Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting plot, poorly written, May 29 2004
By A Customer
This book is a good example why the Star Trek series accept story ideas from outside the writing staffs, and an equally good example why the scripts themselves are written by the experts. The plot is truly interesting, and in the hands of someone with a better grasp of the characters, this could have been dynamite. However, unlike the Avatar books, for example, there were far too many examples of characters saying or doing inappropriate or uncharacteristic things. An apparent attempt to capture some of the popular give-and-take between Odo and Quark from the early seasons of DS9 is badly handled, and the mood swings wildly from somber to silly. Unnecessary sexual dialogue during the story's climax (no pun intended) is just an example of the type of thing that jarred me out of the plot. This is a book with a neat plot idea. I wish the author had collaborated with someone who could write the characters in a more believable way. Somewhat interesting read for the plot but ultimately not satisfying for me.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Decent plot, lousy dialogue, April 23 2004
Maybe I just don't get it. There are so many glowing reviews for Fallen Heroes that it almost made me wonder if I had read the same book. Granted, the plot is very good, and if I were rating just on that I probably would have given four stars. The dialogue is so horrible and inconsistent, though, that the best I could do was two stars, and that in my mind was being generous. This isn't the first book written by Dafyss ab Hugh that had me wondering if he ever watched the series but this one had some moments that really bothered me. The biggest one was Chief O'Brien. In the show he was a family man who loved his children (a fact established on Next Generation, at least with Molly who was the only one born at this point, so the arguement that the show was new and the characters not yet fleshed out when this book was written would not work). Yet in this book, when his wife is killed O'Brien decides that it's time for him to die as well, never once thinking of his daughter or the fact that his planned actions will leave her an orphan. The Chief O'Brien on the show would never abandon his daughter like that, especially while the station was under siege and Kieko was already gone. This O'Brien never even gave his daughter a second thought. Or a first thought, for that matter.The second character that I had trouble with was Jake Sisko. Forget the inconsistencies between the Jake of the show and the Jake in Fallen Heroes (there were several). The Jake character in this book was inconsistent with himself from page to page. In one scene he is a young child having trouble putting his thoughts into words. In another scene he is using technobable that would have Chief O'Brien scratching his head. The frightened child I could buy - especially this early in the series. The boy genius, though, I had a major problem with. It was as if Hugh forgot which series he was writing for and confused Jake with Wesley Crusher (and a couple of the lines would have even been a stretch for Crusher). I guess the bottom line is if you like violence and want to see a reality where most of the characters die, this is the book for you. If you want to read a book that is consistent with the series and with itself, look elsewhere. There are a lot of superior Star Trek books out there. This, despite some of the other reviews, is not one of them.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
DS9 #5 Fallen Heroes - An excellent novel!, Oct 10 2003
"Fallen Heroes" is quite often praised as the best "pre relaunch" Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel, and it quite well deserves that reputation. This particular novel even rated a video game being designed and named after it.As with the departure from the norm that Star Trek Deep Space Nine is, so is this novel that is so much more different than any other novel written in any of the series. In one of the darkest and bloodiest "hours" of Star Trek, the author explores the idea of almost every main character in the series, being brutally murdered and how heroically they "met their maker," yet the author, Dafydd ab Hugh, deftly handles closing up this novel in which there is no change whatsoever to the series. "Fallen Heroes" is author Dafydd ab Hugh's first Star Trek novel and I found his writing style to be quite fluidic and the pacing of the novel to be non stop, which in the light of other Star Trek novels, is a great skill to possess. The cover art for this novel is standard fare for the time and doesn't lend much to the story. The premise: Set sometime early during the second season of the series, "Fallen Heroes" tells the tale of alien warriors coming to the station and demanding the return of an imprisoned comrade, someone of which nobody on the station knows anything about. Being set so early in the series, prior to the fourth season in which Deep Space Nine's defense were seriously "beefed" up, the aliens easily invade the station and Commander Sisko and crew have a losing battle to fight. Meanwhile, an odd device from the Gamma Quadrant has shifted Odo and Quark to three days in the future on the station. They arrive there and nobody is left alive, leaving them the task of finding a way back to the time they left and saving the station. What follows from there, as stated above, is one of the most intriguing and fast paced early Star Trek Deep Space Nine novels set prior to the relaunch series. I highly recommend this novel to any and all fans of the series as you will most certainly not be disappointed! {ssintrepid}
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