In today’s episode, when Jake and Nog find a self-replicating action figure in the basement, their many little Moops soon turn into one big Oops. Meanwhile, upstairs, a strange gold dust is draining power and clogging the A/C faster than O’Brien can change the filters. Is there actually a such thing as an inherently funny word? What’s undog? And who can honestly say they’re not interested in Garak’s childhood? All this and more in Cardassian Imps, the book that will never win a Dove Award.

Cardassian Imps
Author: Mel Gilden
Pages: 114
Published: March 1997
Timeline: Season 2
Prerequisites: None

When Garak notices that Jake and Nog are bored, he recommends they explore the mysterious Level 45, which turns out to be more or less a second, unused promenade. Most of it bores and/or grosses out the boys, but eventually they find a doll that looks like what one might imagine a weird first draft of Cardassians looking like: the usual features, sure, but also wings, antennae, and a tail. Also, it says “Moop!” when Jake picks it up. But it’s more than just a toy that says goofy nonsense: it’s also a replicator—and a pretty big resource hog, at that, because when they moop something into existence, the lights dim and the air system slows down. It can make daggers, food, tiny Galor-class warships that dogfight each other, and even, they soon discover, lifesize copies of itself. Despite some initial concern over the power drain, Jake and Nog make enough Moops to field two baseball teams. The Moops, however, have their own ideas about playtime, and fly off to wreak station-wide havoc.

Meanwhile, the grown-ups have an entirely different problem on their hands. Ordinarily, there’s nothing harmful about Keithorpheum, the fine golden dust being tracked in by the Trulgovians, the aliens who mine it. But it’s accumulating more quickly than any person or machine can clean it up, which is odd, because by all accounts, the stuff is chemically inert. Sisko and Odo pay a visit to the Trulgovian ship to try to get them to confine it to their space, but the lights and air seem to work just fine for them. What gives?

That there’s some sort of connection between the Moops and the dust buildup is obvious from the reader’s standpoint, but the time to figure it out is running out. Since he sent them down to 45 in the first place, Jake and Nog surmise that Garak might have some answers, but he doesn’t know much more than they do (or, at least, claims not to), except that what they’re calling Moops are actually Nimijks, a Cardassian mythical being symbolizing abundance. Symbolic abundances are fine, but it’s a literal one causing all the problems. Can they figure out how to turn off the original copy of the nightmare doll before everyone chokes on glitter?

Cardassian Imps isn’t exactly what I would call a “good” book. The Cardassian toy tech is basically indistinguishable from magic in an uncomplimentary way, and Gilden has a severe tin ear for made-up words and names. Really though, it isn’t any dumber than something like, say, “If Wishes Were Horses”. I really don’t blame you if the idea of flying Cardassians that say “moop” is a tough sell for you. But even though it might not look like much, there actually ended up being quite a few qualities about this book I personally found rather fascinating, both in its own context and within the greater arc of Deep Space Nine.

By narrative necessity, the DS9 young-reader books are restricted to a rather narrow two-season window. I’m sure I’ve already felt the strain of the main series pulling away from these temporally locked kiddie vehicles, and probably even talked about it some. But going back to this so soon after finishing The Tempest, so fully in the thick of Dominion encroachment and Klingon recidivism and a shiny new coat of Worf, I felt that rift more acutely than ever. It’s a little less than a year before the YA line gets shuttered altogether, but I can only see the chasm growing wider between now and 1998. If you tried to come up with a more potent shorthand for how out of step these books are with the series at large, you probably couldn’t do much better than self-replicating action figures. None of this is a knock against Gilden, though; it’s entirely out of his control. It’s just a phenomenon I find anthropologically fascinating.1Yes, I am hyper-aware of my own use of words like “interesting” and “fascinating” after all that crap I said about them in The Garden. That’s why I’m being (perhaps overly) careful to qualify them as personal feelings. YM, of course, MV.

As for the book itself, I liked that it wasn’t afraid to hang out with the adults now and then. Everyone likes to see themselves in the media they consume, of course, but I don’t believe you necessarily have to give kids a character their age to latch onto, especially in a series like Star Trek. It’s something I consider fundamentally flawed about these books, I think. The child predisposed to liking Star Trek, and Deep Space Nine in particular, already (in my experience, at least) comports themselves like a little adult, and gravitates to such. So it’s nice to see scenes where, say, Sisko and Odo tackle a problem peppered in among the typical teenage boy shenanigans.

