Review by C.J. Bunce
Where Star Trek Shipyards is an in-universe library looking at the hundreds of ships of the franchise, Star Trek Designing Starships is a library about the creators and creative process behind those ships. The fifth volume of the encyclopedia of Star Trek ship design has arrived as publisher Hero Collector continues its series after volumes on the starships Enterprise, Voyager, the Kelvin timeline ships, and Discovery. The human adventure continues in Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond. It’s available now here at Amazon. As with the publisher’s previous books, Star Trek Designing Starships is known for its colorful, high quality illustrations in a coffee table-style hardcover edition, providing a near-exhaustive library to the array of the franchise’s highly-detailed spacecraft.
This volume features more than forty ships, as well as Deep Space Nine itself. The best part of this volume is in the detailed interviews, giving fans a rare look at the creative process from the people who made it all happen. This includes interviews with production designer Herman Zimmerman. Rick Sternbach and John Eaves’ eye-popping concept sketches and insight are worth the price of the book alone.
The intriguing, well-conceived, step-by-step creation of Deep Space Nine fills dozens of pages, tapping into every segment of the style, colors, and in-universe influences, including even more ideas that were left behind in development sketchbooks than made it to the screen. This is the ultimate dive into Cardassian, Bajoran, and Dominion art and design. The advanced Klingon battle cruisers look back to the influence of original series designer Matt Jefferies, plus Andy Probert, John Dykstra, and, of course, Sternbach and Eaves.
Beyond the series, readers will be able to dig into key Next Generation cast movie ships, like Eaves’ Vulcan lander from First Contact, Son’a ships from Insurrection, and the Scimitar from Nemesis. A whopping fifty pages double back to the ships of the Enterprise television series. Writers Ben Robinson, Marcus Riley, and Mark Wright put all the right images and descriptions together.
Check out this look inside Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond:
All images used are crisp and detailed, and printed on sturdy paper stock.
This is a must-have for fans of Sternbach, Eaves, and all the franchise’s great Star Trek designs and vehicles. Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond is available now here at Amazon, from Hero Collector.
