Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Avatar Books in Order

S.D. Perry's Avatar is a two-part Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story that continues the station's adventures after the television series. The Dominion War has ended, but peace has not removed the station's strategic importance or the tensions surrounding it. Colonel Kira and the remaining crew must adapt to changed responsibilities while new officers join a place still recovering from conflict. The books use that transition as the beginning of another dangerous crisis.

Avatar, Book One opens with the fragile postwar situation threatened by a surprise attack on Deep Space Nine. The station's location near the wormhole makes it a meeting point for military, scientific and political interests, so damage there can have consequences far beyond the people aboard. Kira must respond while working with a changed crew. Familiar characters cannot simply resume the lives they had before the war, and the newcomers bring their own histories and loyalties into an already difficult command situation.

A prophecy adds a religious dimension to the danger. It concerns the birth of Benjamin Sisko's child and a threatened catastrophe, giving Kira's faith an immediate connection to her responsibilities. The question is not only how to defend the station, but how to understand a warning that may shape the decisions people make around it. The story places Bajoran spiritual concerns beside Starfleet's political and military priorities, continuing the television series' interest in duties that do not always point in the same direction.

Kira has to weigh what she believes against what others expect her to do.

Jean-Luc Picard and the Enterprise crew become involved through a discovery with implications for an entire civilization. Their part in the story connects another familiar Star Trek crew to the station's crisis without making the conflict purely an exercise in military response. In Avatar, Book Two, the possibility of a Federation counterstrike raises the danger of renewed war. The crews must identify a treacherous plot while the prophecy and a murder create further uncertainty. Preventing another disaster requires understanding the threat rather than simply meeting an attack with greater force.

The tone is science fiction adventure with political intrigue, divided loyalties and questions of faith. Avatar also introduces people and relationships that matter to the station's continuing literary story. Read Avatar, Book One immediately before Avatar, Book Two: the second volume continues the same plot and is not a separate case. Familiarity with the television finale helps establish the characters' circumstances, while the novels show a community trying to move into a new era without allowing the end of one war to become the beginning of another.