New The Fall blurbs

New blurbs pick up threads from the Worlds of DS9

The Simon and Schuster digital catalogue has been updated with new blurbs for a couple of books in the forthcoming 24th century crossover series, The Fall. We have a nice set up for the Enterprise-E's mission to Cardassia in Una McCormack's The Crimson Shadow:

The U.S.S. Enterprise has been sent to Cardassia Prime, where Captain Jean-Luc Picard is involved in discussions over the removal of the small number of remaining Starfleet forces left over from the end of the Dominion War. Also present is the Cardassian Ambassador to the Federation, Elim Garak. All parties involved are keen to see Starfleet leave Cardassian soil, not only because the Cardassians are now allies of the Federation, but because Starfleet has been badly overstretched in recent years and the resources are needed elsewhere. With so much goodwill at the highest levels, this meeting should be a formality. However, within a few days of the arrival of the Enterprise, a Bajoran Federation officer is found murdered. The crime may be racially motivated: an ultra-nationalist organization called "Cardassia First" has been stirring up anti-Federation feeling across Cardassia over the past year, and a Bajoran is an obvious target…

And confirmation of the ongoing Andorian reproduction story-line continuing in David Mack's A Ceremony of Losses:

Despite heroic efforts, the Andorian species is headed for extinction. Its slow march toward oblivion has reached a tipping point, one from which there will be no hope of return. With countless lives at stake, the leaders of Andor, the Federation, and the Typhon Pact all scheme to twist the crisis to their political gain—at any price. Unwilling to be a mere bystander to tragedy, Doctor Julian Bashir risks everything to find a cure for the Andorians. But his courage will come at a terrible cost…

The rest of the books in the series all have blurbs up too, but for the moment they are reusing the generic series description which has been attached to the first book in the series, David R. George III's Revelation and Dust, for some months now:

The Federation is rocked to its core as the Typhon Pact is suspected of being behind a barbarous act that shatters the fragile peace of the Alpha Quadrant. An original Star Trek novel, this is part of a five-book story arc that takes place over a sixty-day period, but it is not necessary to read each novel in order to follow the storyline, which involves all aspects of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine universes.

Of course with many months still until the series starts all of these are likely not final, and could well be completely unlike the final product. In other The Fall news, James Swallow, who is writing the fourth book in the series, The Poisoned Chalice, was recently interviewed by TrekFM's Literary Treks show; talking mostly about his recently released ebook, The Stuff of Dreams. They did also discuss The Fall though, and Swallow gave this summary of the series:

It's a big political thriller. It's all based around a huge event, that has massive ramifications; big shock-waves through the political structure of the United Federation of Planets, and their relationship to the Typhon Pact, and all the other nation states in the Star Trek universe. And it will shake things up a bit, and by the time we're done, I think it will point things in a new direction.

He also went on to discuss the significance of the miniseries in the ongoing continuity of the litverse, and how this will be leading towards a potential new direction to some degree:

...in recent novels the focus has been a lot on the politics of the Federation, and the intrigue that's going there, and that interesting. I think in a way we're probably going to bring that to a close; not to say that we aren't going to do those kind of stories in the future - This almost feels to me like the end of the season, it's like we're building up to a big, not a kind of cliffhanger or anything, but this is almost like these five books will be like the final movement in this kind of opera, this symphony of stories that we've been telling over the last two or three years. We're going to move to a point of closure, and say now we've done that, now we're going to do this different thing, and we're going to go out with a bang. That's kind of where The Fall is.

Check out the full Literary Treks interview for a little more talk about The Fall, and some good discussion on everything in The Stuff of Dreams.