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Space battles never took this long. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
The idea of a small team roving around gives the story writers a lot of flexibility to introduce new situations and there are a few interesting characters to develop. They are enough non humans on the bridge to add extra interest. Thankfully we are not always plunged in yawn-making repetitive fighting with hostile aliens so there is an opportunity to develop the curiosity factor about the unknown and fantastic, not just wargaming. These stories are fresher and more like the very best fanzine/New Worlds in longer development. I am looking forward to more.
However, what I found was the stories still have the same level of maturity as other Trek lit, but with a lot more pace, without sacrificing character development.
Also, with this series not being tied to any particular TV series, there isn't reset button at the end of the story, characters can and do die, and will have a lasting effect through the rest of the books.
The one downside to this book was the opening story - I'm not fond of Dean Wesley Smith's writing (particularly his seeming obsession with the word "hunch"), and the story itself - what was happening, and why - didn't really make much sense overall. Apart from this it set down some pretty good foundations for what promises to be a great series.
But I'll tell you what, the adventures they find themselves in make for highly entertaining reading. And the beautiful thing about it is, there really could be no *end* to the adventures. Certainly, there's going to be an S.C.E., and even more certainly, there's always going to be a situation or two where they will be sorely needed.
In this, the first of the eBooks in print, we get four very different stories from five different authors, including three of my all-time favorites: Christie Golden, Keith R.A. DeCandido, and Dean Wesley Smith. We are introduced to the flagship of the S.C.E., the *da Vinci,* and its intrepid crew, which includes, in a wonderful nod to continuity, Sonya Gomez, the painfully-green ensign from The Next Generation, who unceremoniously spilled hot chocolate all over Captain Picard in the teaser of the episode, "Q Who."
In the ensuing decade or so, Ensign Gomez did, of course, mature into Commander Gomez, first officer aboard the *da Vinci.* As such, she does her job very, very well. This, however, makes little difference to those around her, who still tease her at every opportunity about what has come to be known as "the incident." The fact that this is carried over at all is one of the reasons the S.C.E. is so believable. You already feel as though you *know* these people - that the S.C.E. has simply always been there.
I'll leave it to other reviewers to tell you about the rest of the crew or describe the specific adventures if they so desire. As for me, I'll just say I'm LOVING these stories. I've already bought Book 2 and look forward to future editions.
This book was composed of four mid-length stories (longer than "short stories", but not novel-length) each written by a different author, which together follow a continuous time-line and thus more or less make up one book's worth of story. The writing is surprisingly even, given the different authors; the handoffs from each author to the next are seamless, and the writing itself is quite good. The characters are well-developed, a good mix of minor characters from various episodes on TV and new characters (although the first book begins with the Enterprise-E and crew for an introduction, and Geordi LaForge continues through the first three stories.) The plots, while not the MOST original I've ever seen, are good, workmanlike concepts, and the basic SCE concept is in many ways a marvellous return to early science fiction concepts, where there may be action and combat, but the ADVENTURE is in the discovery and the science.
So why is the rating only four stars, given how much good I have to say about the book? (And in fact, I thought harder about whether to knock it down to three than I did about granting it five.) Because the "ending" ISN'T one; they cut the last story off in mid-action in order to make a "tune in next week" cliffhanger to attempt to manipulate the reader into continuing to buy the following books of the series. I will do so, because I enjoyed the book as a whole, NOT because they left me hanging. I consider that a sufficiently cheesy scam to be worth the loss of AT LEAST one star, and demonstrates that they had no confidence in the quality of the series themselves (or they wouldn't have needed to use such a cheap scam.)
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