Have Tech Will Travel (Star Trek: S.C.E. Omnibus 1; #1-4) by John J. Ordover, Christie Golden, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Dean Wesley Smith, Dayton Ward Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genres: media tie-in, science fiction, space opera, Star Trek
Pages: 418
Published by Pocket Books/Star Trek on January 1, 2002
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads
Need a gigantic, marauding starship explored? Is your global computer system starting to break down? Call in the crack team from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Overseen by Captain Montgomery Scott from his office at Starfleet Headquarters, the S.C.E. can build, rebuild, program, reprogram, assemble, reassemble, or just figure out everything from alien replicators to doomsday machines. Just don't expect them to perform miracles-unless they absolutely have to.
Captain Picard and the U.S.S. Enterprise have defeated a gigantic marauding starship from parts unknown. Now that the immediate threat has been neutralized, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers has been called in to probe the vanquished hulk in search of both new technology and the secret of its mysterious origin. Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge temporarily transfers from the Enterprise to assist Captain David Gold and the crew of the S.C.E. ship, the U.S.S. da Vinci on this fascinating mission. La Forge works with Gold, Gold's first officer Sonya Gomez, and a top-of-the-line group of technical specialists to unravel the high-tech mysteries of the supposedly dead alien vessel, only to discover that the real danger has just begun!
My Review:
What happens when the flagship of Starfleet is not available, has been called away, or has solved a problem, but created a huge mess along the way? Easy: you call in the division of Starfleet that focuses on engineering problems: the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Have Tech, Will Travel starts a long series of novellas that follow one Corps of Engineers ships, the USS da Vinci.
Escape Rating B:
The 1990s through the early 2000s were arguably a golden era for Star Trek books, with over 550 novellas and novels published between 1990 and 2010. Particularly during the period when editors John Ordover and Marco Palmieri were in overall charge of the Star Trek book series at Pocket Books, the works sometimes transcended the usual limitations of media tie-ins.
One of the subseries that came out during this period was the Star Trek: S.C.E. (later Star Trek: Corps of Engineers) series of ebook original novellas. The first novella was published in 2000 (seven years before the first Kindle came out!). A total of 74 stories were published between 2000 and 2007, with most of them collected in print omnibus editions.
“The Belly of the Beast” by Dean Wesley Smith does a serviceable job of introducing the crew of the da Vinci and establishing a bridge from well-known characters from the TV shows, including Scotty (in command of the Corps of Engineers) and Geordi La Forge (seconded to the da Vinci during the first three novellas).
One advantage of the printed page is that the reader’s imagination can be far less expensive than CGI, so the crew gets to include members from more truly alien species. For example, one of the engineers is P8 Blue “Pattie”, an eight-limbed insectoid.
In “Fatal Error” by Keith R.A. DeCandido, the da Vinci team tackles the incipient failure (later discovered to be sabotage) of a computer responsible for managing an entire civilization. This story adds some stakes, with a crew member sacrificing herself to solve the problem. That sacrifice gets followed up on in the next story, “Hard Crash” by Christie Golden, where a sentient starship must be reasoned with. In the final story of the compilation, “Interphase: Book One” by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, the crew of the da Vinci gets to spread their wings without La Forge (who returns to the Enterprise) only to run right into a mess involving the (TOS-era) Defiant and a Tholian web.
The compilation does not include the second half of “Interphase”, but by that point, you should have a pretty good idea whether S.C.E. has hooked you or not. Overall, the first four novellas do a good job of exemplifying some of the strengths of Star Trek. The characters are likable and competent; the technology lends itself to good puzzle tales without falling into the trap of pages and pages of technobabble; and there’s clearly room for the characters to grow. Also, it would be easy to imagine these stories as episodes of a TV show that’s a spiritual successor of classic TOS and TNG. The stories are not perfect, however: the initial callbacks to minor incidents in TNG episodes were a bit overdone.
Upshot: If you like Star Trek qua “competence porn”, this omnibus may be right up your alley.
