[SPOILERS
for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
novel Enigma Tales and
also for Star Trek: The Fall: The Crimson Shadow.]
For those
unaware, “professional fan fiction” is a term coined by Doctor
Who author Lawrence Miles for the stacks of officially
published anciliary material genre shows tend to produce as a matter
of course these days. In fairness to Miles, he came up with this name
having created a fair amount of it himself and these days runs a
small cottage industry editing novels and short story collections
featuring his most prominent addition to the Doctor Who extended
universe, the time travelling voodoo cult Faction Paradox.
So, as
pejorative as it sounds, basically it isn't really. Its just an
ackowledgement of the fact that in many ways these tie-ins don't
matter as much as the source material which... well, ask any
pre-Episode VII Star Wars fan about the Star Wars EU they grew up
with for objective evidence of that.
Also, I've
never been one to find fan fiction lesser artistically. Yeah, there's
a lot of crap out there due to the unedited and amateur nature of it
but equally there a hell of a lot more heartfelt, moving and
spectacularly well-crafted stuff that will blow you away than you'd
ever assume from the form's reputation. And its not as if officially
licensed tie-ins haven't produced their share of crap over the
years... I'm looking at you, Doctor Who Unbound: Exile!
Anyway,
I just finished a Deep Space Nine
novel called Enigma Tales
by Una McCormack, the latest in a loose series of books she's written
about Elim Garak and the post-war reconstruction of Cardassia. This
has sort of become McCormack's personal corner of the Star Trek
universe over the years and I'm happy for that to continue. Over the
course of her several novels she's fleshed out the culture of
Cardassia's fledgling democracy and the geography of the (still,
sadly, unnamed) capital city, peppering her narrative with welcome
little bits of worldbuilding that add so much context to events.
She
also writes a fantastic Garak. Garak may be my favourite Deep Space
Nine character, perhaps even my favourite character in the whole of
Star Trek, and McCormack clearly relishes writing from his morally
flexible but utterly stubborn point of view. In particular, Enigma
Tales has a fantastic aside
where he considers the war of manners and vieled insults he's been
waging against the Federation diplomatic corps for more than a decade
and the ways they've been trying to bait and/or frustrate him.
Anyway,
I warned you of spoilers and here's the big one: Garak is Castellan
of the Cardassian Union, its head of state. On reflection its a nice
redemption for him, a late in life convert to the principles of
democracy, and McCormack makes sure an absolutely central part of
Garak's political ambitions is to stop anything like the Obsidian
Order or the Dukat dictatorship from happening again. This novel, in
particular, presents him with the tricky political subject of a war
crimes report about the Bajoran Occupation and the question of how to
prosecute offenders (especially given that, as a former spy, torturer
and killer, he's absolutely guilty and everyone knows it).
Its
an interesting debate... that sadly, the book sidesteps a little by
concluding that Garak has probably hidden the bodies well enough that
no actual evidence of his own crimes will ever be brought to light.
There's a lot to love about the book's treatment of the debate as it
casts the shadow of war crimes over another character, one
essentially sympathetic and innocent in the eyes of the fan,
Professor Natima Lang (a one-off TV character and member of the old
Cardassian dissident movement). All of this is juxtaposed with
descriptions of the Cardassian literary form of the enigma tale,
essentially a form of mystery in which every character shares some
form of guilt, which Lang describes as a quintessentially Cardassian
state of affairs.
Then
there's the pleasure of Garak encountering the only character in Star
Trek canon more sarcastic than he is: Doctor Katherine Pulaski (who
much be about a hundred by this point in the canon, twelve years
after the Dominion War). McCormack uses her intelligently, as well,
as our point of view on post-war Cardassia. In particular, I enjoy
how Cardassians keep mentioning the parts of human culture they
adopted whilst the Federation were helping with the reconstruction
effort: a police officer is addicted to human coffee, a shopkeeper
learnt to play soccer from Starfleet aid workers, another who
remembers having a human teacher at school.
Its
the nature of prose that you have more time for asides and that's
where I think the real benefit of the professional fan fiction comes
in. For instance, in the series we never know who leads the civilian
administration in power on Cardassia between War of the
Warrior and By
Inferno's Light. To
all intents and purposes, Gul Dukat is still the face of Cardassia
all that time, even when he's living in exile on his Bird Of Prey.
This novel (and perhaps others in the past, I don't know who came up
with this one) credits the leader of the Detapa Council in that time
as Meya Rejal, a pretty weak leader by reputation whose reign was
characterised by an ongoing humanitarian crisis that lead to the
Union joining the Dominion just to feed its people.
Obviously,
there's no reason this should have been mentioned on screen. The
Detapa Council appears once as a gaggle of extras in Cardassian
make-up during Way of the Warrior
with Dukat (then their military advisor) getting the only non-rhubard
lines in the scene and they never appear again. There wasn't a
practical need for anything more but a novel has more leeway, as does
fan fiction.
So
in Enigma Tales,
either as its own invention or following the innovations of others,
we have Cardassian capital with distinct named districts like Paldar
and East Torr, each with its own cultural and polticcal history; the
University of the Union has internal politics and underground
corridors connecting its buildings so students don't have to walk
through the summer dust storms; Damar has a statue; wherever Garak
makes his workspace he hangs a picture Ziyal drew for him where he
can see it as both warning and inspiration; there's a particular
flower whose petals are used in Cardassian funerals, a detail that
then gets used to lend symbolism to a later scene.
I
love that the breathing room of the professional fan fiction allows
for these little details to get filled in.
Just
so long as they don't clone Emperor Palpatine at me as they do it,
that is.
