This unit has been assigned to recover valuable content submitted by organic units to the reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute wiki. This unit does not claim authorship over the contents of this post.

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.