Earth's colonial enterprise, founded on a string of planetless stars, fell apart when orders to solve problems lagged a long time behind the reality of the situation. Distance made it impossible to maintain the close control Earth wanted to exercise, and Earth's ill-advised orders provoked rebellion among the colonies when the discovery of Faster-Than-Light travel suddenly brought Earth into close contact and frequent contact with the colonies.
Cyteen had outright defied Earth's visa requirements and founded a runaway colony, its population deliberately augmented by cloned-man establishments.
Pell Station attempted to stand by its allegiance to Earth. So did other colonies, fearing the strangeness developing at Cyteen.
The actual sequence of the Alliance/Union stories is:
Cyteen won the Hugo for Best Novel. There was a paperbound publication that split the novel into three parts, but this has ended: the current and, by my wishes, all future publications, will have Cyteen as one unified book.
AND:
set in the far future of the Alliance, a splinter group
∞…∞
Hani are catlike, spacefaring, attitudinal, and protective of their violent and aggressive menfolk; and yes, I've made a little commentary on gender politics; but I've also tried to tell an honest, light, and rowdy story about very different aliens and a strayed human. Pyanfar never wanted him for a passenger…but having him…well, life just couldn't be the same.
And if you think mahendo'sat politics gets thick…Pyanfar agrees.
Pyanfar's motto is, when confronted with vastly intelligent, aggressive politics: Do something totally irrational and let the enemy think himself to death.
The front end of Foreigner is a novella and a short piece, the first setting up how Phoenix, a station set-up mission, skewed far and dangerously off course. The second chapter tells the story of their descendants some distance along. And then the real story in the novel begins, as a shadow turns up in a forbidden area outside a human diplomat's bedroom.
Say that there were problems in the relationship between humans and the civilization they met.
I didn't plan to have the first two sections on the first Foreigner novel, but my editor said put them in. So I did. The initial situation with the lost colonists in chapter one, is pretty grim…but as you get to know the atevi centuries later, in the main part of the story, they do have a very active sense of humor.
The world of Finisterre is a bad real estate deal: a lot like the ground-level assumption behind Pern and Darkover, it doesn't really matter that everyone arrived from space. Clearly this isn't Earth, that's the important thing, and while townsfolk fear the native wildlife, the riders who keep the towns alive are very happy being friendly with the nighthorses, who are, well, the reason riders exist and the reason humans survive on Finisterre at all.
Nighthorses are addicted to human minds, in the long and the short of it, and find their importation of bacon the single most important event in the history of the world. While the books have moments that you may not want to read alone after dark, have faith: the horses will get you through.
Nhi Vanye i Chya, seeking redemption for his sins…finds himself indebted to a liege reputed for betrayal, sworn with an oath that can damn his soul…
This includes all myth-based stories.
A rusalka is a Russian ghost: a drowned maiden who dies for love will become a rusalka, haunting the river where she perished. Some call it scary. Some call it a vampire story. I call it the story of a scapegrace , a wizard who gets whatever he wants, and a yard-thing who's far more bark than bite. Trust Babi, when all else runs amok.
…trolls, goblins, and a chip off the Goblin Queen's mirror. A young man sets out to answer one question and discovers questions multiplying around him.
…multiple ages of the world, and a wizard from the last age, called Mauryl Kingmaker, isolate from the young kingdoms of Men, works a summoning, a last bit of magic. But was he a good magician, or what cause did he serve?
This set is a project I've worked for years on, and I'm very excited about it.
Over the years my publishers and editors, Donald Wollheim, Jim Baen, Betsy Wollheim, to name a few, have supported me in books that let imagination run free. It's a list of the varied and the different…
An aeons-old alien and the [perhaps] dead crew of a passing spacecraft…
An alien brings up a human child…for alien reasons.