Some Assembly Required
No Surrender
Star Trek SCE, No. 3 & 4
By Various Authors 

    Star Trek is a past master at reinventing itself, and now it has a new incarnation in the shape of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. The SCE have the task of sorting out all manner of things in the aftermath of the Dominion War, and ties DS9 together neatly with TNG as well as adding a cast of new characters to the Star Trek world. The first two books were Have Tech, Will Travel and Miracle Workers (also reviewed on this site) and now here are two more action-packed volumes detailing more adventures of the crew of the da Vinci. Read as they battle giant monsters from one of the Gateways, sort out a computer which only has a manual written in a language nobody can understand (now why does that sound familiar?) and try to find the cure for a planet-wide plague.

    The characters developed dramatically in the second novel and continue to do so in the next two; it is sensible at this point not to add any new ones and they haven't done so. In particular, there are episodes that allow us to explore the characters of Captain Gold and Dr Lense more thoroughly, and there is a nice mix of technical jargon and classic Star Trek plot complete with moral dilemmas and spiced with humor and human interest. Perhaps there is nothing amazingly new here, as there have been plenty of other stories about baffling alien computers, ancient devices of destruction and deadly diseases before, but these always seem to make good SF plots. Something a little more original for book five might be in order perhaps. I continue to congratulate the manner in which the crew had been slotted seamlessly into the Star Trek mythos and I look forward to reading more stories as they come out in paperback form (previously they existed as ebooks) and watching some of the still shadowy characters develop.