Star Trek: Here There Be Monsters

This was a fantastic story, authored by the co-creator of the series. Although billed as a Gateways "epilogue", the gateways are already closed by the time the novel starts, and the focus of the novel is the clean-up of one world by the SCE crew. The world in question is Maeglin, one that the daVinci has been to before. Duffy and company must round up "monsters" which are frightening the populace of the planet. An important part of the story are the fears that are overcome by several characters while encountering these aliens. Overall, this is an excellent story that is hard to put down.

This another good story from the SCE series and the subplots slowly are developing. We see Duffy and Sonya gettng closer. We also see Corsi's feeling for Fabian but not as much as I would like to see. Corsi is mysterious and a character I would love to see more developed. The story has good action and a little mystery. I was hoping a bigger fight but it was still entertaining. The story was a nice add on or wrap up of the Gateway series. I also liked the jokes directed toward Captain Calhouhn in the New Frontier series.

This story serves as an epilogue to the Gateways series which had run through all the various Star Trek paperback book series in recent months, before being concluded in What Lay Beyond, a fairly disappointing hardcover. While this story doesn't erase the bad taste left by that hardcover, it does end the Gateways story on a slightly higher note than it otherwise would have.As part of the mopping-up from the Gateways crisis, involving the seemingly random opening of portals allowing instantaneous transportation from one part of the universe to another (and sometimes other universes or other times entirely), the SCE crew is called to a planet dealing with a sudden infestation of giant monsters. Of course, it turns out the problem isn't quite as straightforward as it originally had appeared, and Sonya Gomez and her crew soon have their work cut out for them ...Author and series co-creator Keith RA DeCandidio is fast becoming one of my favorite Star Trek-related authors, and this story showcases most of the strengths and weaknesses of his writing. Two things I enjoy the most about this particular series are the fast-paced, fairly straightforward plots, and the development of the characters from story to story. This series continues to impress me by not getting bogged down in made-up 24th century technological problems, as one might fear in a series about Starfleet engineers. This story's hunt for the giant creatures continues that theme, justifying characters like cultural specialist Carol Abromawitz and linguist Bart Faulwell (who gets the spotlight in this story) among the cast. (This story also gets points for not gratuitiously mentioning Faulwell's male lover, in a way that screams "See? We've got a gay character!" I want to see diverse characterizations in these stories, but calling attention to that diversity for its own sake reduces those characters to the level of tokens, I believe.)While the ongoing romance between Sonya Gomez and Kieran Duffy seems fairly straightforward, I am more interested in what is or isn't happening between all-business security chief Dominica Corsi and Fabian Stevens. DeCandidio teases us with just enough hints that we want to learn more. The story also seems to plant the seeds for several other upcoming subplots without making the story as a whole feel incomplete or unsatisfying.While I applaud any attempt to infuse some humor into the usually straight-faced Star Trek series, I thought too many of the jokes in this story felt forced. And the big twist, when the truth behind the monsters was revealed, wasn't that much of a surprise, but I don't know how much of one it was meant to be. Some of the hero worship of characters like Captain Picard also seemed overly-fawning. And, once again, DeCandidio seems to be so pleased with his creativity in coming up with alien names, he forgets that the reader has to actually read and remember them. Fortunately, he eventually gives us simpler nicknames, but it takes