The Laertian Gamble

I was going to give this book two stars, I really was, and then I kept reading and it got worse and worse. I found it a really, really bad sign when doing my taxes was easier than getting through this book. But I did (get through the book I mean, though of course I did my taxes too. Huzzah!)

The story was relatively simple. Bashir gets asked by a pretty woman to gamble with her money, and then all hell breaks loose.

Unfortunately there just wasn't much good about it. Absolutely none of the characters were correctly portrayed, they were all cardboard cutouts of the TV characters, and they all sounded alike in their dialogue. The copy editing was horrible too. Once when it was supposed to say 'Kira said', instead it had 'Allura said'. There show more were other inconsistencies in the story too, like the fact that everything official seemed to happen in Sisko's quarters. Apparently the author didn't get the memo that even on DS9 his quarters are different than his office.

Then there was the fact that there were over seventy chapters. They were really, really choppy and it was very distracting. And statements from the characters like, 'An Alien theory trying to muscle its norms into our universe', didn't make the book any better either.

Maybe it was on purpose, maybe not, but no matter the point of the book it came off as hackneyed, disjointed, and it was apparent that Scheckley unfortunately had no comprehension of the DS9 series. show less

So this guy went and slathered a bunch of 60s tropes - with the gambling, the cruise ships, the sexism, pseudo-science and drop-of-a-hat engagements - all over DS9, and it's an impressively poor fit. Combined with the clunky, exposition - heavy writing style, it makes the whole thing rather painful to read.

A pretty good book. I liked it when Kira and Dax got to Laertes. That is when the humor came in. I loved the dancing sculptor.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3084896.html

A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel by Sheckley, who was a pretty prominent writer at one stage, though I confess I think the only things I have read by him were his comic collaborations with Roger Zelazny and Harry Harrison. This isn't terribly special; I'm aware enough of DS9 to appreciate that Sheckley captures the established main characters and puts them in a new situation; the specifics, however, didn't quite convince me - that an interplanetary gambling dispute with Quark could put the entire station (and ultimately the universe) at risk, and the odd pacing of the crisis on DS9 and Kira and Dax's excursion to a conveniently nearby planet to try and sort it all out. First DS9 book I've show more read - not in a rush to read more. show less