Book bits: Elusive Salvation, New Frontier, Captain Kirk, and more

Coming next May is Elusive Salvation, Dayton Ward's follow-up to the brilliant aliens-on-Earth novel, From History's Shadow. Simon and Schuster have now updated their digital catalogue with the first blurb for this book, giving details of the new alien infiltration on pre-First Contact Earth:

The Arctic Circle, 1845: Escaping the tyranny under which their people have lived for generations, aliens from a distant planet crash land on Earth’s inhospitable frozen wastes. Surviving the harsh conditions will pose a challenge, but over time the aliens will migrate to more populated areas, with decades passing as they work to conceal their presence from their former oppressors, who continue hunt them at any cost.

San Francisco, 2283: When a mysterious craft is detected entering the solar system, Admiral James Kirk is dispatched by Starfleet to confront the vessel. He meets with an emissary from the Iramahl, a previously unknown alien race who have come in search of their brothers and sisters thought to have gone missing in this area of space centuries earlier. Having recently thrown off the last chains of subjugation by another species, the Ptaen, they now believe their lost people hold the key to saving their entire race from eventual extinction.

New York, 1970: Roberta Lincoln, young protégé of the mysterious agent Gary Seven, is shocked when she receives the oddest request for help—from the future…

Pre-order: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es, Amazon.it, Amazon.co.jp.  

Continue after the jump for more news of new books, including New Frontier, and Captain Kirk reading his own autobiography:

The first novella in Peter David's new three-part New Frontier ebook series, The Returned, is out this month. StarTrek.com spoke to David about returning to New Frontier, and while discussing the new books he gave this set-up of the story:

We pick up three months after the previous story finished. Calhoun has been wandering Xenex, determined to see if he can find any of his people. He refuses to accept sensor readings that indicate there's no life. But what he's really doing is dealing with his grief and reaching a point where he decides the next step he's going to take. The whole gang is back in this new outing, plus we introduce a new alien race that might either help him against the D'myurj, or wind up being even bigger trouble.

Pre-order: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es, Amazon.it, Amazon.co.jp.

Looking a bit further ahead, David R. George III, posted a tease of an image on his Facebook page, revealing he has just signed a contract for a new Star Trek novel, though gave no more specifics than that. His latest, Sacraments of Fire, has just been released, and the DS9 story it begins will continue early next year, with Ascendance.

Finally, at the San Diego Comic Con, none other than William Shatner himself read excerpts from the forthcoming The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (which has subverted the temporal prime directive by claiming David Goodman wrote it, rather than it being sent back from the future). Thankfully for those of us elsewhere in the world, that panel was recorded, so you can enjoy a few excerpts, read by Captain Kirk himself, prior to the September release of the book:



UPDATE: One more thing... Jens Deffner alerted me to a small notice on Simon and Schuster's Star Trek website, revealing the Strange New Worlds competition is to return.

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek is coming! Get news about Star Trek book releases, book deals, giveaways, trivia, sweepstakes and a brand-new Strange New Worlds writing contest launching later this year.

Strange New Worlds ran for a decade up until 2007, resulting in ten anthologies of short stories from across the Star Trek universe, and was the path several authors took into professional writing for the series. Great to see it's coming back!