Dafydd ab HughBesprekingen

Well.... funny!

I remembered bits and pieces of this book from back in the day when I first read it - it's definitely a Hitchhiker's Guide kind of vibe, with multiple in-joke SF references. The best thing in the beginning is all the commiseration offered Geordi over the death of his beloved (not!) professor.

Sometimes the jokes go on too long, but there is a lot to like in this jolly Trek romp. I'm glad to find where the line about "a broken chronometer is right twice a day" discussion was, one I've remembered for years.

I think this is the one where at some point they end up in the vacuum of space without space suits and remark that it's surprisingly hot when they expected it to be cold. That little bit of physics thought experiment is the only thing I remember from reading this series as a teenager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum#Effects_on_humans_and_animals

Why does every DS9 novel have to be so freakin' dark? This was good, but it also showed you the heroic tragic deaths of basically every person on DS9 except Quark. People joke all the time that they like to torture their characters, but this shit was for real.

This was an intense story involving the characters of Deep Space 9 and aliens from the Wormhole. The title comes from the deaths of all the major players on the station and how Quark manages to put them at risk and manages to save them. If you enjoyed the series you will love this story. The only problem with the book is that unlike the series everything reverts back to normal. In the series this story would have been an episode in a larger story arch.

When Quark buys an unknown device from the gamma quadrant it sets in motion a series of events. Odo and Quark find they are 3 days in to the future. A strange ship comes through the wormhole demanding the release of the other. The story goes between Odo and Quark trying to piece together what has happened, and the people on the station dealing with the attack. Very well done. Good interactions between Odo and Quark.

Entertaining and nice conclusion to the 4 part, mixed series.

I have found this to be one of the most gripping Star Trek novels that I have read and although the ending is fairly predictable the journey grabbed and held my attention until the very end. I try to avoid spoilers in the main part of my reviews which makes this plot hard to comment on in any detail so I will add a section for spoilers at the end. Characterization is pretty good overall with some miner missteps on a few characters Odo's meanness in this novel comes to mind. I do appreciate that this author remembers that O'Brien has combat experience and makes good use of it.

I highly recommend this book and the only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is that a few characters suffer from unkind characterizations that don't fit their character.

The Good:

• The plot is engaging and suspenseful
• The characters with a few exceptions are interesting and well written
• This is a very different kind of story than you will normally find in a Star Trek novel

The Bad:

• Odo in particular has a few out of character moments where he feels too mean instead of gruff and direct
• Bashir's character doesn't feel right to me but I can't put my finger on why
• The ending is a bit predictable although this is mitigated a bit as I will talk about in my spoiler section

Spoilers:
As a book where nearly all of the main characters die, this plot could have easily gone very wrong. We as the readers know that there has to be a reset button and because Quark and Odo have been transported three days into the future we know that the reset button will involve time travel. I feel that the structure of this book most closely resembles a well written murder mystery where we pretty much know how the story ends but there is a lot of good suspense in seeing how our favorite characters died and how Odo and Quark will avert disaster.

A rollercoaster tale of alien invasion using a gate from elsewhere that opens on a Martian moon. Based on a popular video game, it properly fills its pages with shoot-em-up as a Marine charges into the alien nest in search of survivors. A blurb compared it to Starship Troopers. I wouldn't go that far, but it does have a plot and it will hold your attention.

The station is invaded. O'Brien isn't happy with Julian's plan to goto Garak for help. Loved the interactions with Garak. Fun to have Quark save the day

Oh My Word! This just about has to be the worst book, grammar, plot, characterization, that I have ever read! It was basically reading the game with some token things thrown in, like conversation, love interest, duty, despair and hope. It was just plain horrible. Continuity was almost nil; to call the characters cardboard cutouts would insulting to cardboard.

The game is awesome, this novel, not so much. I can see why someone would read this first one, because they are into Doom, but after getting through this trainwreck, I don't see how the next 3 books were ever published. I certainly won't be reading them!

This is a good book taking place during the early seasons of the TV show. The Audiobook is read by Rene Auberjonois, which is fun as Odo is the principal character, along with Quark. ab Hugh does a good job with all the characterizations - clearly has a good handle on each unique personality. I loved the show and if you did as well, you'll enjoy this book.

