cherryh

Since winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977, she has gone on to garner a Locus Award, a Nebula Award, and several Hugo Awards (in 1979, 1982 and 1989). Her published novels include the excellent Faded Sun and Chanur books (both SF series), Gate of Ivrel, Downbelow Station, Cuckoo's Egg, Cyteen, Rider at the Gate, and Tripoint.

The Alliance-Union Universe grips my imagination and I can see the characters.

The Company Wars:

Heavy Time
Don Maitz

Hellburner
Don Maitz

Downbellow Station
Martin Rigo

Rimrunners
Don Maitz

Heavy Time

Two asteroid miners find a dead, drifting ship-but its pilot, Paul Dekker, is alive, insane from shock, and screaming...screaming clues to a mystery that no one wants solved...
What is MAMA hiding?
Paul Dekker, a kid with a dream, wakes to a nightmare. His ship is stolen, his future destroyed, his beautiful partner missing, his memory gone. The ASTEX mining monopoly, MAMA, accuses him of being negligent, crazy, and foolish, as well as a cold-blooded murderer. And only a renegade miner, Morris Bird, will help Paul learn the truth.
Because somewhere in Dekker's mind lies a dark secret that can change the fate of worlds.

Hellburner (these first two have fairly close connections)

Ben Pollard thinks he's traded the perils of the Belt for security on Earth-until he's shanghaied to the orbital Sol II battle station. There he's forced to help a man Ben never wanted to see again, jinxed pilot Paul Dekker.
Now Dekker's the center of a lethal mystery, while military, political, and corporate rivals on two worlds conspire to use him and Pollard as lab animals in a war for humanity's soul. And to save themselves, Pollard and Dekker must master and wield the awesome power of Earth's most secret weapon...

Downbelow Station: Hugo Winner, Best Novel

Pell's Star occupied the central spot in the coming conflict between Earth's tired stellar empire and the thought onslaught of its rebellious colonies. Whoever controlled Pell's Downbelow station held the key to Earth's defensive perimeter - or the jumping off point for a Terrestrial offensive to regain the lost empire.
But Pell had always beem neutral and was determined to remain so.
This is a powerful, complex and enthralling novel of intersellar conflict and ambitions. In its pages you will meet and strive with the many vivid persons, humand and non-human, whose futures would hang on the outcome of that titanic struggle

Rimrunners

His name was Sandor and he was the owner and entire crew of a tramp star-freighter that flew the Union planets under false papers and fake names.
Her name was Allison and she was a proud but junior member of the powerful family whose mighty starship, Dublin Again, was the true queen of the spaceways.
They met at Viking Station, she seeking a night's dalliance, he desperately in search of a spacer assistant.
Their fateful meeting was to lead to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station, thereby catching the calculating eye of the grim commander of the Alliance battlecraft, Norway, and a terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.

The Merchanter Novels:
Trading ships and commerce after the Company Wars

Merchanter's Luck
Barclay Shaw

Tripoint
Stephen Youll

Finity's End
Stephen Youll

Merchanter's Luck

The fateful meeting between the owner of a tramp star-freighter that flies the Union planets under false papers and fake names and a proud but junior member of a powerful starship-owning family leads to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station--and a terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.

Tripoint

The great powers are at peace - but private conflicts are eternal: witness the blood feud between the merchanter ships Sprite - crewed by the several hundred-member Hawkins familiy - and Corinthian, a ship suspected of trading with pirates and smugglers. But this rivalry isn't mercantile; it's fueled by Sprite Cargo Chief Marie Hawkins's vendetta against Corinthian Captain Austin Bowe, a burning crusade that has warped Marie's life, driving her half mad. When both ships dock at Mariner space station, Marie vanishes. Fearing that she is bent on vengeance - a vengeance that might jeopardize Sprite's trading status and future - Marie's 23-year-old sun Tom tries to find and stop her, only to be shanghaied aboard Corinthian.
Now Tom is trapped, destination unknown, on a starship speeding him away from all he has known, with no hope of rescue or return... held prisoner by a crew fanatically loyal to Tom's sworn enemy.
The man who, decades before, battered and violently raped Tom's mother.
Austin Bowe.
Tom Hawkins's father...

Finity's End

A truce is declared between the major powers, and Captain Neihart returns to the Alliance station of Pell to reclaim Fletcher, an orphaned child left there during the wars. Fletcher Neihart has found happiness there and becomes resentful, but peace depends on whether Fletcher can learn to trust.

