A Cardassian novelist whose book Meditations on a Crimson Shadow imagines a future war between Cardassia and the Klingon Empire, and which Garak lends to Doctor Bashir.
Preloc is a Cardassian writer, the author of Meditations on a Crimson Shadow. Unlike the repetitive epics Garak usually recommends, the novel is set in the future, at a time when Cardassia and the Klingon Empire are at war.
The book appears at the end of the Deep Space Nine episode The Wire. Having survived the failure of his cranial implant and told Bashir several contradictory accounts of his exile, Garak resumes their weekly lunch as if nothing had happened and hands the doctor Preloc's novel. Bashir asks who wins the war and then thinks better of wanting to know.
The choice proved prophetic: the Klingons invade Cardassian space less than two years later, in The Way of the Warrior. Preloc is never seen.