PLOT OR PREMISE:
This is the first of a 3-book series dealing with a time when Bajor takes over the station for a trial period of 60 days. Kai Winn is in command, and her past is revealed through a series of flashbacks to the Occupation and her actions to help the resistance. Worf, Sisko, O'Brien, Quark and Odo are stranded on a planet where all the citizens have advanced technology that has reduced them to a complete dependency relationship. Renegade Cardassians have invaded the planet and have no trouble picking off the inhabitants -- all they have to do is cut the power to the technology. Dax and Bashir are also on the planet in a different environment.
.
WHAT I LIKED:
Dax and Bashir's trials and tribulations aren't bad and there is interesting interplay with some cadets.
.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
Kai Winn's character comes off far too "mature" for the period, and belies the changes when she actually reached power. Major Kira's character is barely fleshed out, and mostly appears as a caricature of the real character on the series. None of the four stranded characters are worth reading about here, and are pale imitations of the real characters on the series.
.
BOTTOM-LINE:
Not bad but not great
.
DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow him on social media.

An excellent conclusion to the trilogy.

First in a trilogy. Does a good job setting up the story lines. Sisko and crew are on a planet full of technology. The natives use the tech as they find it. Cardassians are attacking and Sisko's crew has to teach them how to defend themselves when the Cardassians turn the tech power supply off. It is Quark and the rules of Acquisition the lead to the answer.

Meanwhile the station has been turned over to Bajor, and the Kia is in charge when they come under attack.

The crew of the defiant deal with a helpful sea serpent. We learn more about Winn's time under Cardassan rule. And Deep Space Nine is overrun.

This is an odd one-- I can see why people like it (it's one of the few pre-Avatar DS9 novels to ever get praised), but it's slightly off; characters sometimes feel like caricatures of themselves. Odo is more overtly mean to Quark than he usually is, and at one point we learn that Bashir persuaded Odo to bug Quark's holosuites so that he can spy on Dax and Kira. Like, really, either of them would do that???

But on the whole, I think ab Hugh has good command of the characters. Obviously this is a "reset button" story, but you can write a good one of those if it gives insight into characters, and this one does. If the station were overrun and everyone was killed, this is exactly how it would happen, I think. There's a lot of good stuff here: Keiko's death was actually quite sad, O'Brien's soldier/engineer balance (so rarely addressed in the series) is well handled, the way that Jadzia dies but Dax lives on for a few moments is creepy but effective, Bashir is actually quite brilliant as he goes out. Maybe the only character whose death is a little too perfunctory is Kira's. (She's written a little dumbly at times, actually; I don't think ab Hugh has a great handle on her. Oh those pesky angry women!)

Best of all is Sisko and Jake and Molly. Sisko is a great Starfleet commander here, balancing the immediate needs of his people with that of the Federation/Bajor and even his son. His death is amazingly badass. And poor Jake and Molly's survival narrative is harrowing but really quite great. I don't think we ever even see Sisko and Jake in the same scene, but their bond is ever-present and strong.

Quark and Odo form the core of this novel, which makes this the second Odo-centric novel I've read in a row. Watching the show, it's easy to see why: though early S2 is where the other characters begin to pop much more ("The Circle" is where I finally felt the writers had a handle on all seven), throughout S1 Odo is consistently the strongest character, with Kira just behind him. If you asked me to pitch a DS9 novel in 1993, I'd pick Odo as protagonist too. I think this is the first story to pair the two off, something the show wouldn't do until "The Ascent" in S5. It's handled pretty well (except for Odo's occasional unnecessary meanness): I liked Odo's callback to "Babel," where he revises his statement that being trapped on DS9 with Quark would be the worst torment he could imagine, to that being trapped with a repentant Quark is even worse. I also liked some of the touches ab Hugh gives Ferengi culture, such as that there is an enormous set of ritual cringes, from the "relative's cringe" to "okay, you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar, but society's to blame." Someone needs to enter these on Memory Beta.

The heroic triumph of both characters is great: Odo's journey into the still-hot fusion core of the station is truly gripping, and I like that Quark gets to actually save the day. Though everyone is a jerk to him about it, poor guy. (Does Quark ever do anything as bad as people act like he does?)

