David R. George, III

This is essentially two entirely separate novels crowbarred together, so I'm going to review each in turn, and then discuss they way they are brought together.

The first is what's promised by the series title: Rough Beasts of Empire is (chronologically) the first of eight books about the Typhon Pact, the Warsaw Pactesque Federation adversary introduced in A Singular Destiny. Basically, it's a set of alien species often opposed to the Federation banding together. With six members and eight show more books, there's more or less one alien race explored per book. Rough Beasts of Empire covers the Romulans, who in some previous book (Articles of the Federation, I think? it's been a while) split into two different polities, each led by a female character from Nemesis: Praetor Tal'Aura's Romulan Star Empire (which has joined the Typhon Pact) and Empress Donatra's breakaway Imperial Romulan State (which is friendly to the Federation).

The main focus of the novel is that Romulus is an empire divided, which basically no one wants: Tal'Aura and Donatra both desire to rule over a united Romulus. Many of the Star Empire's allies, particularly the Tzenkethi, would prefer to be dealing with a united nation as well. And then there's Ambassador Spock, still doing his Vulcan-Romulan reunification thing underground (literally and figuratively), who realizes that a united Romulan people makes reuniting with the Vulcans easier. So in classic Romulan tradition, we have plots and counterplots, as Tal'Aura, the Tal Shiar, Spock, Donatra, the Tzenkethi, and various Romulan families each pursue their own interests clandestinely.

It's entertaining enough. I didn't love it, but it's well done. It's hard to care about any of the Romulan characters, so really it's just Spock carrying you through the whole book. David R. George III has a pretty good grasp on Spock for the most part, as a principled man. Spock is attacked by a Reman assassin early in the book, and has the plan to turn him into the authorities, even though Spock is wanted by those same authorities, and that seemed very in character to me. There was a spot where he was overly naïve (I didn't buy that he would not foresee how his movement being legitimated could lead to long-term harm), but on the whole I enjoyed his story.

I do wish Donatra had appeared in the narrative earlier: she doesn't really become significant until near the end, and she shines then, as a principled woman trying to save her people from autocrats. On the other hand, she's distressingly passive for a head of state, especially one who's declared herself an empress! I would have liked to have seen her fighting more actively.

The Romulan plot kind of fizzles out, though. You figure out what's going on, the characters do too, and then it all plays out inevitably. There's no suspense as events draw to a close: some characters get what they want, and Spock watches it all happen. I did like how complicated it was, though. Almost no one here is an obvious black hat, and arguably the Romulan people are better off once the book is over even though the "villains" technically won!

There's a whole second book in here, though, that follows Benjamin Sisko. Now, Sisko ascended into the Bajoran wormhole at the end of Deep Space Nine to live with the Prophets, but he came back in the tenth-anniversary special Unity. Personally, I feel that after Unity, Sisko should have been quietly shunted off-stage somewhere to never play a major role in a Star Trek story again. How can you keep writing him into action-adventure stories in a way that doesn't undermine the celestial experience he would have had?

According to this novel, though, Sisko reactivated his Starfleet commission during the Borg invasion in Destiny to command the USS New York. I can kind of buy this, but everything that follows just seems wrong. Sisko is convinced that his is a life of sorrow (following on from the Prophets' warning to him in "Penumbra"): since he's returned from the wormhole, his daughter has been kidnapped, his neighbors have died, Elias Vaughn has been rendered brain-dead, and then a few chapters into this novel, his father Joseph passes away. I can just about buy that Sisko would be hurting from all this, though it's somewhat unconvincing for the novel to depend on past events only briefly described for its emotional heft. (Like, why the heck should I care about his dead neighbors?)

But what I really don't buy is what Sisko does in reaction to all this. He shuts down, leaving his siblings to manage his father's funeral while he aimless wanders the streets of New Orleans, ignoring Jake. Then he permanently reactives his commission (accepting command of the USS Robinson)... without telling Kasidy! I can only assume that when Sisko returned from the wormhole, it was another man who looked exactly like him, because this bears no relationship to the man whose adventures I saw on screen for seven years. Sisko was a builder and a doer, never a runner. Even when he suffered the greatest tragedy of his life, he did his job: through all of "Emissary" he does his best to set up Deep Space 9 to run successfully even though he has no intention of staying in command of it.

It also flies in the face of everything we've seen about Sisko as a family man. He would never ignore Jake like this; he would certainly never ignore Kasidy and his daughter like this. This is a man who lost it all and managed to put it back together. He is not so emotionally immature as to do what he does here, and the recent tragedies in his life don't make it plausible. The death of Jennifer is the defining tragedy of Sisko's life, and not even the death of his father comes close. This is the man who once said, "Running may help for a little while, but sooner or later the pain catches up with you, and the only way to get rid of it is to stand your ground and face it."

It also is just so pedestrian. Sisko should be enlightened and shit, not doubting that his experiences with the Prophets ever happened. I get that George probably wanted the prophecy from "Penumbra" to have some weight, but this was not the way to do it. I found this entire plotline frustrating to read about in the extreme.