Cyteen Novels:

In a futuristic world of cybernetics, two young friends become trapped in an endless nightmare of suspicion, surveillance, programmable servants, a centuries-old ruling class, and an enigmatic woman who rules them all.

Cyteen: The Betrayal
Don Maitz

Cyteen: The Rebirth
Don Maitz

Cyteen: The Vindication

Don Maitz

Cyteen: The Betrayal

ARIANE EMORY IS DEAD.
BUT NOT FOR LONG.
WHERE IS ARIANE?
For fifty years, Dr. Ariane Emory has dominated politics on Cyteen Station. Because Dr. Emory controls Reseune, a city sized factory that creates the one item essential to the planet's wealth. Reseune produces people - computertrained azi servants and soldiers.
Then Ariane Emory is assassinated. Yet her rivals and victims, people like Dr. Jordan Warrick, his cloned son Justin, and Justin's azi brother Grant, are not freed by her death. For Emory's murder has turned Reseune into a vast, tyrannical experiment: an attempt to merge nature - and nurture... biotech - and cybernetics ... genetics - and psychology...heredity - and environment. Cyteen's labs can grow clones, but Ariane Emory's followers want more. Much more. They want to re-create Ariane.

Cyteen: The Rebirth

ARIANE EMORY IS ALIVE.
PERHAPS.
WHO IS ARIANE?
Little Ari Emory knows her life is Unusual. She knows people around her Disappear, for no reason, and are never seen again. She knows adults like Justin Warrick fear her. She knows she is under constant surveillance and medical testing. But she doesn't know why.
Ari doesn't know that she is the key to a multi-world, century-long power struggle.
Ari desn't know that her home, Reseune, has been warped into a city -sized psychology lab. A conspiracy forcing Ari to relive all the influences that formed a woman born 125 years before. An experiment designed to shape and mold a little girl and make her grow to become a woman who died before Ari was born.

A woman who lived for tyranny and terror...

Cyteen: The Vindication

ARIANE EMORY HAS RETURNED.
BEWARE
WHAT IS ARIANE
Fifteen-year-old Ari Emory must grab and wield vast political power. She must prove her existence and identiy to a world that fears her, that thinks her a programmed living puppet - because Ariane Emory is the replicate of the dead tyrant whose name and genes she bears.
Her struggle will rip the social order of planet Cyteen and turn family into foes and enemies into allies, as the possibility of eternal resurrection fuels the lusts of rulers and the terror of the ruled.
Ari alone knows that her predecessor discoverd a "Worm" - a flaw - in the basic fabric of civilization. If not corrected, it will inevitably destroy humanity. And only Ari Emory can hope to stop the Worm, if given centuries of life and unlimited power.
But someone murdered Ariane Emory once. And stands waiting to kill her again...

Hanan Rebellion

Brothers of Earth
Alan Atkinson

Hunter of Worlds
Danny Flynn

Brothers of Earth

Stranded forever on an alien planet.there was only one way to survive! The ship died silently, a manmade star that glowed brilliantly, then quickly winked out of existence. Kurt Morgan watched her from the view screen of his survival craft until there was no more left to see. There had been eighty people on the Endymion. . . over one hundred more were aboard the enemy vessel--now nothing was left but dust and vapor. No report of the violent encounter would go back to central. There would be no rescue ships sent to investigate and Kurt's survival capsule had no starflight capability. It all added up to a silent, freezing death in space, unless Kurt found an Earth-type planet somewhere in this vast, uncharted solar system. . .

Hunter of Worlds

The Iduve were predators, incapable of human emotions, their giant starships travelled the galaxy, taking what they pleased. . .

At the Edge of Space (onimbus)

Now, two of C.J. Cherryh's long-unavailable early classics are together in one omnibus edition. Brothers of Earth and Hunter of Worlds chronicle the survival of solitary humans among hostile, predatory aliens on the fringes of human-explored space-and represent Cherryh's early best.

Morgaine

Faded Sun

Kesrith
Gino D'Achille

Shon'Jir
Gino d'Achille

Kutah
David Stone

Faded Sun Trilogy
Michael Whelan

Kesrith

This is the story of three people: Sten Duncan, a soldier of humanity; Niun, last warrior of the mri, humanity's enemies; and Melein, priestess-queen of the final fallen mri stronghold. It is the story of two mighty species fighting for a galaxy, humanity driving out from Earth, and the enigmatic regul struggling to hold their stars with mri mercenaries. It is a story of diplomacy and warfare, of conspiracy and betrayal, and of three flesh-and-blood people who found themselves thrown together in a life-and-death alliance.

