The Search (Mass Market Paperback)

When reading a novelization of an episode or movie, the reader is looking for but a couple things, some personalization to the characters thoughts throughout the episode and some "between the scenes" scenes. Diane Carey accomplishes that in "The Search," and sets a very good tone for the story, to include the characterizations and the pacing of the novel.

The cover art unfortunately is from a time in Star Trek publishing where not a lot of thought was put into the cover, so there really isn't much on the cover that lends to the story other than an image of a Jem'Hadar warship.

The premise:

The history:

"The Search" constitutes one of the most pivotal times in the "saga" that is Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Coming off of the second season finale, "The Jem'Hadar," where we learned a lot more about them when Sisko, Jake, Quark and Nog took a runabout to the Gamma Quadrant to go camping. The Jem'Hadar took Sisko and Quark prisoner but Jake and Nog were able to escape and managed to get the runabout to help. Starfleet sends the USS Odyssey, a Galaxy class starship, through the wormhole to make a rescue attempt for Commander Sisko. The Odyssey immediately runs into several Jem'Hadar warships and is destroyed, quite easily. The ending for this episode is quite ominous, leading up to the beginning of the third season, "The Search" parts I and II.

The Search

As the episode and novel open up, Major Kira and crew are running drills to see how well the station would hold up against a Dominion attack and they're "not exactly" happy with the results. Just as this finishes up, they receive warnings that a ship is de-cloaking right on top of the station but to their great relief it's a Starfleet ship, but of a class they've never seen before.

As part of his time between the loss of the USS Saratoga at Wolf 359 and being stationed on Deep Space Nine, Commander Sisko helped design and build the USS Defiant, Starfleet's toughest little ship, which was their answer to Borg problem. Due to design errors though, a fleet of these ships wasn't built though and the project was abandoned until the onset of the war with the Dominion.

As the Federations and Starfleet's answer to the Jem'Hadar problem, they send Commander Sisko and the Defiant into the Gamma Quadrant to look for the leaders of the Dominion to tell them that they mean them no harm, but at the same time, the Defiant also carries the message that they can defend themselves.

At the same time, Sisko also brings back Commander Eddington to head up Starfleet security on the station which prompts Odo to resign. Major Kira does talk him into going with them into the Gamma Quadrant and he suddenly finds that he has a calling.

What follows from there is certainly one of the best stories ever written for Star Trek Deep Space Nine and certainly a great novelization where we finally learn about the Dominion and the irony for Odo as to who the founders are.

I highly recommend this novelization to any and all fans of the genre. {ssintrepid}

The problem with tremendous finales, of course, is that it builds up huge expectations for the follow-up. And "The Search" failed miserably to live up to the promise of "The Jem Hadar." Sure, it was cool to see the Defiant's rapid-fire blowing up an enemy ship and to see Sisko literally go down fighting, but the rest of the two-parter was a dud. Watching Odo constantly mope was painful, as was seeing Kira's "I'm worried about Odo" face. And the "surprise" resolution was trite, hackneyed, anti-climactic, and unconvincing.

Along comes Diane Carey, whose only other Star Trek novel I'd read, Best Destiny, ranks among the worst books ever put to paper - so awful I couldn't make it through even a third. Yet, surprisingly, and to her credit, Carey turned a bad episode into a decent read. She succeeds in several different ways. She fully fleshes out the change in Sisko's attitude toward Bajor (represented in the episode by Sisko's query to Jake, "When did this Cardassian monstrosity become home to me?"), making it both convincing and moving. She adds scenes not seen in the episode, including Dax's and O'Brien's adventures on the relay station (in the episode, they are captured immediately). Of course, Carey's not a miracle worker. Kira is as painful to read as she was to see, and not even a J.K. Rowling could have saved the ending. In the end, Carey brings us a serviceable Trek novel, neither better nor worse than the vast majority of them.

Ms. Carey has always had a tendancy to try too hard to reach for "clever and creative" in her use of language, and generally succeeds only in achieving "wrong, distracting, and silly". But she's much worse in this book than she has been in most of her previous efforts, which is a shame because she actually has a good feel for characterization, pacing, and (when the story's her own, which it isn't here) plot. If she could ever grow up and stop trying to be clever, she might actually be a competent writer. But when the book is filled with lines like "'This isn't a racial issue, Odo,' Sisko surfeited," and "Sisko swashed back and forth before the office viewing monitors," and "...the Romulan woman inflected back to him..." and "Feeling the Jem'Hadar ships gloss over the skin of his cheeks and forehead, Sisko stared at the screen." and "He bent over Kira, who had the presence of being to hold still..." and "everyone else sat on the edge of their work..." and "he turned to her, anger pleating his eyes" and "he gazed off into the surmountable future" (when overcoming that future was NOT what he had in mind) and....

Do I really need to continue? These are just a FEW of the examples I could list, and there are others just as bad on almost every third page or so. Is it possible that both Diane Carey AND her editors really feel that this constitutes competent (dare we say "clever" writing? I wish I could believe that it was more likely that both the writing and the editing were done while under the influence of powerful mood-altering chemicals, but I suppose that it is much more likely that they are really that incompetent without the aid of artificial incompetence-enhancing drugs. That, or Ms. Carey has decided that now that she's a multiply-published writer, she's big enough that she doesn't need to be ruled by petty little things like the actual meanings of words. Like Humpty Dumpty in "Through The Looking Glass", words mean what she intends them to mean, neither more nor less.

If you're desperate for a Deep Space Nine story with good plot and action, and don't care how badly it's written, this book will fill the bill. Otherwise, avoid it most emphatically.