Here There be Monsters by Keith R.A. DeCandido - Star Trek: S.C.E Book 3 - A Short Story Review

 

Here is the strength and weakens of tie-in books - they reward the dedicated reader while making somebody new to the series know they are missing context. 

This story in particular really made me feel that I was missing out on just how it fit into the wider narrative of the Star Trek Literary Universe.

Just look at the Historian's Note inserted before the story!

Here There Be Monsters takes place shortly after the events of the Gateways crossover, specifically after Book 3: Doors Into Chaos, Book 4: Demons of Air and Darkness, Book 5: No Man's Land, Book 6: Cold Wars, and the stories "Horn and Ivory," "In the Queue," "Death After Life," and "The Other Side" in Book 7: What Lay Beyond.

Whew!

Is this pure marketing or a service to the reader?  Being a completist myself, the references in the story to the events above served only to distract me from the events in front of me.  Of course, had I read those books previously, I would have been feeling quite rewarded by all this.

A good writer will not allow previous books to take away from the one he is writing nor to make those details required reading to understand the current adventure.  And that was the case here.

The gateways, which in my mind looked and worked like the time portal from the original Star Trek TV series, was causing havoc on a distant colony.  "Monsters" were coming through and making things unpleasant for the locals.

Thank goodness Star Trek is about "seeking out new life and new civilizations" and not just killing the life forms we don't understand.  The team of the U.S.S da Vinci take the time to understand what is happening before taking any action.

This is why I will always love Star Trek.  It posits that one day we will be better than our bullets.

The Riddled Post by Aaron Rosenberg - Star Trek: S.C.E Book 3 - A Short Story Review

 

Sometimes, after reading a big book like one of the Expanse tomes, I like to settle into something short and familiar.

Nothing fits that bill quite like Star Trek stories.

Best of all, if you like the ideas and the world of Star Trek, the books are a terrific way to get more ST goodness.

This series of books are collections of short stories of a different ship, with a different crew, on a different mission, to fix what is broken.

Great pains are taken to fit these adventures into the timeline established by the television shows and movies PLUS the timeline within the Star Trek Literary Universe.  Whew!

In The Riddled Post the crew of the USS da Vinci are sent to investigate what happened to a far-flung outpost that seems to have been attacked. 

These Starfleet Corps of Engineers stories are problem solving adventures - like MacGyver in space.

I must admit, I thought I had the problem figured out from chapter 3 but I was surprised by the actual source.  

It took the entire team to figure it all out and make the outpost safe again.

I do enjoy stories about smart people being smart.

Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack - Book Report #300

I'm always a bit torn when I read, or listen, to Star Trek books.  On the one hand it's terrific to catch up with those characters but on the other, it can be a bit frustrating, because so much has gone on in the books that I feel like I've missed out on a lot.

And that should be okay.  Why shouldn't dedicated readers be rewarded for sticking with the franchise and supporting it?  The Titan series is not a bad one to drop into as the books are pretty much stand-alone adventures but with a narrative arc that spans over all the books.  The authors are usually pretty good about catching a new reader up with details from previous books.

And there's the rub; I'd love to read them all but there are so many that it's daunting.

In any case, this story picks up a thread from an episode of the TNG television series and that is always satisfying.

A superweapon is discovered and the race is on to make sure the bad guys don't get their hands on it.  There are a lot of bad guys, not-so-bad guys, opportunists and the Federation here.

This is a David Mack story so be ready for lots of action, good humour and a high body count.  My only frustration with the Titan series is that I wish they'd get Admiral Riker off the fucking ship.  He is constantly second-guessing Captain Vale's decisions that I am surprised Star Fleet continues to allow the situation.

Other than that quibble, this was a terrific yarn, jammed full of the stuff that makes Star Trek fun.

David Mack's website:  http://davidmack.pro/

David Mack

Star Trek: Into Darkness by Alan Dean Foster - Book Review #258

This was my first experience with a movie novelization and I must say that Foster did a terrific job of it.  As a matter of fact, he made tolerable, even enjoyable the never-ending fight scene from the movie between Spock and Khan.

Foster had a terrific way with the narrative that touches on the old pulps without crossing into purple prose.  I could feel that I was in the hands of a confident writer.

All in all, this was a terrific way to experience the movie in another form.  I liked it very much.

I found the narration of the book by Alice Eve to be refreshing and I thought her take on the characters was spot-on.  I could listen to her voice all day.


Recommended.

