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Rating: 
Summary: Great war stories
Review: I was looking forward to this story and I was not disappointed at all. It focuses on three characters of the SCE series Dr. Lense, Bart Faulwell, and Sonya Gomez and their experiences during the Dominion War.
As always Keith does a wonderful job capturing the horrors of war but how it might be in the 24th Century. I found the Dr. Lense story the most gripping of the three. His description to put it simply was powerful.
I read a lot of history books and especially about war and I would put his telling of Dr. Lense's story up there for anyone who wants to get a taste how war is.
The Faulwell and Gomez story very solid and good but have the misfortunate of following the Lense story.
The great thing of all three of them is you get a lot of questions answered about the characters and you get great insight of the Dominion War. I have to put this SCE story as one of the best one of the entire series.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining exploration of the Dominion War
Review: War Stories, Book One explores what three members of the SCE team--Dr. Elizabeth Lense, Bart Faulwell, and Sonya Gomez--did during the Dominion War. This work consists of three short tales featuring the three main characters under different circumstances, told with a different tone, ranging from lighthearted to somber. War Stories presents us with crucial incidents in the lives of the characters. We are there with Lense as she deals with battlefield medicine while also dealing with a personal crisis. We are there with Faulwell as he tries to break a Dominion code when he meets the love of his life. We are there with Gomez as a moment of inspiration and an engineering trick are all that stands between life and death in pitched battle with the Cardassians. A sense of history pervades the book. One character has a love for historical novels about the 21st century and debates with another the literary styles of the early 24th century. Another character muses about how "[t]he Akira-class ship had a compact, retro design, reminiscent of the old pre-Federation Earth starships," thus giving a retroactive reason for why Jonathan Archer's Enterprise looks suspiciously like the Akira-class ships two centuries hence. Gomez visits Deep Space Nine and attends a strategy meeting with Captain Sisko and General Martok. Faulwell works with a character from Diane Duane's novel, My Enemy, My Ally. Lense deals with the political fallout of Julian Bashir's genetic enhancements. A new character from the post-series Deep Space Nine novels receives a mention. Little touches like this tie the Star Trek universe together a little tighter, reward patient readers for their diligence and attention, but don't detract from the strength of the storytelling. Fans curious about the Dominion War and how it affected people beyond Deep Space Nine will want to read War Stories. Long-time readers of the SCE eBook series will see some long-standing questions about the characters answered, and newcomers to the series will have no difficulty jumping into the series with this book of three self-contained tales. War Stories is a book about history, not just of the universe but of the characters, showing us glimpses of who and where the SCE characters were before we first meet them in Belly of the Beast. War Stories is also a change-of-pace from previous SCE eBooks in that engineering problems are not the focus of the story. Instead, these are three stories of the characters experiencing the realities of 24th-century warfare from their own unique perspectives, and Keith R.A. DeCandido finds something unique to say with each of the tales.
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