Gilden also writes a pretty solid Garak, really nailing the thick air of ambiguity that permeates every single thing he says. It’s fun to see him run his “plain, simple tailor” act on a couple of characters he doesn’t normally interact with. The uncertainty around what’s the truth and what’s a lie crackles with as much electricity as any of his TV appearances. Did he know all along what was on Level 45 when he suggested Jake and Nog go down there? Is he ever being totally forthcoming with them, even when he tells them about the Nimijks? It can be easy to underestimate the YA books at times, and I have to admit, I wouldn’t have thought the DS9 line would have this good a Garak in one of them.

There are times when I end up looking more favorably on a book while reviewing it than I thought I would in the moment where I finished it, and this is one of those occasions. Cardassian Imps is a little fusty and dorky, but in a winsome sort of way, kind of like a nerdy dad that you and your friends all roll your eyes at but secretly respect. I can’t say it blew my mind, but I did end up appreciating it a fair bit more than I expected I would, given its superficial corniness.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP choice for Cardassian Imps is Garak. Besides all the fun he provides, he’s the only one who knows how to turn off the toy at the source. That also solves the dust problem simultaneously; I won’t spoil how they’re connected, though I thought it was a tad flimsy. It is pretty funny, though, how he essentially ends up solving a problem he arguably created.
• Our LVP today is Dr. Bashir. Neither rapidly duplicating dolls nor dust-cloaked environmental systems call for any form of medical expertise, unfortunately.

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: Though the contrast betweeen the blue and orange is quite striking (they are complementary colors, after all), I have to say I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with Jake and Nog here. Jake looks like he’s trying to blend in with a zombie horde, while Nog is wearing an expression that says he just saw someone’s intestines spill out of their midsection.
• Based on how many times the phrase “squarmash and queeble sticks” appears in Chapter 2 (seven in that specific formulation, nine if you count variants), Gilden must believe it’s an inherently funny one. Spoiler: he is mistaken.
• To pay for their squarmash and queeble sticks, Nog gets Quark to extend them a line of credit based on his newest profit venture: another shipment of self-sealing stem bolts. Which is kind of a weird thing to lie about, considering, you know, how that worked out so well the first time. It doesn’t last long, either: Quark makes payment due almost immediately, in the form of sweeping up the Keithorpheum.
• It legitimately shocked to me to discover there is actual cursing in this book! On page 43, Sisko asks, “Then what the hell is going on?” And it isn’t a one-time occurrence either. O’Brien says “That’s the hell of it” on page 79, and then Sisko violates the verbal morality statute again on page 111, when he chillingly threatens Garak in that wonderful Sisko way (“Say that next time you make a suggestion to my son, you’ll make damned sure it doesn’t endanger the station”). Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think kids can (and ought to be able to) handle a few PG cusses, and I think that final one especially works when you can hear Sisko saying it in that baritone cadence in your head. But this is just the absolute last place I was expecting to see something like that.
• “Jake was relieved when he found what he was looking for. He began to undog the hatch cover.” At first I thought this was a typo and that Gilden meant to write undo. But then it appeared again a few pages later and I thought, well maybe it is something after all. Turns out it is in fact a real word, simply attaching the un- prefix to a specific definition of dog (sense 3, definition 2). Still, it does not pass my ultimate test, which is the ability to use it in Scrabble. (p. 64)
• Jake, p. 75: “I don’t care about Garak’s childhood.” Uh, I think that makes you just about the only one, friendo. I need that book in my lap yesterday, please.
• At one point, Garak hesitates at the prospect of going down a narrow maintenance duct. I know the publication of this book predates the revelation that he has claustrophobia, but I’m still choosing to headcanon that in here. (p. 84)
• Been a while since we highlighted an order form in the back of a book, but this is a pretty cool one we haven’t seen yet. Apparently, there was a line of Are You Afraid of the Dark? books for kids, and there are a lot of familiar names on this list. In fact, there are only two books here not written by someone who’s also done a Deep Space Nine YA book (#2 and #4). I never really watched the show, sadly. For one thing, horror, even in its tamer forms, isn’t really my jam, and for another, its heyday came during a time when I didn’t have cable in my own home and not much access to it otherwise either.
  

Final Assessment

Average. I was prepared to bag on this one a little and say that I appreciated its ideas more than its execution, but somewhere between finishing reading it and writing the review, something about it won me over just a little bit. It’s not great by any means, and it does read like it’s written by someone with a very corny sensibility, but somehow a sort of dorky charm breaks through. A beefier role for the adults and the excellent way Gilden writes Garak, who features heavily in the book, help a lot as well. This one sounded like it was going to be insufferable from the synopsis, but sometimes you get pleasantly surprised.

Also, this is the final Star Trek book we’ll see by Mel Gilden. Live long and prosper, Mel!

NEXT TIME: Voyager hits up yet another garden planet in Chrysalis