In honor of @cmdrtpol and their journey through Deep Space Nine I present a passage from “None of This Ever Happened” by Gabriela Santiago, an excellent short horror story in an excellent issue of Nightmare Magazine.
The best episode of Deep Space Nine is “Far Beyond the Stars,” in which Captain Sisko is suddenly and without explanation catapulted into the life of Benny Russell, a black science fiction writer in the 1950s. The great tragedy of Deep Space Nine is that you cannot immediately show this episode to any potential acolytes of the show, because in order to understand why it is the best episode you must have seen every episode leading up to it, so that you will love every character and understand every trope associated with them and weep in the final scene when Benny Russell insists that he has made a world, that knowledge alone can make a world, that the space station with a black commander really exists, it’s real, it’s real, it’s real!
