[BOOK REVIEWS #2] Star Trek: Typhoon Pact #3 Rough Beasts of Empire





ED's Review: ★★★☆☆

The entirety of this story rests on its twist at the end. It feels unsatisfying because not enough links are made to the twist itself. Reading this feels rather unfulfilled - 'is this it? - until you have it explained to you. The journey needs to work too. I might compare this to M. Night Shyamalan, which is basically aimless crap until you go 'ohhh'. To be clear, the aimless stuff is this book is not quite as shallow as Shyamalan. But it won't hold a lot of interest to the unitiated to the Star Trek litverse until the end.


To which point, the Sisko stuff is really not satisfactory at all. Maybe it's because I am not religious, but ruining your life and the life of your family because you were worried about something vague that a 'god' told you is really fucking stupid. Thinking that everything bad that happens to you is a deliberate collocation of 'fate' is really fucking stupid. But, then again, it might resonate if you believe in that kind of thing. The fact that Sisko did all this so suddenly is bitterly disappointing.


But this book is really about Romulan politics, and the fact that the situation is not dealt with by massive space battles or crazy sci-fi massiveness, but by the careful manipulation of background strings to end up controlling a very careful game of chess (mixed analogies be damned!) is quite satisfying, even if it is a bit undercooked here. I don't usually say this, because I dislike inefficiencies in story telling, but I think there were certain steps and especially characters that needed more to make the twist even better.