Fearful Symmetry
Olivia Woods
Publication Date: June 2008
Timeline: 2377, following the events of Warpath; also, 2357, 2358, 2359, 2360, 2361 and 2375
Progress: This book has a flip format, so that it can be read from either cover, with both stories meeting roughly in the middle of the volume. Mirror, mirror, and all that. These two sections are referred to as Side One and Side Two. Here we go:
Side One: A Prologue set “Seven Days Ago” depicts Sisko having an Orb vision (facilitated by the Orb of Souls) in which he congregates with seven other alternate Siskos. This meeting suggests to Sisko that the Prophets/wormhole aliens originally facilitated contact between our Sisko and the Mirror Universe Sisko (m-Sisko), who is notably absent from the vision gathering, so that the former could in some way inspire or shepherd the latter to play an Emissary role in that realm. After this vision, Sisko discusses the paghvaram–the titular soul key—with Opaka Sulan, and then receives the call from Ezri that will put him at Kira’s bedside when she regains consciousness near the end of Warpath.
Back in the “present,” Mirror Universe Iliana (m-Iliana), now aboard the station, explains that our Iliana is in the Mirror Universe and has very likely replaced their Intendant. m-Iliana tries to enlist the help of the station’s senior crew to stop Iliana in her plan, but they are understandably skeptical. Kira finally decides to use the Orb of Memory, which reveals that she was in fact at the Elemspur Detention Center. She was captured by the Obsidian Order so that her memories could be transferred to Iliana, who was surgically altered to look like her and take her place, and Gul Dukat let Kira out with her memories of Elemspur removed.
Nog helps to rig a device that allows the crew to contact the Mirror Terok Nor, but just as they are making headway in convincing them of who they are, the Alliance attacks Terok Nor and communications are lost. Kira decides to cross over to the Mirror Bajor, and wants to take m-Iliana with her, but Sisko persuades her to take Vaughn instead. Vaughn’s mission, instigated by Sisko’s request, is to find m-Sisko, previously thought dead but still alive, while keeping Kira in the dark about his goal.
* * *
Side Two: We travel back in time to Iliana’s youth, adolescence and early adulthood. She starts out as a somewhat free-thinking artist who is critical of Cardassian politics and of Cardassian rule over Bajor, but the death of her confidante and lover Ataan Rhukal ends up pushing her into the arms of the Obsidian Order. We also learn that Gul Dukat pressured Corbin Entek, who had trained Iliana and was in fact responsible for Ataan’s death (without her knowing it), into dropping his original Kira-replacement plan. Dukat did this so that Iliana, altered to look like Kira and believing herself to be Kira after the memory transplant from the real Kira, would be imprisoned at the Cardassian facility of Letau and essentially serve as Dukat’s personal plaything. The convulsive conclusion to the Dominion War, however, allowed Iliana to escape, and the discovery of her true identity, combined with the prolonged abuse and resulting trauma from her time at Letau, broke her mind and set her on the course we saw in Warpath.
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Behind the lines: I’ve always enjoyed the episode “Second Skin,” but I had no idea it would spawn all this. Goodness. Some aspects of Fearful Symmetry—Sisko’s development and his new sense of purpose regarding m-Sisko, Kira learning more about her own past, and facing a difficult command situation with Vaughn—are enjoyable and well-handled, but there’s quite a bit of material here that left me cold, namely almost all of Iliana’s backstory and arc. Considering that this makes up over half the book, that’s not good. I was also disappointed that the story threads initiated in Warpath didn’t advance except by maybe a few inches.
Let’s begin with positives. Woods is skilled at descriptive prose and dialogue in equal measure, as well as stage-setting and scene construction. This makes for an immersive prose experience. She kicks off her novel with a succinct recap of everything we need to understand and, for the first four or so chapters, manages to maintain a strong forward momentum. She introduces just the right amount of comedic relief with Quark in Side One to ease the tension while keeping the stakes high.
There are neat little moments throughout—like Sisko of the Borg, for instance, in the Prologue. Also, Dax raises good questions early on: “If it really is our Iliana that Taran’atar has followed into the alternate universe, do we leave them for the other side to deal with? Or do we have an obligation to go after them for the crimes that were committed here?” It would have been nice to spend more time on the moral implications of these issues, but the narrative doesn’t pause to breathe life into these dilemmas. Still, I’m grateful that they were articulated and at least briefly addressed.
