Book 32: Star Trek Deep Space Nine Bloodletter

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Bloodletter just failed to be a great book for me. A lot of the time, I keep finding my suspended disbelief couldn’t remain suspended. There were moments where I kept going this isn’t good Trek.

In need of a Star Trek fix and after the fail to get that on the eReader during my Philly trip, I was finally able to treat myself after coming home and finishing Royal Pains.  I decided to go Old School Star Trek. Okay not Old School in the sense of the original series but from early Deep Space Nine (before they even knew they would relaunch the book series).  This is the third book in the series written back in 1993. Even Deep Space Nine was only in its first season.  

Being an early book, there is some things you could let slide. At least I tried to but it just didn’t always work.

This book quite frankly didn’t deal with the Star Trek universe very well. First, they made Sisko very concerned by finances and they were trying to run a deficit to prove how they needed a larger budget. Great except the Federation officers don’t worry about money and they struggle with the concept of being driven by money when dealing with the Ferengi (as shown in The Next Generation). So to see so much focus on money and budgets didn’t make sense. Second, Dax wasn’t even mentioned or used until mid book when she was always part of the conversations and more likely to be in a private conversation with Sisko and Kira then Brashir ever would be. Third was pulling the baseball from Sisko’s drawer and explaining what it was. The baseball was always on display on the desk. No need to explain it to a senior officer after the Emissary book/episode. Then there was the problem of the Doctor.

I tried to tell myself that the character problems weren’t really there. It was just an early Trek book. It was before the character growth happened. But then they had Kira trying to save the prophets while the Doctor was willing to sacrifice them. He took an oath that said do no harm. He would never advocate or really even consider the killing of the Prophets. It would be genocide. So when that happened. It was game over in trying to keep the suspended disbelief.