Alan Dean Foster's website - http://www.alandeanfoster.com/version2.0/frameset.htm

Life Among the Post-Industrial Barbarians by John Coffren

Man, I really don’t like time travel stories, and I especially find the Star Trek ones tedious.

I know they are supposed to be fun, with the Department of Temporal Investigations and all, but it just gets to be so loopy that an author can make up whatever crap he or she desires and it just doesn't have to make sense.

Kind of like this one.

The Last Refuge by Roger McCoy

Not being much of a Voyager fan I could still appreciate the story on its own merits.

That said, it was obviously meant to flesh out a previous episode where a plot thread was left dangling. 

I liked the structure, using flashbacks of a crime to expand on the story at hand. 

Part of what makes tie-in fiction so comforting is that the reader already understands the world, how it functions and the main players in it. 

I felt McCoy had a perfect grasp of the characters voices and created a compelling and satisfying expansion of this part of the franchise. 

A lovely way to spend some downtime. 

Roger McCoy - http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Roger_McCoy

The Dreamer and the Dream by Derek Tyler Attico

Wow!

This took one of my favourite episodes of DS9, Far Beyond the Stars, and revisits the life of Benny Russell.   The 1950’s writer has spent the past six years in the Queens Borough Mental Institution. 

He’s been incarcerated there since being fired from his job at  Incredible Tales magazine.   He has fallen into his creations, that of a black captain of a space station, choosing to live in his mind's imagination. 

But now, 1959, he is on the cusp of being released.  However the power of the worlds he created are influencing his reality. 

Like I said - wow!

This was so much fun to read. I tore right through it loving every flashback to 1959.  I was completely taken in by the meta nature of the story and how the author tied the world of DS9 to Benny Russell and further tied his reality to how Star Trek influenced our own society. 

Well done indeed. 

I continue to be impressed by the quality of storytelling in this collection. 

The Manhunt Pool by Nancy Debretsion

I enjoyed this one very much.

It had all my favourite characters from DS9; Odo, Bashir, Quark and Garak.

It certainly kept to the darker version of Star Trek that was the Deep Space 9 series.

There is death, intrigue, politics and humour.

Every time I read a quality short, it makes me want to either binge on some episodes or start reading a novel.

This collection of stories from "unknown" writers impresses me with it's quality.

The Façade of Fate by Michael Turner

I liked this one. It played with time travel and the Prime Directive.

Sisko, Dax and Worf are ambushed by the Jem’Hadar and, just when it looked like our heroes were at an end, they are hurled into the future.

There they find the Federation much changed.

How they react, the relationships they build and what they do about this future depends on their training and their values.

It was an interesting test of the Prime Directive.

The Seen and Unseen by Chris Chaplin

This was an exploration of the Reman society.

The species was introduced in the movie Nemesis.  They were an oppressed slave race of the Romulan empire.

I found the story a bit ponderous.  Although it did a good job of filling out the society in terms of the movie I wanted it to come to some more satisfying conclusion.

But it did what the best of Star Trek does, it reflects our past back to us, to allow us to see our mistakes.

The Sunwalkers by Kelli Fitzpatrick

The Enterprise is dispatched to a world to lend assistance in a medical emergency.

The story centres on Beverly Crusher, her struggle to come to terms with having to say goodby to Wesley and how that separation speaks to her abilities as a mother.

The story felt like a found script for an episode that was never shot. But, I guess, all these stories will feel that way, considering the length of them. 

As in all good Star Trek this story works on more than one level. Sure there is the adventure of the mission, but from it there is character growth.  This made the story satisfying. 

Kelli Fitzpatrick's website:  https://kellifitzpatrick.com/

Kelli Fitzpatrick

A Christmas Qarol by Gary Piserchio & Frank Tagader

This was a fun riff on Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol.

In it, Q decies to throw Picard into a simulation of the classic tale.  But something goes wrong - when he snaps his fingers it's not Jean-Luc who is forced to play the role of Ebenezer Scrooge but Q himself!

Honestly, this was an absolutely charming story. Not only did it capture the spirit of Christmas it also was a story of hope for the Star Trek universe.

Hard to believe these writers are amatures. 

Very well done indeed.

Gary Piserchino's website:  http://garypiserchio.com/wp/

Frank Tagader has no dedicated website but his Goodreads link is:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13994748.Frank_Tagader

Star Trek: Enterprise The First Adventure by Vonda N. McIntyre - Book Report #232

I won’t lie: I found this book tedious. Mostly because I was uninterested in the guests aboard the Enterprise. 