Woods is also very good with continuity. I thought that Kira reflecting—after chastising Vaughn for losing his perspective—on her own behavior with Silaran Prin was a compelling choice, and in fact her whole exchange with Sisko about their time serving together was excellent. During this conversation Sisko recalls the events of “Rocks and Shoals,” which also struck me as thoughtful and germane. In Side Two, there’s many nods to previous Cardassian worldbuilding. My favorite was Iliana’s reflection on an operative’s “ability to merge with one’s surroundings,” which produced a cool resonance with A Stitch In Time.
Add to this an almost-palpable sense of doom. We get an explicit taste of it in Chapter 3 (“There was a dangerous climate building aboard the station—an unspoken feeling that everything was coming apart”), later echoed in Chapter 8 (“All the tension around here lately—it’s enough to depress anyone,” Quark remarks), but it’s also peppered in through a myriad of descriptive details.
This leads me to Woods’ stylistic choices. Many are quite effective. In Chapter 2, for instance, we get a scene between Kira and m-Iliana from m-Iliana’s perspective rather than from Kira’s, a simple but powerful authorial move that ends up helping us understand both characters better, as opposed to just deepening our insight into Kira. There’s a poignant symmetrical use of the present tense that unifies both Sides: “She [Kira] plunges into darkness for a time and floats among shadows” and “She [Iliana] plunges into darkness for a time and floats among shadows.” The epistolary format, which kicks in during Side Two when Ataan writes to Iliana with news of his various experiences in the field, offers nice insight into their relationship and “humanizes” him as much as possible. Some lines—for example, “Try as she might to find it, her true face eluded her”—work on multiple levels.
Other moves were, I think, less successful. The first few times “what the kosst” is used are cute, but it gets overplayed. In the Prologue, key information about what Sisko is told regarding his mission is deliberately omitted, presumably to generate suspense, but it’s just annoying. The same thing happens again later: crucial information is withheld from us readers when Sisko visits Vaughn in his quarters, for no real reason, and yet again when Sisko informs Vaughn that he can’t tell Kira the truth but declines to explain why. This is not so much elegant narrative misdirection as it is distractingly overt manipulation. It also ties in to the use of flashback scenes, as for example in Chapter 5, which are technically well-executed but break the flow of a story that is already hardly advancing.
This issue becomes particularly troublesome in Side Two, since we essentially know all of the end-states going in. We come to understand why the four characters who assisted Iliana-as-Kira did so, for instance, but since they are already dead it’s hard to care. Expending over a hundred pages on filling in the details of Iliana’s extremely anguished and ultimately brutally violent past is off-putting, and it grinds the narrative to a halt. I don’t mind disturbing scenes or graphic violence if they serve a strong dramatic purpose (see Warpath for an excellent way to accomplish this), but here they felt superfluous and clichéd. I also don’t buy the enormous retconning of Dukat’s prior involvement with the real Kira and the Kira-lookalike that we’re asked to believe here.
Part of the overall problem is that the macro-plot seems to be depending more and more for its resolution on an outcome—the filling of a void in the Mirror Universe that will likely “strengthen the rebellion against the Alliance” and potentially “usher in a new age”—that is both weirdly specific (Sisko’s role) and generally vague (everything else), so as to feel not particularly fleshed out and somewhat arbitrary. The “dire and convoluted circumstances,” as the novel itself refers to them, of the multiple doubles and counterfeit pasts, combined with the stakes depending on the grand-scale evolution of the Mirror Universe rather than the immediate fate of our characters, makes it challenging to become emotionally invested in this story, and, frankly, to become too excited about where this is all headed.
I did appreciate the suggestion that Taran’atar’s character could be redeemed and rehabilitated, but then we get exactly zero progress on his story with Iliana-as-Intendant, which was frustrating. Nor is the grander arc of the forthcoming conflict with the Ascendants pursued. This brings me to my biggest gripe with this book. It’s the first relaunch novel, sadly, that feels non-essential. The Prologue and the few other plot elements from Side One could have made for a tasty short story or novella, and I personally could have done without Side Two entirely. Your parsecs may vary.
Memorable beats: Kira to Vaughn: “… after all the questionable actions you took while I was out of commission…how is it you’re still alive, Commander?”
Kira, when asked by m-Iliana what she requests of the Prophets: “I don’t ask them for anything. I look inward for the virtues the Prophets have taught us to cultivate. Wisdom…strength…hope.”
Major Cenn reflecting on life aboard DS9: “Being on Deep Space 9 often felt like the surreal consequences of a night spent drinking far too much copal.”
Quark’s wisdom: “When in doubt, tug on the lobes of your elders. ”
And Quark again: “People love the bartender; Rule of Acquisition Number 147. Why do you think I took up mixology in the first place?”
