Customer Reviews

Trials and Tribble-ations (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

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I love the tribble episodes, TOS and DS9, no question. I enjoy most of Carey's stories, too, no question about that either. And this is a decent novelization, though I expected more fleshing out.

But the Kindle edition is almost impossible to read. There are no breaks between scenes -- every scene just runs into the next one. And there are neither breaks between paragraphs nor indenting of paragraphs. There were numerous times I had to go back and reread, and recall the episode, to realize, "ah, yes, we're in a new scene," or "okay, this is where somebody else started acting or talking."

If a person hadn't seen the episode, I suspect they would be completely lost, trying to read this on Kindle.

When it comes to novelizations of the more popular or special episodes of any of the Star Trek series, Pocket Books usually calls on Diane Carey to cover it, as they did with this exceptional novelization. Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Trials and Tribble-Ations is the novelization of Star Trek Deep Space Nine's fifth season episode that is Deep Space Nine's tributary episode in honor of Star Trek's thirtieth anniversary.

In honor of Star Trek's thirtieth anniversary the producers and writers cooked up this special episode which actually involves footage from the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" and threw in the majority of the Deep Space Nine crew to make a very special episode.

In addition to being a wonderful novelization by Diane Carey, this novel also contains an introduction by David Gerrold, who wrote the Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," which is extremely entertaining and informative.

The premise:

Captain Sisko finds himself being visited by members of Starfleet's DTI (Department of Temporal Investigations), which is paramount to a present day tax audit. The purpose of their visit is to have him explain the recent time travel incident in which Captain Sisko and the crew of the Defiant found themselves in the twenty third century and staring face to face with the original USS Enterprise NCC-1701, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk himself.

What follows from there is most certainly one of the more special episodes in all of the Star Trek series and an exceptional novelization by Diane Carey who quite deftly handles all of the proper aspects of writing a novelization!

I highly recommend this novelization to any and all Star Trek fans who enjoy the Deep Space Nine series and who just enjoy good Trek fiction! {ssintrepid}

From the forward and history of the episode to the way the episode was novelized, I thought it was one of the absolute best of the ones done by the Star Trek franchise. The blending of original Star Trek episode with the new Deep Space Nine plotline interwoven was incredibly well done.

It doesn't expand much on the episode (bar a scene between Bashir and McCoy and including more scenes from "The Trouble With Tribbles") but its worth it anyway.

This novelization of the popular DS9 episode is a great read. I'm not a big fan of the Original Series, mostly because I enjoy the high-tech graphics of todays entertainment, but after reading this book, I sat down to watch the Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" and found it most enjoyable to see it after I had read the book. I focused more on the plot than I did the graphics and it helped me to better understand and savor the episode. The DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" is a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Star Trek and, as a special tribute, the cast was digitally put into the old Original Series episode, progressing through their story while the Original Series cast continues through their plot around them. I won't go into the plot itself, as other reveiwers have done so, but I will say that this novel is a must read.

Go Star Trek!!!

Diane Carey is a multiply-published author of Star Trek novels, and is frequently the one called upon to write novelizations of popular episodes. This is unfortunate, because her strengths as a writer lie in her ability to create interesting plots and characters, abilities which do not come into play when novelizing someone else's story. Granted, she is also good at pacing and the building of tension, which DO come into play here, as does her ability to make characters come to life, if not as much as it would were she writing her own story.

Her weakness, unfortunately, is in her nuts-and-bolts use of the language. She tries desperately to make creative and original use of the language; generally, all she manages is to distract the reader by misusing words clumsily. This isn't ALWAYS the case; there were very few examples of misused words in "Ship of the Line" and "Day of Honor, Part 1". On the other hand, "The Search" and "Descent" were practically unreadable due to the frequency with which she butchered the language.

This book falls about midway between her two extremes; nowhere near as bad as "The Search" and "Descent", but nowhere near as good as the previously mentioned books. Better than "Way of the Warrior", but not as good as "Battlestations" or "Dreadnought", it is probably closest in quality to "Flashback", although the writing is not quite as good as the writing there.

Which is a real shame, because this is perhaps THE best story in the Star Trek franchise, certainly in the top ten. It deserved better than the mediocre handling it received here; it seems to me that, even ignoring Diane Carey's weird use of language, the story was much better fitted to Peter David's style, and would have worked much better if he'd been the one writing the novelization.

Diane Carey strikes again.

This book is delightful to read. It is a must-read book.

You'll enjoy it because this novelization is more worth than the money paid for it.

The book is has some differeces toward the episode. So read it, then wath the episode. You'll see the differences