If you read this series how is it I'm trying to decide if I should read it?
Corps of Engineer books?
- Thread starter GalaxyClass1701
- Start date
You do realize that the Corps of Engineers is just a renamed S.C.E. (Starfleet Corps of Engineers) series and that they're e-novellas, rather than full-blown novels, correct?
Just making certain that was clear.
I haven't read any of them personally but I've heard good things about them. I plan to read through the whole series once I get caught up on all the current continuity, sometime in the next couple of years.
- Byron
Just making certain that was clear.
I haven't read any of them personally but I've heard good things about them. I plan to read through the whole series once I get caught up on all the current continuity, sometime in the next couple of years.
- Byron
There's ongoing continuity between the SCE books. Personally I like them alot, and have bought most of the paperback collections.
I've been working my way through them very slowly over the last couple years (I'm only on the 16th story out of 74 novellas and two short stories), but I've really enjoyed them all. IMO of all of the series, it is probably the one that feels the most like another show. Where the other series tend to be big epic stories, the SCE/CoE stories tends to be smaller and more episodic in nature. It's also got a lot of fun, quirky characters. I would definitely recommend checking it out.
Basically SCE/Corps of Engineers is structured a lot like classic Marvel Comics, say -- each monthly "issue" tells its own story (with the occasional 2-parter) but there's a lot of character-arc continuity from one to the next, and events in one installment will have ramifications in multiple stories further on, and so on.
I enjoyed them quite a bit. Got most of them either once they were printed or on my Kindle. Except the second half of Remembrance of Things Past, which is apparently not available at Amazon anymore.
Im confused if there are 74 stories what are these?
1: Have Tech, Will Travel, 2002
2: Miracle Workers, 2002
3: Some Assembly Required, 2003
4: No Surrender, 2004
5: Foundations, 2005
6: Wildfire, 2005
7: Breakdowns, 2006
8: Aftermath, 2007
9: Grand Designs, 2007
10: Creative Couplings, 2008
11: Wounds, 2008
12: Out of the Cocoon, 2010
13: What's Past, 2010
1: Have Tech, Will Travel, 2002
2: Miracle Workers, 2002
3: Some Assembly Required, 2003
4: No Surrender, 2004
5: Foundations, 2005
6: Wildfire, 2005
7: Breakdowns, 2006
8: Aftermath, 2007
9: Grand Designs, 2007
10: Creative Couplings, 2008
11: Wounds, 2008
12: Out of the Cocoon, 2010
13: What's Past, 2010
^It was 74 ebooks. Those are the paperback collections.
Cool thanks.
Those are the paperback collections. The first 7 were released under the SCE title and are mass market paperbacks that collect 3-4 of the ebooks. After that the series title switches to reflect the new ebook title of Corps of Engineers and they then become trade paperbacks and collect 5-8 of the ebooks.
when are the rest out?
A very good description. You get a very good feel for the characters as they struggle to solve the dilemma in each story. And while there's always a technological aspect to the stories, many still had gripping "human" elements, too (though several of the crew are aliens).
I have all the paperback collections published so far, and have read all but the last 2-3. But they're on my short list to read, now that I have them.
Well, it's a bit of an unnecessarily complex and fanboyish description, actually. A better analogy for readers of this particular forum, and one that the writers themselves used when launching the series, would be to point to the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which each episode/story was effectively standalone, although would occasionally refer to events from previous episodes/stories.
Anyway, I read the series up to the Wildfire story. They're very different from regular TrekLit, but I really enjoyed the majority of the individual stories- and eBook was a great format for them because they were in shorter, more readable, chunks. Also, because they were shorter, they felt more like typical episodes of Star Trek, whereas most Trek novels cover more ground than a single episode usually could. I'd definitely recommend you check out at least the first few, get a feeling for them and see if you like them.
Anyway, I read the series up to the Wildfire story. They're very different from regular TrekLit, but I really enjoyed the majority of the individual stories- and eBook was a great format for them because they were in shorter, more readable, chunks. Also, because they were shorter, they felt more like typical episodes of Star Trek, whereas most Trek novels cover more ground than a single episode usually could. I'd definitely recommend you check out at least the first few, get a feeling for them and see if you like them.
I don't think anyone ever figured out why Breakdowns wasn't released in ebook. And they haven't announced the release date for Turn the Page yet. At this point I believe it's just going to be a filler whenever another gap pops up in the schedule. Either that or the TNG Sling & Arrows miniseries collection.
Fanboyish? That's not fair. It wasn't an arbitrarily chosen analogy. SCE/CoE was published monthly and told relatively short stories, so it has clear structural similarities to a monthly comic book. And there's long been a comic-book influence on Trek literature, since Bob Greenberger, Marco Palmieri, and Margaret Clark were all DC Comics editors before coming to Pocket. In fact, I personally believe that it was the influence of that comics background that led Marco and Margaret to build up such a rich interconnected continuity among the novels. Of course, CoE was created by John Ordover and edited by Keith DeCandido, but it was part of that same overall creative climate, and in structure and pacing it was a closer match to comics than anything else in Trek Lit. However, modern comics tend to be rather more serialized than the structure I was attempting to convey, with stories usually stretching across multiple issues, so I had to choose an analogy that better fit the blend of episodic plots and strongly serialized character arcs. Silver Age Marvel was the closest analogy I could think of. '70s or '80s DC might have worked as well, but only because DC was imitating Marvel by that point.
And I don't think the TNG analogy works very well, because TNG had far, far less serialization than CoE. Sure, in TNG, you'd occasionally get followup to earlier episodes, but most of the time, the events of one episode wouldn't be mentioned at all in the next episode or the one after that or the one after that. Something like "Family," where the aftermath of one episode was still visibly being felt in the next episode, was extremely rare in TNG, but it was routine in SCE/CoE. In just about every installment, you'd see characters talking or thinking about the events of recent adventures, still coping with their consequences, even if it was just a passing reference. And character arcs would develop steadily from installment to installment, rather than being revisited only every couple of months. That's not TNG storytelling. It's closer to DS9 storytelling, or ENT season 3 or 4. But it's also a very good match to the storytelling style Stan Lee and his collaborators developed for Marvel.
This, though I'd characterize the "show" as being more like DS9, because of the serialization and the focus on characters. All the stories are relatively brief, again like episodes (as opposed to the full-sized novels, which read more like movies or miniseries).
SCE/CoE is actually my second/third favourite series after DS9 (tied with Enterprise).
Thanks for posting the list, too. My only complaint about the big trades is that they aren't numbered and it's hard to tell which one to read first....
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