Ro recalling her affection for Taran’atar: “He was always—himself. I don’t know how else to explain it. He wasn’t trying to assimilate, to become more like the rest of us.”
Kira to m-Iliana, as eloquent as ever: “You’re the double of a woman who was surgically altered to replace me, but who has instead replaced my double in an alternate universe.”
Best Ferengi moment in the relaunch? “Nog knew in his lobes that this was one of those times when the dividends to the many outvalued the dividends to the few. Or the one.”
Orb factor: A few interesting notions, but overlong, and grimly unpleasant without a justifying payoff; 6 orbs.
In our next installment: We’ll be back in this space on Wednesday May 27th with The Soul Key by Olivia Woods!
Alvaro is a Hugo- and Locus-award finalist who has published some forty stories in professional magazines and anthologies, as well as over a hundred essays, reviews, and interviews. Nag him @AZinosAmaro.
This was the last DS9 continuing book I read. I couldn’t get past the even more gross retcon of Dukat’s gross televised interactions with Kira. It was the sexually traumatized woman trope turned up to revolting new levels and did not belong in the Star Trek universe.
Also that thing you mention where the author thinks they’re being clever by deliberately omitting info to generate “suspense” – can writers please stop that? It’s not doing what you think it does. Reminds me of all the “Captain, can you come here? There’s something you need to see” moments in TNG that grate on my nerves. Just spit it out! A truly good story doesn’t need the fake writerly tricks.
I’m hoping the next review indicates the series is back in its feet again after this mistake. I’ve continued to purchase the novels and I’d like to know if it’s safe to dip my feet back in the water…
This and the next novel in line, “The Soul Key”, were intended to be one book, but upheavals on the writing/editing side led to it being delayed and split in half. If the events of “The Soul Key” had indeed been included in this book, I think a lot of the complaints that have been laid against this book would be resolved – the lack of forward motion in the A-story, the information being deliberately withheld. Think of this as the “Half-Blood Prince” before the “Deathly Hallows”, or the “Song of Susannah” before the “Dark Tower” – the slight pause as we recover from the intense events immediately prior and build up to the climactic events yet to come, while filling in backstory so that those events have the full context when they come. I really don’t think you can skip it, because it sets up so much stuff that is resolved in the “season 9” finale.
Another complaint is that the story went to the Mirror Universe instead of sticking with our characters, with some even saying this amounted to a “tangent” – and that I utterly disagree with. This season began with the WoDS9 stories, and the MU is just as much a “world of DS9” as any other. After spending three books (each containing two stories) exploring different planets, we now have another book (containing two stories) exploring a whole other universe, and its effect on this one. This plot line has been building for 6 books, so how that can be a tangent from the plot I don’t get – it is the plot.
I will never forget reading the first scene with all the Alternate Siskos in the Orb of Souls vision, standing in the book store (I did buy the book, I just got caught up reading it right there). The idea that the Prophets storyline and the MU storyline – aspects of the TV show that had seemed completely separate at the time – were actually the same storyline all along just blew my mind. I thought that was a brilliant idea, it excited me and opened up so many more possibilities for this entire connected universe.
That this storyline drags in pieces from so many previous episodes and stories – “The Storyteller”, “Necessary Evil”, “Crossover”, “Second Skin”, “The Darkness and the Light”, “Ties of Blood and Water”, “Penumbra”, “The Lotus Flower”, “Fragments & Omens”, “Olympus Descending” – doesn’t confuse or overload me. It make it feel like we are living in a coherent universe where even the early stories you didn’t think were relevant turn to be very relevant indeed. This kind of complexity and thematic coherence is what makes me enjoy the Season 9 arc even more than I enjoyed the Season 8 arc.
We get an entire complex built just to house one prisoner – in this case it was Iliana, but in “Olympus Descending” it was the Female Founder. That being alone is not good for your mental state has been a recurring theme of the season – Korven in “Lotus”, Shar in “Paradigm”, Luaran the Vorta and Taran’atar in “Malefictorum”, Soloman in ‘Lost Time”, Lense in “Wounds”, the Hundred and the Female Founder in “Olympus”.
“The Lotus Flower” also features a moment where Garak – an ex Obsidian Order agent – interrogates someone in silhouette, the light almost hiding their identity. We now realise that the kidnapper in “Fragments and Omens”, who did the same thing, was also an ex Obsidian Order agent, Iliana.
“Fragments and Omens” sees Rena struggling to balance what her family wants her to do with what her soul tells her to do. She finally chooses her art, and finds all the happiness she needs. It plays forward to this story, where Iliana faces a similar choice – do what her family wants (state service) or what she wants (work on her art). She chooses the opposite of Rena – service – and it leads to a life of heartbreak and madness. One tiny line by Sisko in F&O – “…and those others…” – sets up the revelation at the beginning of this story that all Siskos are the Emissary, across the multi-verse.
