Warchild (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine #7)
Jul. 27th, 2025 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One star is for being well meaning but otherwise it's rather a two-star read. It's...dull. And probably written in a flash since this came out within a year of the show being on the air. It shows in how cruel Nog is in this, showing none of the character growth we know he had.
I think in a way it really wanted to show how the provisional Bajoran government wasn't caring for its people, leaving kids in battle torn encampments suffering from a fever and no one cares. But we never saw in canon this much Bajoran in-fighting. One of the Utopian aspects of ST is how all planets have to be united in order to be in the Federation and if you've ever been in a work meeting you know it's impossible to get 12 people to agree on one thing like alone millions. That aside, Bashir goes to the camps to try and help find a cure for the fever and Dax goes with him though she has a secret mission to find the Nekor, a girl of prophecy that the Kai had written to Sisko about, she's meant to unite the warring factions of Bajor (though we don't much ever see warring factions in canon)
So instead of letting Bashir find the cure, it's given to Dax (way to diminish Bashir's abilities, instead they have him bleating on about how good he was in Star Fleet but again this is written after S1 and Julien was obnoxious then) So when his anti-viral med works, Julien takes off to cure all the kids in every camp he can find.
Meanwhile Dax thinks she has the Nekor in a pair of close siblings Dejana and her sibling Cedra. Dejana is almost a non-entity, existing to be sick and make us wonder will the Nekor die? Cedra is much better drawn.
I guessed the ending. I wasn't sure why they ever bother to give love interests in these books when we know canonically it's not going to work out then they have to find a lame way of ending it (kudos, they nailed it) and what in the world does this whole thing hinge on outdated human gender norms? Did we ever see Ro Laren or Kira Nerys being forced to wear dresses and long hair?!?
I'm not sure I would have finished this if not reading it for a couple of challenges. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't very engaging.
View all my reviews