It made perfect sense; a new captain should be assigned an easy, shake-down cruise. Time to get to know the ship and its crew without putting much stress on them. 

So, brand new Captain Kirk takes on a traveling Vaudville show and is instructed to visit all the distant star bases to lift morale by taking the act “on the road.”

The idea of the book was a good one but I did not enjoy the circus performers and the fact that Kirk was instantly attracted to one of them.

There are some added characters; a Vulcan juggler who is emotional, a new alien race is discovered drifting through Federation space and Klingons come to mix it all together. 

Sounds like it should work, right?  Except it doesn’t.  It was exceedingly slow, far too introspective and just boring to read.  I’m not the kind of reader that needs a fistfight in every chapter but this book takes its time to get going. 

Having been published in 1986 it’s conceivable the author was under strict control not to do anything alarming to the franchise. So maybe I’m not being fair. 

But it all comes down to whether I enjoyed the story or not. 

I didn’t. 

To bad too. I was really hoping for something a bit more fun. 

Okay, that was quite a bit of bashing the book. It wasn’t all bad: there were some parts of the book that I did like. 

Since this is an origins story it was a lot of fun to read how Sulu came aboard, the bad feelings the senior crew held comparing Kirk to the departed Captain Pike, how Scotty treated the new captain and how Chekov was always on board the ship. 

That last point filled in the gaping plot hole from The Wrath of Kahn.  How Kahn recognizes Chekov even though he wasn’t on the TV show until the season after his appearance. 

So it did work on some levels.  It just didn’t capture my imagination. 

Vonda N. McIntyre's website - http://www.vondanmcintyre.com/

The 50-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, Book Two by Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross - Book Review #231

This was a giant addition to the previous book.

Once again it is just packed with insights some readily known others scathing.  But it still manages to make me wonder how the shows ever made it to the screen.  There was so much interference by the creators, studios, networks that all managed to dumb down the product.

What rally made me unhappy was how the powers that be consistently underestimated the audience.

As I've mentioned before, I love the DVD extras that are part of most movies you can buy.  This filled that desire so very well.

I've enjoyed these volumes as audiobooks and I must say that the productions was very well thought out.  It was not just read by one person.  Since the books is nothing more interviews thoughtfully laid out to make a cohesive narrative, the producers of the audiobook hired a cast of narrators which made following along that much easier.  It would have been very easy to lose track of who was doing the talking had it been read by only one person.

I had no idea how scripts were written for the show, when you have that many people writing and making changes along the way to production, the original idea of an episod was often completely lost in the process.  How I would love to read the originally intended stories in book form, just to get an idea of what could have been.

The only example of that is Harlan Ellison's City on the Edge of Forever, which has been made into a comic book and released as a novela under his own name.  What was intended and what was delivered is actually quite disappointing in comparison.

I loved this series of books.  If you like knowing what happened on the set an in the writers room, then you'll love these books.

Highly recommended.

The 50 Year Mission - Book One by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman - Book Report #228

Simply terrific stuff.

I am a person who LOVES DVD extras; this is over 400 pages (25 hours of listening) of unedited, unauthorized and unapologetic behind-the-scenes stories of the first 25 years of Star Trek creativity. 

The stories contained are fearless in exposing the warts, egos and political maneuvers that created this thing. 

My god, I would have thrown my hands up and gone on to something else if I had to work in such an environment. 

It is shocking that anything made it to television, never mind the movies.

All-in-all it was terrific fun.

Highly recommended - if you're a fan.

Star Trek: Envoy, a Captain Sulu Adventure by L. A. Graf - Book Report #226

At first I was disappointing by the short, one hour, run time of the audio book.

But it was well produced and narrated by none other than George Takei.  So I was in.

The story is set in the time period of Captain Sulu's command of the USS Excelsior.

Starfleet Command orders Sulu to board a shuttle and travel to a nearby starbase to assist in the final stages of a peace treaty between the Krikiki and the Den-Kai races who have been at war for decades.

When he finds out what his part in the peace process entails, Sulu finds himself in a battle between his personal morals and the greater good. 

This is the kind of subject matter that makes Star Trek so very special.

I enjoyed the story very much and found the one hour duration similar to watching an episode of the TV series.

Dilithium is a Girl’s Best Friend by Neil Bryant - Short Story Review

Oh!  What fun.

Harry Mudd, ladies and gentlemen, gets his hands on the Genesis Device.

