Una McCormack's Deep Space Nine novel "The Never Ending Sacrifice"

[brainwane]

Someone on Dreamwidth -- I don't remember who -- mentioned and recommended this Star Trek branded novel: Una McCormack's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Never-Ending Sacrifice. I just finished it.

If you loved DS9 then you should strongly consider reading this. Especially if you found the Cardassian-Bajoran dynamic one of the best multi-world arcs of all of Trek.

This book:

• is like if Alan Furst wrote a book about people caught up in the shocks and tumult of the Cardassian empire over the course of DS9, and after
• is the most wrenching Star Trek branded book I've ever read (ok, maybe I've only read 20 or 30 or so)
• touches on Cardassian education, agriculture, visual arts, family life, funeral rituals, and more (as well as literature, as alluded to by the title)
• captures Dukat's voice so well that I felt like I could hear Marc Alaimo declaiming as he walked into the room
• for like 96% of its length is told from the point of view of people who are not Starfleet -- mostly Cardassians, but also a non-Starfleet starship captain
• builds on the worldbuilding in Andrew J. Robinson's Garak-POV novel A Stitch In Time

If you recommended this or saw who did (in a DW post within the last 2 months, I think), please say so in the comments so I can thank you/them?

Reading this also helped me appreciate how the Cardassian empire is probably the villain polity in Trek that makes the most sense to me. It acts like an empire -- it captures and extracts resources from subject worlds because it has stripped its own resources bare. It doesn't just go out and make war because of some inborn biological urge or because warriors have high status.

TANGENT ABOUT A PROBABLY HALF-CENTURY-OLD TREK NITPICK: The one big snag in this whole thing, of course, is replicators. Why is anyone going hungry or thirsty on Cardassia Prime, ever, if replicators exist?! Why does anyone have to farm??!! As far as I am aware this has never been adequately explained in canon (although there are a lot of episodes of the original series, Voyager, and The Animated Series that I have not watched). You can kind of handwave it by talking about the bootstrapping problem of manufacturing replicators, or saying that some things are not replicable with replicators, or by saying that replicators are actually really tetchy and high-maintenance and break a lot in hard conditions, or by coming up with some math about producing and distributing the joules of energy needed to power replicators and saying that's an infrastructure problem that's hard and slow to address.

[This is of course also related to the question Leonard asked on his blog decades ago and that I partially answered in one of the first emails I ever sent him (back before we'd even met, much less dated and married) -- what's the deal with the Ferengi being so scarcity-y in a universe where gold-pressed latinum and all the other stuff can be replicated? (A branded novel says: if you try to replicated gold-pressed latinum you just end up with regular latinum.) At least Mariner points this out in a recent Lower Decks episode!]

I usually don't get wrought up about this but the thirst and hunger and agronomy in the McCormack book really brings it to the forefront of my mind. We do get some hints that replicators are harder for an untrained person to fix than, say, power generators.

END OF TANGENT

Thinking about realistic and unrealistic Trek empires also made me realize that the Romulan-Vulcan split along logical vs. passionate lines reads to me as something out of fantasy, not scifi.

If you read and enjoyed this or another McCormack book please say so in the comments!

Comments

[oracne]

I know Una from our days together in Blake's 7 fandom, and all her work is terrific.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah there do appear to be some limits, and I'm pretty sure they weren't like, common enough to be standard on all ships and what-not until TNG times, but there's a lot of stuff that contradicts the whole 'post-scarcity society' thing Trek has going on. And more generally, I've been working on a Trek AU fanfic for another fandom and realizing just how holey Trek worldbuilding is (particularly the medtech - the most we get on prosthetics/replacement limbs is like, mentions in two episodes of DS9). Meanwhile Star Wars is like 'here is the exact composition and history of bacta'.

[viggorlijah]

it was meeeeeeee! wasn't the grandmother fabulous? And I love what she did with the cardassian secrets confession at death which had been really a plot point, and turned into this big thing. The part on the planet with the snow death trek felt more poignant to me because what he'd learned up to then meant he wasn't able in hindsight to give his comrade what he needed by their standards or understand the loss, and also just how - the slog and mundane horror of war and survival. And the symmetry of the parenting at the end, the reasons for the child being afraid and finding him a refuge - it wasn't spotlit so it felt like a near mirror rather than hitting over the head. And oh, his parents, all of them, and their anxiety and patient love for him. And the street revolutionaries who give him no sympathy over his ignorance and wealth, even when he walks the walk because - well that's reality, not romance.

Replicator and agriculture technology tend to be handwaved. My own headcanon is that sure you can have replicators but they take a LOT of energy if they have to convert from random junk rather than suitable source materials, which is all fine on a spaceship with few people, a warp core drive and a big reservoir of base materials, but on a planet with unreliable energy and source materials - sure your replicator could convert a bag of scrap into food, but you'd have weird stuff left over and use more energy than just growing the stuff, so people use it for specific things or fancy treats.

[brainwane]

Related Tumblr post.