Continuity Points:

• Not a lot here, but explicit references are made to a number of S1 episodes up to "In the Hands of the Prophets." Since that episode, Bajoran "Sunday schools" have sprung up on the station, and Sisko has been sending Jake to them. Through this, we learn some about ancient, pre-Prophet Bajoran gods, no longer worshiped except by radicals. Again, an area the show never touches on-- and given the first Orbs came to Bajor 10,000 years, and that the ur-B'hala was built 25,000 years ago, those must be some very old gods!
• There are also references to other DS9 novels, which is neat. O'Brien thinks of himself as an "amateur magician," a reference to his attempts to learn magic tricks to amuse Molly in The Siege, and there's also a couple references to the poker game in The Big Game (which I last read many, many years ago). If there were any references to Bloodletter, I missed them.
• O'Brien says he worked on the Enterprise when it was under construction at Starbase 13, which is why he transferred aboard the ship five years later. Given it's canonical that the ship was constructed at and launched from Utopia Planitia, do we take this to mean that perhaps some components were built at SB 13 in 2359 and sent on to Mars?
• The enemy race is this novel is known to the Cardassians as bogeymen called the "Bekkir." A hundred years ago, the Cardassians tried to recruit their help in attacking the Klingons. The Bekkir declined and attacked the Cardassians, who couldn't launch a punitive expedition because the Bekkir reside in the Gamma Quadrant. Pretty much nothing about this makes sense.

Other Notes:

• I liked the rhyming aliens.
• Welshman ab Hugh populates his novel with a number of UK sorts: a Scot, a Welshman, and a second Irishman are all on the DS9 crew. Also Odo calls a flashlight a torch!
• How generic is that cover?

This wasn't so bad. I've read a couple of other things written by Dafydd ab Hugh and boy oh boy were they bad. This book wasn't perfect either, but much better than his other forays. Although it could have also been the fact that the story in Fallen Heroes was such that the canon characters could act slightly out of character and it wasn't quite as obvious as in other Star Trek DS9 novels.

I'ts not a happy go lucky story at all. Actually, it would probably never have been able to be on TV, even within the DS9 series and that one was the darker of the four 'modern' serieses.

There are aliens who come searching for someone and they're not the sort of take prisoners aliens by a long shot.

And, of course, there's the obsession that some Star Trek novel writers have with 'ancient' chemical weapons. i.e. handguns, rifles that use solid bullets, etc. That's where the plot gets a little iffy for me. On the one hand these aliens are advanced enough to build a ship, and yet they can't do better than P90s and nuclear weapons? That's not Star Trek to me, but maybe I'm in a minority.

Anyway, for the most part it was a pretty good book, aside from the few wrong characterizations there were (really, Trills spots turn white, or really why can no one get Odo right, either he's portrayed as mean or a bumbling idiot. Thank the great bird that Rene Auberjonois was so awesome in his portrayal on the show).

A three star book that may have been four stars if someone else had written it.

(Originally posted in my blog on March 28th 2010)

I'm not arrogant enough to believe that anyone reading this has actually been actively following me from blog-space to blog-space, fandom to fandom in my time on the internet (Except for that House of Fail guy, what is up with him?). So I don't expect anyone to know about, let alone remember, my review of DooM – Knee Deep In the Dead back when I was with the Splurd Crew. Long story short: I enjoyed not liking the book. I liked it the way people like Battlefield Earth.
For Christmas, Kippurbird of The Eragon Sporkings got me book two, Hell on Earth and I have to say I actually enjoyed this one.
The characters actually became a little more in depth, particularly Arlene who was a one dimentional Mary-Sue Ripley Knock-off in the first book.
We also delve into cults and religion and a whole whack of stuff and to be honest I think one of the strong points in this book was the fact that there were very few monsters and it was mostly character development. It made me feel a little dirty to come to that realization because it's a DooM book, it's all about the one note wanton violence! I’m not supposed to want character development.
Having said that, we do get appearances from more familiar monsters. Revenant and Mancubus show up, as does my beloved Arch-Vile.
We also get two new side-kicks. One is Jill the tom-boy hacker. I like Jill, which probably means she's going to get killed by the end of the series. The other is Albert, a former Marine turned Mormon with the hots for Arlene. Lucky for them Talking is a Free Action and discuss glory holes and marriage while trying to un-couple a train car from a speeding locomotive. Yes, really.
Unfortunately the writer still had an annoying habit of making characters stupid for plot reasons. For example, Fly says they need "tech" to build a ship. Arlene replies with "Tech?". Of course you need tech to build a freaking rocket ship! She could have said "What sort of tech?" or something, but no, Arlene was clueless.
Also continued was the out of place vocabulary. If you've taken the time to read my other review, or This FRIENDS 4 EVER!!!! strip, you know that one of my biggest problems with the book was that the character Fly had a vocabulary bigger than his education should allow for. One word that caught my attention in Knee Deep… was nomenclature. They use that word again in this book no less than twice. Also, I counted at least eight punctuation and spelling errors in the book. Eight. They miss-typed "The" as "eht". Almost every page had at least two exclamation points.
Finally, just like at the end of the last novel, Fly and Arlene are confronted with a huge problem and the last sentence is basically Arlene saying "Fly! I know how to _______ us to _______!"
At any rate I found it much more enjoyable for what it was then the first book and really want to finish the series but I can't find the other two books anywhere but online. My life is hard.

