What I'm Reading: Twilight

Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine
Mission Gamma:
Twilight 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Mission Gamma: Twilight
by David R. George III

When the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series left the airwaves too many years back, several of the more gifted Star Trek novel authors decided to continue the story. The trend has since continued beyond the original two-part relaunch, with a whole small series of novels joining the semi-canon purgatory of those written by Trek producer Jeri Taylor about the Voyager crew.

After all my recent heavy reading lately (not that Dan Brown's fast paced fiction can ever be considered "heavy" but it did make me think a lot), I decided to pick up something a bit lighter. I failed pretty miserably. Twilight is long, dense, and fairly uninteresting. I know now why I started it twice before.

The story it tells lacks much of the epic feel that the earlier DS9 relaunch books shared with the show. The Avatar books, the first two of the relaunch, were a fluid extension of the television show. They introduced us to new characters and new twists on old ones. Twilight was like carrying around a brick: comparatively substantial in heft, but otherwise not much fun. I've noticed that about this author before, but at the time I didn't have my critical brain turned on.

This is not to say that it had no redeeming value. After all, there is a wise proverb that goes something like this:

Star Trek is like sex and chocolate. Even when it's bad, it's good.

Though a literary stinker, it was Star Trek, and that's the reason I was reading it. It bridged the story until I get to the next one. It occupied me in classes while the students worked on whatever assignments they had. It's served it's purpose. And although there was nothing particularly moving about this story, it did remind me that Deep Space Nine the TV show, and the relaunch especially, maintain an ongoing theme of interplay between science, religion, and politics (though all three are fictional), and that definitely resonated with my recent topics of meditation.

I had a recent dry spell in posting, but it's not because I wasn't working on them. This is the first of six draft posts I have been queueing up during a couple of hectic weeks. With luck, there should be more to follow.

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