Unrelated to all this, there's this sort of weird non-subplot about the Tzenkethi in the Sisko half of the novel. The Robinson ends us patrolling a sector of space where they sight some Tzenkethi vessels. This leads to a series of flashbacks to when Sisko fought against the Tzenkethi under the command of Leyton on the Okinawa (as mentioned in "The Adversary"). Why? Who knows because Sisko doesn't even interact with the Tzenkethi in the present day of the story; he just monitors sensor contacts from the bridge of the Robinson. It's really strange and pointless and has nothing to do with anything. It feels to me like when the initial set of Typhon Pact novels was reduced from six to four,* George was asked to jam them into his book because they weren't going to get a focus novel otherwise.

I read most of Rough Beasts on a flight; my wife sat next to me noted that the cover indicated a team-up between Sisko and Spock. "So far," I said, "their storylines have had nothing to do with each other." I think I was two-thirds of the way through at that point; the rest of the novel didn't remedy it. As close as the two plotlines come is when Spock gets a secret message to the Federation president asking for information to be passed onto Donatra, Sisko and the Robinson are assigned to do it. Why? I don't know. The president's staff tells her that Spock is the diplomatic service's expert on Romulans so that without him available, they should ask Starfleet. The head of Starfleet ends up recommending Sisko, because 1) according to a deleted scene he worked at the Federation embassy on Romulus, and 2) he met Senator Vreenak. Really!? There's no one in the whole Federation Diplomatic Corps who knows more about Romulans than that? Seems unlikely.

It's a contrived attempt to jam together what really are two completely separate stories. Take out the trip to see Donatra and the flashbacks to the Tzenkethi conflicts, and Sisko's story has nothing at all to do with the Typhon Pact in general, or the Spock/Romulus tale in particular. I also didn't really see any thematic resonance, though George tries to bring up a commonality of home at the very end. Based on the acknowledgements, it seems like George realized that with former Deep Space Nine editor Marco Palmieri gone from Simon & Schuster, the DS9 story wasn't going to advance unless he slipped it into unrelated novels.

Unfortunately, it doesn't serve it to advance it in such a weird way.

Continuity Notes:

• There are a few small references to Diane Duane's Rihannsu novels: "High Rihan" is said to be the name of the Romulan language, some Romulan characters reference the Elements that Duane's Romulans swore by. It's subtle enough that it works: I didn't really like how Martin and Mangels' Enterprise novels gave all their Romulan characters Rihannsu-style names nothing like the screen Romulan names.
• Amanda is said to have passed onto her son Spock a love of physical books. When the book came out, on-screen canon said she liked Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but said nothing about a love of physical books (often shown to be odd in the 23rd century)... but by the time I read it, Discovery revealed that Amanda gave Michael Burnham a physical copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• There's a joke about how Romulans have a lot of ancient sayings about serpents. A previous George novel, Serpents Among the Ruins, takes its title from a Romulan saying.

Other Notes:

• Kira has become a vedek!? I know future novels will fill in more of the backstory in the four-year gap between this novel and the previous chronological DS9 novel, The Soul Key, but I find it hard to believe that George could ever make me believe in such a transformation, which is as bad a misunderstanding of Kira's character as this book is of Sisko's.
• It also seems pretty shitty to (essentially) kill off Vaughn.


• So who's in command of the station, then? If we're told, I missed it. But Kira's gone, and Vaughn's gone, and Ezri's gone. Even Bowers is gone. I guess that leaves Nog or Shar?
• Sisko emotionally isolates himself from the crew of the Robinson and gets called out on it; George repeated this subplot almost precisely with Sulu's transfer in Allegiance in Exile.
• The book's title is taken from the notes accompanying a Romulan painting. Based on the full poem (the novel's epigraph), the painter was really into William Blake.

* I'll talk more about the overall shape of the Typhon Pact series in a future review. show less

I wasn't going to bother with Spock's story in David R. George's Crucible series, because the Kirk and McCoy instalments hardly set the world alight and I didn't know if I could stand a whole novel about Vulcan philosophies and rituals. Turns out I was right on the first count - I wouldn't have missed much - but find myself strangely cheated on the second: this story is more a rehash of the Kirk and McCoy narratives, with a second stab at Spock's Kohlinar thrown in for good measure. Mr show more George could have saved himself a lot of time by just writing one book.

In order of grievances, Spock's story is lacking three key details: action, originality and t'hy'la. Spock's life seems stuck in a loop: he leaves Starfleet because working closely with humans is throwing his Vulcan reserve out of whack, journeys to Vulcan to cleanse himself of all emotion, realises that he can no more deny his human half than his Vulcan heritage, returns to Starfleet. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only trouble is, for those who have seen Star Trek: the Motion Picture, George's rehash of all this is rather redundant. In fact, the whole novel adds little to the original series or the films. We also get a summary of season one episode 'The City on the Edge of Forever' - strangely, for a novel about Spock, from Kirk's perspective - which goes nowhere, and is also used in McCoy's narrative. Basically, Spock feels guilty - both about interfering in time and not interfering enough - and tries again to achieve Kohlinar. He is successful this time, but decides - completely randomly - that he made a mistake, and undoes the rigorous training in a paragraph of dialogue with McCoy. That's the story in a nutshell.

