Foundations
Star Trek SCE
By Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Star Trek’s elite Starfleet Corps of Engineers is the latest incarnation of this classic series. You won’t catch them on TV, but you can read about their adventures in a series of forty ebooks, or in print in (to date) five compilations. This book contains three stories, all fitting neatly together and showing how the Corps was founded, back in the days of the original series when Captain Kirk captained the Enterprise. As the crew of the Da Vinci sort out the dilemma faced by an out-of-control alien ship, the Corps’ ultimate chief Montgomery Scott reminisces about how the SCE was founded, and the very similar problem he had to tackle among other tales.

There isn’t a great deal to learn about the Da Vinci characters, but instead Scotty gets to be center stage for once and we meet a whole new ship full of people. As usual, there is a good combination of technical jargon and classic Star Trek plot complete with humor, interesting aliens and the obligatory moral dilemmas. Parts of the earlier adventures hark back to a couple of original series TV episodes which is a nice touch, and we get to see these familiar tales from a new angle and find out what might have happened next. The secret of the SCE books is that they fit seamlessly into the existing Star Trek mythos and I look forward in the ensuing books to finding out more about the Da Vinci’s large crew.