I wasn't certain about this (never being overfond of Quark) but I was pleasantly surprised and amused. Worth picking up if you like DS9. ( )

This book finally brings an end to a depressing five-year gap without a Deep Space Nine book. Sure, we've had Deep Space 9 books, but not Deep Space Nine books, if you see what I mean. The last one was a moving epic about one young man with a backdrop of an entire civilization's rise and fall, so what's this one about?

Well, it's about Quark trying to find some good porn.

Uh, okay.

Look, I know these novellas are trying to emulate a tv episode more than your average prose release from Simon & Schuster, and there are several Quark episodes this is clearly intended to remind you of, like "Who Mourns for Morn?" or "Rules of Acquisition." But the best Quark episodes were 1) actually funny, 2) had a somewhat serious core somewhere, and 3) were actually about Quark! That last one is where this all falls down for me. Quark tries to track down the rest of a Vulcan's Love Slave sequel, and goes to Wrigley's Pleasure Planet and battles with the Orion Syndicate, but basically none of his choices move the narrative at all. He gets himself out of no dangers, he does nothing clever or interesting. This is the dumb Quark of the worst DS9 episodes. At the end, we learn three other characters manipulated him and everything he did was pointless and then the book stops. He learns nothing, and we learn nothing. I was genuinely surprised when I got to the end: "That's it?" Like, that was all this book was for?

On screen, Armin Shimerman might have made you believe in this stuff (he could do that with weak scripts on screen), but on the page this all lies pretty flat. Quark can be shallow, but this is ridiculously shallow even for him; it's like the tv show never happened. Quark gets a dumb "comedy" sidekick, and I kept expecting some kind of reveal about him, but no, he's just a dumb "comedy" sidekick, and his role would have been much more interestingly taken by just about any other character.

Even at its short length, it's a joke that goes on too long.

Continuity Notes:

• We're told in this book that since the dedication of the new Deep Space 9, business at Quark's has been totally dead. So what about that massive crowd there to watch the new president's inauguration in Fire with Fire, huh?
• Thank goodness the book specifically mentioned Photons Be Free, because I never would have remembered that Broht was a screen character otherwise. (Here we learn he publishes basically every significant holoprogram seen on screen.)

Other Notes:

• Thankfully, for us font-watchers, the book maintains the DS9 relaunch logo, and doesn't Rotis Serifize it as the TNG relaunch logo was. If this book had a spine, it would look good on my shelf!
• One of the big problems about the Destiny time jump and then the lack of DS9 novels is that all of the characters seem to have been in stasis the entire time. It's been almost a decade since Quark and Ro first dated back in Mission: Gamma, and apparently their relationship has not progressed since.
• The writers keep confusing "vedek" with "vedic." Unlike all the errors in Absent Enemies, this one remains uncorrected eight years later.