Shon'Jir

Sten Duncan had saved the lives of the last warrior and the last priestess-queen of mankind's enemies, the mri. He had come to understand their ways and to value their code of honor. When they planned their escape and he was ordered to trap them, Sten fled into space with them instead. Far across the cosmos was their forgotten homeworld. He could help them find it--and maybe there find the secret that had eluded the military masters of Terra.

Kutah

Kutath was an ancient world and a dying one. In ages past its best sons and daughters had gone to the stars to serve as mercenaries in the wars of aliens. Now the survivors of its star-flung people, the mri, had come back - in the form of a single woman, the last priestess-queen Melein, and a single man, the last warrior, Niun. And one other - the human Sten Duncan who had deserted Earth's military to swear service to the foes of his own species. Here is. an in-depth study of the last stand of an alien culture confronted with the devastating vengeance of two star-conquering races.

Faded Sun Trilogy

Ealdwood

The Dreamstone
David A Cherry

The Tree of Sword and Jewels
Michael Whelan

Arafel's Saga
Rowena Morrill

The Dreamstone

It was that transitional time of the world, when man first brought the clang of iron and the reek of smoke to the lands which before had echoed with inhuman voices. In that dawn of man and death of magic there yet remained one last untouched place--the small forest of Ealcwood--which kept a time different from elsewhere, and one who dwelt there who had more patience, pride and love of the earth than any other of her kind--Arfel the Sidhe. This is the story of the last defense of Faery against the encroaching iron sword of the Era of Man.

The Tree of Swords and Jewels

They said that Cairan Cuilean was fey - that he had a touch of the Sidhe on him, and on his lands. And it was true. Elvish blood ran in his veins, and he had been to that other world - that parallel and magical land of Eald, where Arafel, the Lady of Trees, held dominion.

The Dreaming Tree (Onimbus)

Arafel lives alone in Ealdwood, the sole remaining portion of the great magical forest that once covered the Earth. It was humanity that sounded the death knell of Arafel's kind on Earth, for with their implements of iron--a substance Elves find painful to the touch--men drove back the forest and defeated the Elves who attempted to stop them. Now, as the only one of her kind, Arafel has as little as possible to do with men. Yet, when Niall Dubhlachan ventures into Ealdwood, Arafel finds herself acting to help him.

Compact Space

Age of Exploration

Port Eternity
Gary LaSasso

Voyager in Night
David A Cherry

Cuckoo's Egg
Michael Whelan

Port Eternity

Their names were Lacelot, Elaine, Percivale, Gawain, Modret, Lynette and Vivien, but they were not characters from legend. They were made people, clone servants designed to suit the fancy of their opulent owner, the Lady Dela Kirn. And they worked aboard the Maid, an anachronistic fantasy of a spaceship, decorated with swords, heraldic banners, old-looking beams maskeing the structural joinings, and lamps that mimicked live flame.
They lived in a kind of dream, and had no idea of their origins, their prototypes in those old, old stroy tapes of romance, chivalry, heroism and betrayal.
Until a wandering instability, a knot in time, a ripple in the between sucked them into a spatial no-man's land from where there seemed to be no escape. And they were left alone, with the borrowed personas of their ancient namesakes, to face a crisis those venerable spritits were never designed to master!

Voyager in Night

Two voyages, two ships. One had been en route for over a hundred thousand years, was the size of an asteroid, and its place of launching beyond the trace of any man-made telescope. Its crew was an enigma.
The other ship had been out of Endeavor Station just a few months, was a tiny ore-prospector with a crew of three: Rafe, Paul and Paul's wife Jillan.
Two ships were on a collision course which neither could avoid in time. The three humans were the first of their species the master of the monster had encountered, but now two were already dead and one was dying. But that could be remedied - and was, multifold.Here is a truly unique novel by the author of the Hugo-winning DOWNBELOW STATION, that dares to explore the unexplorable - for what does alien mean, what can an infinite universe hold, and what would being merely human signify in that terrible context?

Cuckoo's Egg

Science fiction novel about a human stranded of a alien world. He finds a place for himself within their society, going native in the process.

Alternate Realities (Port Eternity, Voyager, Wave without a shore)

Long out of print, these three acclaimed, stand-alone novels by the brilliant C.J. Cherryh are among her personal favorites. She calls them the "magic cookie books"- treats she wrote for herself-three daringly original works that explore the more "fantastic" themes of science fiction....

Merovingen Nights

Rusalka
Dark fairy tale using Russian traditions.

