| Author: Anthology | Series: Star Trek Corps of Engineers |
| Rating: 7 (Jeremy's Scale) | Reviewer: Jeremy |
| Genre: SciFi | Publisher:Simon & Schuster |
| Pages: 627 | Orig Pub Date: July 3, 2007 |
| Binding: Paperback |
Captain David Gold and the crew of the U.S.S. da Vinci are tasked to tackle the most daunting engineering tasks that Starfleet faces. They are the Corps of Engineers and they boldly go to take on the projects that are too tough for anyone else in Starfleet.
“Grand Designs” is a collection of 7 novellas, originally published as eBooks, set in the Star Trek Corps of Engineers series. This is the 9th collection of this series, spun off of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When there is a daunting engineering problem, rather than send in a standard Starfleet vessel and crew, Starfleet can send the U.S.S. da Vinci and its Corps of Engineers. Under the command of Captain Montgomery Scott at Starfleet Command, no engineering problem is too great for Captain Gold and his crew.
The collection brought us stories by Allyn Gibson, Kevin Killiany, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, David Mack, Dave Galanter, and Paul Kupperberg. Almost all of them have written in the Corp of Engineers series before, and that showed as they seemed to have a good handle on the characters. As hinted by the title Grand Designs, all of the projects facing the crew in this book were large, with big implications. I also thought all the stories were original, deviating from the usual Starfleet objectives of diplomacy, conflict resolution, or armed conflict. I found this crew to be very engaging and likeable. As I compared it to a couple other crews from extensions of the Star Trek Universe I found that my interest in this crew of characters was rivaled, in my opinion, only by Peter David’s New Frontiers crew.
I do feel that one cannot just step into this book and read from the beginning. There are events that are referenced repeatedly in the novellas which I would presume occurred in a recent book. The crew is still reeling from the loss of 23 crew members in some tragedy on a recent mission, and were still becoming comfortable with a few of the characters in this version of the crew, who were new replacements for fallen comrades. While this was referenced plenty of times in the stories, actually reading these events would probably make those elements more relevant and powerful.
This brings me to one thing that annoyed me about the book. Certain impressions and descriptions of characters, how they were disliked by other crew members or were not yet comfortable because they were filling the post of a fallen crewmember who was greatly beloved, were continually outlined almost verbatim in most of the seven stories. That may be a function of the editing rather than the writing. I can see how the information is relevant in understanding characters and how they relate to one another. But when each story is part of a collection there is no need to be repetitive with that information. When I got to those sections it just felt like an annoying case of déjà vu.
I have to also mention that this book is 627 pages of novellas about an entire crew of engineers. There will be a lot of classic Star Trek technobabble in the stories. If you’re a person who gets lost in all that discussion this book, and probably the entire series I’d guess, may not be for you. I have never been put off by the technobabble but even I found my head spinning by many discussions of probability, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Schrodinger’s Cat in the last story, which was otherwise one of my two favorites in the book.
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