This is why I suggested you read the side stories. “The Officers Club” sees the real Kira have a makeover after which she inspects her new body in a mirror, just as Iliana gets a makeover and inspects her new Kira body in this story. It also features a ludicrously over-complicated Obsidian Order plot, just as we get in this story. “Saturn’s Children” sees MU-Kira start the story being raped by MU-Martok, just as another Kira-but-not-Kira starts her new life being raped by Dukat in this story. “Malefictorum”, although originally an SCE story, when transposed to the DS9 characters sees Taran’atar attacking that Vorta, foretelling him doing the same to Kira in “Warpath” and here. “Lost Time” reminds us of the multi-verse concept, which becomes central to Iliana’s plan. Those stories really do make up a part of this season’s arc.
The author Olivia Woods has no other credits whatsoever. Neither did the author originally announced to write this book – Leanne Morrow, or the author of “Fragments and Omens”, J Noah Kym. This has led to speculation that they are all pseudonyms (after all, it has been revealed the author credited with writing the DS9 MU story “Saturn’s Children”, Sarah Shaw, was actually just a pseudonym of prolific trek writer David Mack), and if so, there’s reason to think they are all the same person. I theorise again that they are all Marco Palmieri, the editor and creator of the DS9-R line, who might have wanted to take a firmer hand with the story but couldn’t do so openly because to be seen to be employing himself would look like a conflict of interest.
@2/DS9Continuing: I’m not sure how I feel about characterizing stories in different novel lines as merely “side stories” to the DS9 relaunch. It might’ve kicked off the Novelverse, but it’s not the center that everything else revolves around. It’s a vast interconnected universe that expands on the setting as a whole rather than just one particular TV show, and that’s what’s so amazing about it. I mean, the best series in the Novelverse – SCE, Vanguard, DTI, Rise of the Federation, Titan – aren’t part of a show line at all.
As for Fearful Symmetry, I pretty much agree with the review, yeah, though I was softer on Side Two. I liked having Iliana’s backstory fleshed out if only to give us more of a perception what the average person on Cardassia understood about the Bajoran occupation, but the sexual assault and torture was so unnecessary and gratuitous. Ugh.
(The idea of retconning Dukat’s knowledge of Kira in general pre-series doesn’t really bug me, though; I mean, the show already retconned that itself in having her mom be taken as Dukat’s personal “comfort woman”, how would he not have some awareness of Nerys through that?)
@2: On TrekBBS just this week, there was a thread about who J Noah Kym was. That turned out to be a pseudonym for Jeffrey Lang and Heather Jarman’s collaboration.
@@@@@ 3: Oh that wasn’t my intention at all, I didn’t mean to sound like I was dismissing everything else as just an adjunct to the DS9-R, sorry. If anything I was trying to praise the unity of the entire TrekLit approach, where even stories that aren’t part of the major lines are still relevant and important and part of that same coherent fictional universe.
@@@@@ 4: Ah okay, I didn’t know that, thanks. Haven’t been on TrekBBS in a while so I hadn’t seen that. So again similar to the Sarah Shaw / David Mack case, as since Heather was already contributing the Andor story to the WoDS9 collection, it would seem unfair for her to have a second story, hence pseudonym. Just leaves us with the Leanne Morrow / Olivia Woods mystery…
I think I may have come at this one from a different perspective, since I’d missed out on Warpath, so much of the information in it was new to me. Hence, it wasn’t a case of seeing the plot move along by inches but of catching up. (It’s a shame I missed the long overdue comeuppance of Intendant Kira, after the show treating her like some sort of Villain Sue who inexplicably survives everything, but I’d already given her a death of my own so I’d had that catharsis.) It’s also another novel that looks at a TV episode, decides that it doesn’t make a lot of sense and reinterprets it, although I do share a certain amount of discomfort with the idea of Iliana, looking like Kira and thinking that she’s her, being raped by Dukat. I seem to recall that Kira planted the bomb that killed Ataan, and Iliana personally executed a Bajoran terrorist who was a friend of Kira: Neither of them were really interested in who their victim was, yet Iliana ended up with both sets of memories and had two recollections of killing someone that she knew intimately in her other life.
I’m not sure if it’s this novel or the next which addresses the issue of how the resistance have been able to occupy Terok Nor for so long, but I think it’s the next, so I’ll wait until then to bring that up.
@5/DS9Continuing: Ooh okay, my misunderstanding there, then. Totally agree on that front, yeah!