This idea will perk up life-long fans of Star Trek.

The thing I like best about the written universe of Star Trek is the ability to play around with characters and ideas.

Not only did the author pick a popular character but he made the focus of the story be a less known one, that of Eve McHuron, one of "Mudd's Women" from the original TV series.

The plot was terrific, Bryant took the MacGuffin from the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn and put it in the hands of Eve.  This is precisely when Mudd shows up to make a deal for the device.

The story was fast-paced and there was some welcomed humour throughout.  It's the humour that makes Star Trek work because it brings the characters to life.  The author had a nice light touch with it and never made it come across as campy.

In any case, I liked the story and it was a terrific opening to the whole collection.

Star Trek: Legacies: Purgatory's Key by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore - Book Report #184

This was a fine ending to the story.

But I will be honest here, when it comes to science fiction I like mine hard.  Hard boiled is even better.  (But that is a very thin slice of the SF pie.)

Because I like my fantastic stories to be as plausible as possible I am not a big fan of; aliens with convenient "super powers", time travel, mystic powers (like the force) and alternative dimensions.

Honestly, and I am sorry if you don't agree, but these are just conveniences that allow a writer to escape from well, reality.  If you want a dose of true hard science fiction try reading The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.  It's in the public domain and can be easily searched.  Here is a link to a PDF copy of the story - http://photos.state.gov/libraries/hochiminh/646441/vantt/The%20Cold%20Equations.pdf

Okay, the story.  Our heroes have shaken off the Romulans now they have to convince the Klingons that the work they want to do on the planet will not harm the Empire nor give the Federation an unfair advantage going forward.

Kirk and Spock have to use the Transfer Key to locate and rescue their friends from the other dimension.  Loads of time is spent showing just how strange the other dimension is, which I found exceedingly boring, but the conflict between the Klingons was very entertaining.

In the end it was the talents of Ward and Dilmore that kept me engaged.  Their sense of humour lifted the story many times when I was just about to roll my eyes.

Yes, I liked the series.  The stories were at their best when we were in our own universe  I found the characters true to their TV roots.  Interestingly I thought the narrator channelled Karl Urban's performance of Bones rather than DeForest Kelley.  But it worked for me.

I must mention the talents of Robert Petkoff who narrated all three books.  He had perfect characterisation throughout.  He convincingly channelled the original actors of the series which was a talent that needs to be recognised.  I was transported into the story by his abilities.  Excellent work.

Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore

Star Trek: Legacies: Best Defense by David Mack - Book Report #183

Book 2 of 3.

We continue with the adventure, with Captain Una trapped in the other dimension attempting to rescue her friends.

Meanwhile, the Romulans have the key and are making a menace of themselves with it by disrupting peace talks between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.

With David Mack writing the story you know there well be mayhem.  There is lots of action to occupy the story culminating in a spectacular battle between the Enterprise and a Romulan Bird of Prey.

The story mostly is dedicated to the recovery of the key and solving the mystery of its power.  There was some interesting tension on the Romulan vessel that I enjoyed a lot.

The book teed up the next and final instalment in the series nicely and I started listening to it right away.

David Mack

Star Trek: Legacies: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox - Book Report #182

Book One of Three in the Legacies series.


I liked this one, it really felt like characters jumped out fully realized.

The dialogue was perfect although there were times that I felt that Spock spoke a bit too much.  When that happened it usually was in the service of some humor.  So I found my self forgiving him.

One of the things I love about these books is how little details from the TV show or movies are used and expanded to create interest.

The MacGuffin in the story is a special key that activates an alien machine which has the ability to send a person into another dimension.

The part of the story that stretches plausibility is that this device has been hidden on the Enterprise for a very long time.  Two captains ago actually.

The story then travels back in time, to the era of Robert April, the first captain, and the adventure that brought the key to be hidden in the captain's quarters.  And, this is the part I liked, it was hidden behind a piece of art that was in the television show.

The key is behind this panel

What I found implausible was that after finding the key Robert April kept a promise not to reveal it's existence to his superiors.  Then told the next captain, Christopher Pike, about the key and the reasons not to divulge it's existence to Starfleet Command.  Then Pike did the same with Kirk. And none of them turned the key over!

Well, to be fair, they never were put in a situation where the key was a factor.  Until now...

But that is my only complaint.

I found the story a bunch of fun and I can't wait to listen to the next installment in the trilogy.

http://www.gregcox-author.com/

Greg Cox