious (and still of no clear relevance) wormhole experience in Revelation, Kira is deposited in, it turns out, 2377, just prior to the Ascendant attack on Bajor. This means that what happened in the Destiny time jump isn't just a flashback, but it happens in the "present" for her. This takes what has been a "bug" of the DS9 novels and turns it into a feature.
Yet, Kira's dilemma about how to act in the past is too abstract; since we as readers don't really know what happened to the Even Odds, it's hard to perceive the issues in changing its history. It's hard to feel any suspense when all that Kira does in the past is continually be introduced to characters from Rising Son. I remember loving the Even Odds crew in Rising Son, eager for more adventures with them. Well, I finally got my wish... and it's so boring?
To add to all this, the book is often a plod in its prose and in its plotting. Prose-wise, I know we need some recapping, but there's often too much of it; the book indiscriminately recaps stuff we don't actually need to know. Many scenes would have benefited from a slash of the red pen. For example, when Ro and Cenn Desca discuss whether Altek Dans reminds them of Akorem Laam, Ro says she doesn't rememeber him because, "Thirteen years ago, I was living on Galion." The narrator then says:
Cenn knew that, at that time, the planet Galion had fallen within the Demilitarized Zone established by a treaty between the Federation and the Cardassians. If he recalled correctly, many of the Maquis leadership—and apparently Ro Laren—had settled there. He also remembered that, during the Dominion War, Jem'Hadar forces had wiped out most of Galion's population. All of which suggested why Ro might not have learned about the lightship that traveled out of both the wormhole and Bajor's past.
You probably don't need most of that
paragraph, which provides way more detail than is needed to communicate
the fact that Ro wasn't in Starfleet thirteen years ago. You certainly
don't need the last sentence, which makes obvious an inference that
anyone who had read the rest of the paragraph could have made. But it's
typical of the book. In fact, in part II, there are these little recaps
of part I, written as though it's recapping a previous book. Quark, I
know who Altek Dans is and how he got onto the station because I read about it in this book earlier today!
The plot also plods. The conversation above is one that about happens
about fifteen times. Is Altek Dans from the past like Akorem Lans?
People wonder about this again and again. This is annoying because 1)
everyone who read Revelation and Dust knows the answer is "yes"
and 2) the characters make no progress in this question, and eventually
decide the answer is probably "yes." Why did we have to spend all this
time debating it? Isn't there some kind of Star Trek science test that could tell us he's from the past? On p. 190, this is still being debated!? Why are there interminable scenes about Ro trying to decide if Altek should be extradited or not extradited?
This book leads right into Ascendance, but the station
present-day plotline doesn't even have a cliffhanger; it just stops. The
cliffhanger is about what is happening eight years in the past!
- When Nog tries to access the Vic Fontaine holoprogram, he notices
someone else accessed it. I initially thought this was a reference to The Light Fantastic, but that happens after this part of Sacraments, so I am not sure.
- Blackmer offers his resignation to Ro again, but there's no acknowledgement he already did this in The Missing.
- You can write paragraph upon paragraph about how Cenn Desca and Kira were friends, David R. George III, but you can't make me feel it.
- Speaking of which, Cenn Desca is boring, like all of the other new
station characters. I don't think they've really been designed as main
characters; they're names and species and jobs and that's it. They don't
have hooks or desires. The original relaunch characters, Vaughn, Shar, Taran'atar, and so on, had things they wanted to do, and
other things in conflict with them. What does Jefferson Blackmer want?
Gregory Desjardins?* Wheeler Stinson? It's okay for side characters not to have this level of development... but they're too often the new ones are focused on like they are main characters. Indeed, I actually forgot Cenn Desca even existed, because I don't think he's even mentioned in The Missing or Rules of Accusation. Probably those authors forgot about him too!
- The back cover blurb is a very detailed description of the first scene and it gives little sense of most of what the novel is about. I would not be at all surprised to learn it was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of George's outline.
* Why put a JAG office on the station if you never use it to tell a story, anyway?
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every
few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance by David R. George III
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