Rulsalka
Keith Parkinson

Chernevog
Keith Parkinson

Yvgenie
Keith Parkinson

Rusalka
A Perilous Love

In the folk-tales of pre-Christian Russia, the most dagerous ghost of all was the Rusalk, a murdered girl still seeking to exist by drawing the energy fof life from all nearby living things. Once Pyetr Kochevikov had mocked belief in magic, as he rioted through life with the young blades he thought his friends. But now, outcast from his native city, his only friend was Sasha Misurov, a young man fearful of his own beginning magical powers. Pyetr and Sasha had found safety in the forest cottage of the old wizard, UUlamets. Or it had seemed to offer safety, if not warmth.
Now Pyetr was less sure it was safe. The dvorovoi, or Yard-Thing, accepted young Sasha, but the vodyanoi, or River-Thing, had tried to kill Pyetr, and he had met the ghost of Uulamets' murdered daughter, the Rusalka the wizard was trying to call back to life.
The worst of it was that Pyetr felt himself falling in love with her, as she seemed to be with him! But no love could quench her need for the life -sustaining energy within him. And no man could ling suffer that drain and live.

Chernevog
Tangled Trails of Terror

The forest wilderness lay somewhere north of Kiev in the spirit-haunted land of ancient Russia. There Eveshka, the former destructive ghost - a ruslaka restored to life - had dwelt in peace for three years with her husband Pyetr and the half-taught young wizard Sasha. But now something called her to travel north into that section of the forest none of them had visited for yeras - on a redezvous about whcich she dared not tell either her husband or his friend.
Pyetr and Sasha left to seek her - on a course straight to where Kavi Chernevog slept, on a stone where the forest guardians had bespelled him three yeras before. It was he who had once killed Eveshka and turned her into a rusalka.
Chernevog's magic caught Pyetr and Sasha in its web of power, and they were forced to take Chernevog where he willed. From Eveshka, there was no word. Dark magic was loose in the world and loose among them, in human shape.

Yvgenie
The Wizards Daughter

In the spirit-haunted wilderness near Kiev, years had passes since the evil wizard Chernevog had given up his life. Ilyana had grown into a young woman. Her mother Eveshka, the former rusalka, and her father Pyetr, kept her close and guarded her well. For Ilyana, like her mother before her, had been born a wizard.
Ilyana was careful of the temptations and mistakes of wizardry, lest they betray her, as they had once betrayed her mother. But there was one secret she kept hidden from her parents: For years, since the time Ilyana was very small, every spring had brought a playmate for her to the shoreline of the river - a ghostly boy, always her own age. Now they were fifteen. He kissed her, and she began to fall in love.
Then Evashka found them together and recognized the boy - Kavi Chernevog, returned to trouble her life again and take Ilyana from her. The peace that she and Pyetr had thought they had was gone. Once more dark magic was loose in their world.

Foreigner

Tristen

Gene Wars

Hammerfall
Bob Eggleton

Forge of Heaven
Bob Eggleton

Hammerfall

In this first volume of The Gene Wars, C. J. Cherryh creates a universe where two interstellar empires, scarred by nanotechnology weaponry, hover in an uneasy détente. The fate of one of these worlds lies in the hands of one man: a prince and warrior named Marak.
Marak has laways hidden his "madness" — voices and visions that beckon him toward a silver tower. When betrayal brings him face-to-face with the dictator of his world, the mysterious Ila, Marak is assigned a seemingly suicidal mission to cross his planet's vast desert and find that tower. Miraculously reaching his goal, he is given another, even more impossible, mission by the beings within the tower itself: lead his people to safety before the deadly hammer of the Ila's enemies falls.

Forge of Heaven

In this sequel to Hammerfall (2001), the story of an important desert planet that was nearly destroyed by the alien Ondat continues. Marak Trin Tain is the planet's leader and a key figure in maintaining the tentative treaty between human and alien powers. The focus here is on Concord Station, which monitors the tiny planet at the edge of the galaxy and is the fulcrum of the precarious balancing of peace and power between two intergalactic empires. Because of past associations, Procyon, a young watcher monitoring the planet, becomes the object of intense interest for the major powers, Marak, and the leaders of the planet's underground movement, which has its own agenda. Complications arise with the unexpected visit of the Earth ambassador and an attempt on his life that seriously threatens to reopen old wounds and plunge the universe back into devastating war. Although it begins quietly and occasionally slackens pace under the weight of complex political alliances and strategies, this story is not to be underestimated. It carries the reader along as it gathers momentum toward the stunning and unexpected ending that is realized with masterly aplomb.