Had this book come out in 2007 like it was originally intended to, I would agree with the reviewer’s statement that it seems like a non-essential title. However, because it was released in 2008, it became (in my own opinion), the cherry on the hasperat that was the Terok Nor trilogy that also came out that same year and I don’t think it’s coincidental that FS came out at the END of the trilogy. On its own, FS is the filler between Warpath & The Soul Key. Read in context with TN, it makes a whole lot more sense. Dukat’s character fits the bill. On screen, he was a womanizing SOB but you only got glimpses of how disgusting he was. Reading TN, you get an indepth exposé to that dark character and by the time you get to Night of the Wolves and Dawn of the Eagles, you witness Dukat’s obsession with Kira to the point that suddenly, Illiana’s story becomes more believable. Dukat sparing Kira at Elemspur was out of a twisted love. He couldn’t bear to hurt Meru so he spared her daughter, but got the next best thing in Ghemor. It’s disturbing AF but it’s true to Dukat’s character. And if you have read Dawn of the Eagles, you’ll notice a gap where this story of Elemspur is not told and you were left wondering why that is. Well, it’s because Side Two of FS is meant to fit into the Terok Nor narrative as well as being the jumping point to The Soul Key, Sacraments of Fire and Ascendance.
@@@@@ 8 : Yes absolutely. The flashback scenes to the Occupation in Fearful Symmetry do dovetail perfectly with the Terok Nor trilogy, clearly written with each other in mind. As for Dukat, the way I had it described to me once was that what he did to Iliana was the pressure valve that allowed him to present the charming and urbane front to the rest of the world. That the two aspects are not contradictory, but all part of the same thing.
His simultaneous needs to both seduce Nerys as a symbol of conquering Bajor, and to protect her thanks to his fucked-up image of himself as her father figure, is what led to him kidnapping Iliana. That way he could work off his darker Nerys-shaped urges on Iliana while keeping the real Nerys safe, thanks to the sentimental promise he made to Meru. The fact that it meant repeatedly raping a loyal Cardassian citizen whose father was a colleague and superior of his, to the point where it drove her insane, while simultaneously ruining an important Obsidian Order intelligence operation, was neither here nor there.
But then, what Corbin Entek did to her was hardly nice either. He leaked info to the Bajoran resistance that would result in the death of Iliana’s boyfriend (with the negligible collateral damage of a house full of loyal Cardassian soldiers) purely so that her grief would drive her to join the Order, so that he could then have her replace the very same person who he had allowed to kill her boyfriend. It was basically a pissing match between Entek and Dukat as to who got to do the most horrible thing to her.
@1. whimziequiltz: Thanks for reading along! I can understand dropping out of this series at this point, and, under different circumstances, I might have done the same.
As far as when to wade back in, upcoming reviews will let you know :-)
@2. DS9Continuing: I have now read The Soul Key, so I can see where you’re coming from. Having experienced each book separately did no favors to either. My review will elaborate.
Thinking of the Alternate Universe development as metaphorically within the Worlds of DS9 framework is neat way of adding continuity to what feels a little disjointed to me.
I’m following the book list provided in my Avatar Book One intro, so no side-stories for me. But thanks for filling in some of those details!
@8. Jeremy Woolward: That’s helpful to know, and makes sense–thanks!
Once again, I really enjoyed reading your review.
I totally understand why you reviewed the second part reluctantly in terms of the reading experience, but I seemed to have developed a much more positive opinion of this book and perhaps it’s because of how I did it? Not sure. First of all, I watched “Second Skin” and “Ties of Blood and Water” while I was reading Warpath so they were very fresh in my mind. I also watched “Shakaar” to refresh my memory and I would recommend to anyone reading these that they re-watch those three episodes.
Secondly, I read Part 1 and 2 simultaneously, always keeping part 2 about 15 to 20 pages ahead, thus I neve rgot the “long backstory in Part 2” feeling. In fact, I found Ghemor’s backstory fascinating and found myself immersed on the character developments of her parents, herself, and Ataan (through the letter). Olivia Woods’s prose was fantastic in those. With my pattern of reading I finished Part 2 before part 1 (about 10 pages before) and everything seemed to click in place for my reading experience. I don’t believe I would have had the same experience had I read from the beginning cover to the end. It is a dense book and requires concentration to all the details, maybe that is a downfall for the reader who just wants to read a book in relaxed state, and I agree with you on the “18 hours earlier” (Sisko-Vaughn dialogue) being unnecessary. Otherwise, I found this book to be one of the best in the DS9-relaunch series even though it’s the middle part of a sequential trio of books.