The Way of the Warrior [Paperback]

Author, Diane Carey, given the task of novelizing Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe's manuscript for "The Way of the Warrior," does an outstanding job of doing exactly what novelizations are designed to do; she quite laudably writes the scenes that we saw on the screen, throws in some great "between the scenes" scenes and captures the characters feelings extraordinarily well, all wrapped up in a well paced novelization that was a true joy to read!

The cover art for "The Way of the Warrior" is a slight cut above the rest of the novels that were being published at that time. While it still relies upon placing character images on the cover, the addition of the Klingon battle cruiser and the Defiant is pretty good. Overall, it lets the casual reader know that Worf is now involved with Deep Space Nine.

The premise:

Captain Sisko finds himself dealing with Gowron, Chancellor of the Klingon Council and General Martok, both leading a large force of Klingon ships and hanging around Deep Space Nine for reasons unknown to him. Faced with this force and unable to get any answers, he calls for Lieutenant Commander Worf in order to discover what the Klingons are there for.

Not unlike Captain Sisko when he first came to Deep Space Nine, Worf is facing the dilemma of having lost the Enterprise and his faith and he's thinking of leaving Starfleet, but he accepts Captain Sisko's mission and sets out to find out why the Klingons are there...

What follows from there is one of Diane Carey's best novelizations of one of the best episodes in the Star Trek canon. I highly recommend this novel to any and all fans of Star Trek fiction! {ssintrepid}

Her weakness, unfortunately, is in the nuts-and-bolts use of the language; she tries desperately to make creative and original use of words; all she manages in most cases, unfortunately, is to make incorrect and distracting use of the language. This isn't ALWAYS the case; there were very few examples of this in "Ship Of The Line" and "Day of Honor, Part 1". Other books, such as her novelizations of "The Search" and "Descent", were virtually unreadable due to the frequency with which she butchered the language unmercifully. This book isn't quite as bad as those (in spite of the fact that it starts poorly, with THREE silly word choices on the first page) but it is much closer to that level than to the level of her better work. (To give examples of what I'm referring to, I'll cite the three from the first page: she uses the non-word "unassuring" where she intends "not reassuring", as in "Phaser rifles. Lightweight, efficient, somehow unassuring at the moment." Later, she describes Sisko's skin as "resined" with sweat, presumably trying to capture the visual effect of resin beading (rather than simply saying the traditional and therefore "uncreative" "beaded"). Unfortunately, the property of resin that comes immediately to the reader's mind is not that it beads, but that it makes things sticky; if Sisko's sweat makes his face sticky, he is, shall we say, somewhat unusual. Then, in the same sentence, she refers to his attitude as "charred"; I'm not entirely certain WHAT she means by that, but I assume it has something to do with his patience being burned away by the frustration he's been experiencing. In any case, descriptive words that leave the reader more puzzled as to what was described than they would have been without them are poorly chosen words, and further, words that are SO creatively used as to jolt the reader's attention away from the story that he's attempting to immerse himself in are likewise poor writing.

The story itself is a fine one, one of the best of the DS9 stories; it's the one in which Worf moves from the Enterprise to DS9. It's unfortunate that the writing of it was given to someone who did it so little credit.