could a book be any worse?

I could not find anything good about this, and even though from page 20 I wanted to toss the book in the corner, I did finish it.

The two plot lines are never really fleshed out, and people act out of character.

I have read every book of DS9 that came out since the series ended, and this is my only real disappointment to date.

could be the Worst Trek Book I've read

I have read almost every TOS, TNG and DS9 book ever written. This one may very well be the worst of them all. The plot line never grabs you. Several of the characters (especially Sisko)are portrayed way out of their normal character. It's portrayed as tale of the Dominion War and the war is just a backdrop. It also assumes from the beginning that you clearly remember some specific events from one of the episodes of the show itset rather than having a prologue that presents/refreshed those events as a baseline.

Didn't bother buying the book, even though it's worthy

There was a time when I bought every Star Trek book, but with the franchise proliferating faster than tribbles, I couldn't keep up.

I thought that this one would be interesting, and there were some great cultural commentaries, such as the 24th century protests (a subtle comment on democracy) against the Dominion War, which has always seemed to me to be an amalgam of the War on Terror and Word War II. The difference in the 23rd and 24th centuries is that there's no shortage of people wanting to join the military, and unlike today, there's no destructive press, no Abu Ghraibs (though torture is self-defeating and what we hated about Saddam), the military (Starfleet) is viewed as a place for the best and brightest (a title of one of the Star Trek books) as well as a lot of, as Garak remarks, "disillusioned idealists," and there's support for stopping an enemy that, rankly, wants to kill us just as the terrorists do today. The Section 31 genocide of the Founders referred to in this book still gives me qualms--although the Founders are narrow minded insular beings who, unlike the gods they purport to be, have no universal love, genocide, especially through the amazing Odo, gives me a qualm. In the Final Chapter, love won out when Julian Bashir found the cure to the Founders' Disease and Odo passed it on, ending the war...at least in the series. However, real life is more complex than even a TV series that was ahead of its time.

This is my main complaint with HOLLOW MEN. Although I think Una McCormack rises above the traditional Star Trek novel, portrays the characters well and is to be commended for tackling issues that ring with our times, I was disappointed that the message seems to be basically "Covert ops leave you hollow." Yes, the spy biz does produce blowback as well as morally ambiguous at best existences, but given the fact that the liberals have tried to brainwash us, undermined intelligence in this country and then whined about Bush's failure to stop 9/11 (most of Osama's attacks took place on Clinton's watch) as well as his reliance on intelligence about WMD, plus manipulated the press so that it gets Amercan soldiers killed while deriding them, I, like Garak, find this attitude a bit naive. Don't get me wrong--in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," I was disappointed that Sec 31 mucked about with Cretak's life. But given the events on our culture, and one too many times being searched at the airport, I'm a bit of a disillusioned idealist, albeit a Bashir fan, myself.

Speaking of Bashir, there's an end exchange with Vic Fontaine that seems to sum up this "spying is at best morally ambiguous."The cameo by Agent Luther Sloan (if you've read any of Ms. McCormack's Star Trek fiction online in the fan databases, she describes him as "sandy-haired and smallish"), interestingly touches on the Founders' Disease, but I was hoping for a look inside Sloan's head, especially post-"Inquisition," or at least an internal monologue reference to his encounter with Bashir. I understand that Ms. McCormack's focus was on Sisko and Garak as well as the Romulans, but I would have appreciated less B-plot on the station (though Bashir does figure and the B-plot is connected to Sloan at the end--even from afar Sloan is still manipulating our innocent doctor) and more musings on Sloan's plans and the Section 31 perspective that we got in the four-book "Section 31" series in which Sloan graced the Voyager installment (and Admiral Marta Batanides, present here in a scene where Ross gives a speech upon hearing of Sisko's "In the Pale Moonlight" doings that's similar to "Inter Arma...," vows to destroy Section 31 for taking her fiance in "Rogue.") A regular guest character of course gets more play, and should, than a three-episode guest star whose past is unknown--but then again, Sloan was in the final chapter!

As I write this, post-production is being completed on "Purple Heart," an Iraq War movie telling a story of the US military trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein in 2003. The movie's tagline is "The true horror of war...is what we do to ourselves." (Yep, another anti-military movie from Hollywood.) The movie posits the existence of a Section 31-like military covert ops division, Epsilon Force, created to assassinate foreign leaders deemed a threat to the interests of the United States (never mind that Saddam, who we backed without foresight in the Iran-Iraq war, murdered his own people).

The star of the movie and the only reason I would go to see it (it's probably better than "Fahrenheit 9/11") is William Sadler as one of the minds behind Epsilon Force. Star Trek fans also know him as...Luther Sloan. And he recruits an idealistic young Marine who he has to destroy when the Marine gets a crisis of conscience and his very existence gets sticky. Sound familiar?

The movie's Web site sums up the message of HOLLOW MEN: "too often, the first casualty of that kind of war is the truth. In the end, the worst horror of war is what we do to ourselves in the name of freedom and democracy."

We don't want the hypocrisy of Cardassia, which condemsn protests against the state while the Nazi licentious Gul Dukat sells out his own people to the Dominion. But as James T. Kirk says in "Star Trek VI": "The truth lies probably somewhere in between." It's a truth that sadly escapes the excellent work in HOLLOW MEN.