Then we have Spock and Kirk. Now, your mileage may vary, but there is no denying how close these two were during the series and the films - even Roddenberry admitted that the Captain and his Vulcan First Officer love each other, whether physically or purely emotionally. The Vulcan word for this is t'hy'la, meaning friend, brother and/or lover. Jim Kirk was Spock's t'hy'la - only not in David R. George's view, oh no sir. Spock might have lead a lonely life, and Kirk might have had a 'solitary nature', but these two were just friends looking for the right heterosexual life partners. Nothing to see here, move on. Even though George can't explain what prompted Spock to try for Kohlinar in the first place, immediately after the end of the five year mission with Kirk, he is certain that Spock's feelings for the Captain have nothing to do with anything. Denial doesn't begin to cover George's canon blindness. He even throws in a beautiful, intelligent female ambassador - who looks a lot like Droxine from The Cloud Minders, an awkward Spock flirtation from the series - and has the usually solitary and reserved Vulcan fall instantly head over heels in love with her to emphasise his point.

The only trouble is, denying the depth and nature of Spock's love for Kirk, then having him forge an instant relationship with Ambassador Mary Sue, doesn't work with the Spock we know from the original series and the films. Neither does Spock's overwhelming 'guilt' about various past events during his time aboard the Enterprise - Spock would have made the correct logical decision at the time, and would hardly have cause to doubt his actions years down the line. The word I think the author was looking for is 'grief' not 'guilt', only he painted himself into a corner by denying Spock his t'hy'la and had to embroider an introspective, platonic alternative. Needless to say, the ending is ridiculously implausible - neat, but unlikely, and hardly satisfying.

I think I shall have to look elsewhere for a more honest appraisal of Mr Spock's true character! show less

Wow! George has always been one of my favorite Star Trek authors but this blew me away.

The book begins seconds before the previous novel ended. U.S.S. Robinson exits the worm whole to find explosions galore and Sisko may never be the same again.

It's certainly an odd story though. 400 pages, only 24 chapters, but a prologue and an epilogue that make up 100 of those pages.

The Romulan praetor is committed to peace even when everything the Romulans have been doing leads the rest of the show more universe to believe otherwise, but she goes to great lengths to make it reality.

The leaps between the real world, the past, the wormhole are written so amazingly that something that should be incredibly confusing is even easier to follow than if it was in front of your face, and I have never had so may out loud physical emotional responses to ANY book, let alone any Star Trek book. show less

Armin Shimerman and David R. George III’s novel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The 34th Rule takes place during the fourth season of DS9 and puts the Ferengi Alliance at odds with the Bajoran Provisional Government. Following the events of the third season episode “Prophet Motive,” Grand Nagus Zek plans to auction off the Orb of the Prophets he purchased from the Cardiassians, who had looted it when they departed Bajor following the occupation. Bajor places a bid, but does not make it to show more the final round of the auction. The Provisional Government believes that they have a legal right to the Orb as it was looted from them, so they demand that the Nagus allow them to continue in the auction or they will bar all Ferengi from Bajoran space, including the wormhole. The Nagus refuses, the Bajoran Provisional Government expels the Ferengi, and Quark and his brother Rom find themselves in uncertain waters on Deep Space Nine. The Bajorans arrest them, but put them in an interment camp when the Ferengi blockade the Bajoran system, denying access to food, medicine, and other trade goods. In their plot, Shimerman and George drew inspiration from the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Shimerman further used this novel to deepen the portrayal of the Ferengi, an effort he began in his role as Quark to counter their portrayal in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Last Outpost.”

Shimerman portrays Captain Benjamin Sisko and others, both in Starfleet and the Bajorian militia, examining their motives. For example, Sisko discusses his reticence to do more to resist the Bajoran edict and questions if he is motivated by conscious or unconscious biases (pg. 113). Jake responds, “It’s only natural to draw inferences from the compilation of your life experiences. It’s only when somebody does that without thinking, or to adversely affect another person, that it’s a bad thing… The fact that you’re now questioning yourself about the Federation’s role – and your own role – in this affair between the Bajorans and the Ferengi is an indication of that” (pg. 114, further examples on pg. 360-361). The Ferengi themselves continue to serve as an example of the perils of capitalism. As Jake says, “As far as the Ferengi are concerned, I think it’s important for you to realize that it’s because you believe so deeply in your own philosophy – including the Federation Constitution, Starfleet regulations, and the Prime Directive – that it’s difficult for you to credit not only a foreign notion of right and wrong, but something that was previously considered wrong in Earth’s past. Capitalism and greed almost destroyed our world” (pg. 115). Shimerman and George’s novel thus gets to the very heart of the humanistic morality that underpins every entry in the Star Trek franchise. A worthy entry in the Deep Space Nine series of novels from one of the people who best knows the characters. show less