David Mack teases The Fall: A Ceremony of Loses

[Mage]

I also hope that the Typhon Pact will remain. I doubt that it can last forever, but I wouldn't mind them hanging around a little longer.

[Lee Son of Pete]

A similar length of time that the Warsaw Pact lasted would be good.

[zarkon]

TJ Sinclair wrote:

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I'd like where it was going if I was sure it referred to Ezri and Bashir bleeding out on the deck of the Aventine as it counted down to a catastrophic slipstream/warp core breach.

instabuy

[tomswift2002]

It's intersting how Garak is going to be showing up again. I don't recall him being in the DS9-Season 9 books since the Cardassia story in the Worlds trilogy.

[Emh]

lvsxy808 wrote:

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Given that A Ceremony of Loses doesn't actually make any grammatical sense as a sentence or statement, I checked the link, and the title is indeed A Ceremony of Losses, not loses.

Oops. Mere typo (brain fart, really). *shrug*

And now it's fixed.

[Sci]

tomswift2002 wrote:

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It's intersting how Garak is going to be showing up again. I don't recall him being in the DS9-Season 9 books since the Cardassia story in the Worlds trilogy.

Garak has appeared in several novels since Worlds of Deep Space Nine was published, including DSN: Fearful Symmetry, DSN: The Never-Ending Sacrifice, Terok Nor: Night of the Wolves, Destiny: Mere Mortals, and Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship.

[Emh]

Sci wrote:

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Garak has appeared in several novels since Worlds of Deep Space Nine was published, including DSN: Fearful Symmetry, DSN: The Never-Ending Sacrifice, Terok Nor: Night of the Wolves, Destiny: Mere Mortals, and Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship.

All of them being minor to small supporting roles. Sounds like his appearance in The Crimson Shadow will fairly large, at least the same as The Lotus Flower, also by McCormack.

[lvsxy808]

Sci wrote:

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Garak has appeared in several novels since Worlds of Deep Space Nine was published, including DSN: Fearful Symmetry, DSN: The Never-Ending Sacrifice, Terok Nor: Night of the Wolves, Destiny: Mere Mortals, and Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship.

I was always mildly worried that Garak's assignment to the position of Cardassian Ambassador to the Federation, as depicted in Mere Mortals and others, was a misunderstanding of what happened in "The Calling."

When Destiny was first being teased, we were informed that it came after "The Calling" chronologically. "The Calling" featured Garak appearing to be sent to Earth by what passed for the Cardassian government at the time, except that it never actually happened, it was all part of his vision in the Vinculum. So when Garak appeared as the ambassador on Earth in Destiny, I was like, "Noooo! That's not what happened! It was a dreeeaaam!"

Now, it certainly makes sense that Garak would be assigned as the ambassador - he's certainly the one with the most experience living and working with the Federation on friendly terms while remaining loyal to Cardassia. I was just afraid that they thought that had already been established prior to Destiny, when it hadn't actually.

And that's the kind of blow-it-out-of-all-proportion thoughts I suffer from constantly.

.

[Reanok]

I'm definitely glad Grak is going to be in another Startrek novel.It sounds like an intriguing ds9&Tng crossover miniseries.I've enjoyed rRading David's latest novels.I'm definitely going to be buying this novel when it comes out later this year.

[Jarvisimo]

And Garak written by MacCormack is always good. His scene with Rugal in The Never-Ending Sacrifice is one of my favourites in Treklit: with Garak slipping between different facets of personality - charmingly pleasant, analytic, damning, generous, ironic - to interrogate the man sitting in front of him.* Also exciting about this book will be to see how she treats the TNG crew: in Brinkmanship it was unconventional and excellent for this.

*also i love the nod to the German embassy of the early twentieth century, and how she has Garak refer to it:

“When I took up residence here, I took the trouble to investigate the history of the place. It turned out to have once been the embassy of a military dictatorship whose name is synonymous with cruelty, aggression, and sheer brutality of the most unspeakable kind. Someone at the Federation Diplomatic Corps went out of their way to calculate that insult so finely. I was quite flattered; I’m sure not everyone earns such particular attention. Besides, it’s a remarkable building and a magnificent city.”

[Una McCormack]

Thank you, Jarvisimo, that is a favourite scene of mine too. I'm glad you picked up on the history of the building assigned to Garak by his hosts.

[Jarvisimo]

Your welcome, Una. Thanks always for writing so well.

[Cicero]

Emh wrote:

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. . . that will have serious and lasting consequences for some of our continuing principal characters.

I'm very tired of "serious and lasting consequences." They seem to be most of what the non-TOS line consists of these days.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the only Destiny/Typhon Pact-era novel I've enjoyed (Zero Sum Game) is the only one I've read that took an incremental approach to character development and plot advancement. Aside from the entirely gratuitous graphic sex scene, it felt very much like a novel from the heyday of the DS9 relaunch (which used incrementalism very effectively).

Most novels today seem to be following a similar model to that used on the Star Wars novels since the advent of the New Jedi Order, which favors "shocking" and often brutal status quo changes in rapid succession in the service of a shallow progressing narrative.

[Thrawn]

Whereas that was one of my least favorite Trek novels post-Destiny, for exactly the same reason. Nothing really happened.

Just goes to show you can't please them all, I suppose

[TJ Sinclair]

^ ZSG may not have been my favorite Typhon Pact book, but that had more to do with the characters involved than anything else. It was the first DS9 story I'd read since before Unity that didn't seem to move at an overly frenetic pace, so I definitely get what Cicero is saying.

I understand the desire to have "big events," as those attract attention and sell more books. But at the same time, especially in the case of the DS9 Relaunch, it seems to have prevented the story from evolving more organically.

Stuff like that's been going on in the comic book industry to one degree or another for the past couple of decades. Big crossovers, radical changes to characters, all to drive sales, and it's led to "event fatigue."

I was definitely feeling fatigued by the time Destiny came out, which is why I put off reading it and Typhon Pact for so long.