Ugh. Getting into this was like trying to get into a pair of skinny jeans. And, once I did there was wayy too much that was just wrong. Uh, Neelix as some sort of 'Swashbuckler' space pirate? Puleeze... I don't think so. B-Elanna, please, really, she's not insecure like that, not by a long shot. Ugh.

Not to mention Janeway's a scientist, NOT an engineer on the show. And in the Star Trek Universe there's a big difference between the scientists and the engineers. They even wear different division colors on their uniforms.

And, of course, there was the most often occurring mistake that's happened in more than one Star Trek Voyager novels. The Ops consoles are at the back of the bridge, not the front. Harry Kim's station is NOwhere near Tom Paris' station. Ack.

Add to all that the fact that none of them sounded right either. Or, a very trippy experience, ab Hugh didn't seem to be able to choose whether he wanted The Doctor to be able to turn himself on and off or let the crew do it. Agh.

A thoroughly horrendously written and plotted book and the only reason I plowed through it was because I wanted to finish the Invasion! series. I did have a story thought though. Maybe, since the book was about all these hellish furies, maybe the whole book was --supposed-- to be hell for the reader to read. But, I've tried to read other ab Hugh books which were just as bad. So I'm gonna stick with the simple answer. The author can't write good Star Trek Novels.

I need to read this one again. All my memory contains are impressions -- no plot, no defined characters, just impressions of emotions. I recall the book flew in the face of my expectations for a fantasy novel, but in a way that intrigued me. I found the ending to be quite different from what I thought should happen, yet it didn't leave me unsatisfied. I remember being impressed with the female protagonist because of how "hero" was interpreted through her very human actions. I don't recall any eye rolling.

Yes, definitely need to revisit this one.

Huh, a book with Wesley Crusher in it. I didn't know that there had been any Star Trek The Next Generation novels that had him when he was at the Academy (after the whole 'held back a year because I participated in killing my wing man' episode but before the 'traveler's going to abduct me' episode).

There are two main stories. The first is that a famous inventor dies and his son decides to auction off all his inventions. Some think that they're amazing (and the weapons dangerous), others, like Geordi LaForge are sure that they're a bunch of hot air (vaporware).

The second story involves Wes Crusher. He and his Academy roommate inadvertently create a machine that turns another metal into something that passes perfectly for Latinum.

It wasn't a badly written novel, but in some places it seemed sort of uneven. Not in regards to the plot, that was even and well put together, but at the beginning and a couple of other sections the writing seemed forced.

Still, I liked how ab Hugh wrote the Wes Crusher character, a lot of time the character is given a short shrift because the writer only sees what the character started as on the TV show (sorta a whiny brat), not what he ended the show as (more of an adult for sure). So, that makes this book refreshing. And, it was a bit more humorous in places than your average Star Trek novel as well.

The shortest way I can summarize this book is this: It's like someone wrote down gameplay and packed it full of erotic jokes.

I bought this one as a test to see what video game based literature was like. I shouldn't have chosen this one to begin with. There are good books that are based on video games, but this is not one of them.

For any fans of the Doom universe, whether the novelization series or the games themselves, I cannot caution you enough to never pick this book up. Stay with Knee Deep in the Dead or Hell on Earth if you must, but Endgame is a novel that completely strays away from sense and sanity.½

What.

I have a strange spot in my heart for this book. It's not well-written by any stretch, but I guess maybe I just have fond memories of it. This is probably the best book it is possible to write based on the original Doom.½