Finisterre

Rider at the Gate
Ciruelo Cabral

Cloud's Rider
Stephen Youll

Rider at the Gate

A grief-haunted horseman on a suicide mission to avenge his dead lover; a boy on a quest to prove his worth and find his destiny; a saga of tragedy and loyalty in a place of stark, wild beauty and unbearable, maddening terror.
A new universe and a startling new planet where the lost descendants of colonists struggle against a deadly, unyielding frontier. On the surface, it is a paradise of fertile farmland and towering, ore-rich mountains—but its pleasures lie beyond humanity's reach. For here all animals, from tiny wally-boos and willy-wisps to fierce predatory goblin cats, survive by telepathy, projecting images that drive humans mad. Grouped in cramped walled towns, most humans can only hide. Only the Riders, the handful chosen by the native Nighthorses, have any kind of protection. Attracted by the complexity of human thought, the most powerful Nighthorses enter the dreams of individuals, choosing their Riders, bonding them into a telepathic community. While townsfolk cower behind a religion based on fear and ignorance, Riders and their Nighthorses shield the infrastructure of human settlements, challenging the Wild.

Cloud's Rider

In the distant past, colonists from Earth are stranded on a planet that is deadly to humans: the native wildlife is telepathic and the horrific images they project are enough to drive humans insane. Their only defence is to live in isolated communities protected by nighthorses. High in the mountains, Danny and his nighthorse are snowed in for the winter. Their greatest problem is an unseen predator that begins to prey on the humans...

Novels

Hestia
Don Maitz

Serpent's Reach
David B Mattingly

Wave Without a Shore
Don Maitz
(Also used as cover for "Alternate Realities)

40,000 in Gehenna
James Gurney

The Paladin
Gary Ruddell

The Goblin Mirror
David Cherry

Faery in Shadow
David A Cherry

Hestia

After a hundred pioneer years the colony on Hestia seemed to be nearing its end. Its holdings on that green and fertile planet were still limited to a single river in one valley. Everywhere else hostile fauna hedged them in.
A dam could break the deadlock, and they needed an engineer to construct it for them. Sam Merrit was the man who came in answer to their S.O.S. - and he wanted out as soon as he had landed. But once down on Hestia, it was live or die with the colony.
So Sam stayed - to discover certain anomalies that the hardscrabble colonists had thrust from their minds.

Serpent's Reach

The constellation of Hydri, also called the Serpent, became an undesirable destination during the era of humanity's most prolific interstellar colonization. For Hydri was under strict quarantine because it harbored an intelligent and dangerous alien race, the insectoid majat. Yet human colonies predating the quarantine did exist in this sector of space, which they called Serpent's Reach. Cut off from others of their own kind, they had their own inbred culture and special relationships with the alien majat. Raen was the only survivor of the massacred Sul family, and she had made a pledge to devote her life to seeking vengeance for her slain clan. Her thirst for revenge would take her not only across the worlds of the Reach, but into the very center of an alien webwork that knit the stars of the forbidden constellation into a complex of interbred alien hives that no outsider could hope to unravel, and where most of humanity dared not go.

Wave without a Shore

Freedom was an isolated planet, off the spaceways track and rarely visited by commercial spacers. It wasn't that Freedom was inhospitable as planets go. The problem was that outsiders - tourists and traders - claimed the streets were crowded with mysterious characters in blue robes and with members of an alien species.
Native-born humans, however, said that was not the case. There were no such blue-robes and no aliens.
Such was the viewpoint of both Herrin the artist and Waden the autocrat - until a crisis of planetary identity forced a life-and-death confrontation between the question of reality and the reality of the question...

Forty Thousand in Gehenna

Set in the same future as the Hugo-winning Downbelow Station, but fully self-contained, this is a story on the classic theme of human understanding of the alien...

The Paladin
ALAS FOR CHIYADEN

It is a country of myths and demons, dragons and magic, a land long ruled by the spirits of wind and water. Alas, its human sphere is not so beningly governed. The old Emperor has died, and the heir is weak and timid. Vicious Lord Ghita reigns from the Phoenix Throne, and once-peacful Chiyaden drowns in blood...
Blood will find the Emperor's swordmaster, too, should he depart his mountain exile. But Shoka vows to fight no more in a world which has forgotten justice. Then one day a peasant who would take up the sword seeks him out, demanding justice - and revenge Will the legends that rise around them hold power enough to turn the battles ahead?

The Goblin Mirror
A FRAGMENT OF POWER

Things weren't right in the little kingdom of Maggiar, not right at all. So the princes Bogdan and Tamas set off to seek an answer to the kingdom's troubles in the land over-mountain, a world they knew only from legends. And Yuri, the youngest prince, chafing at being left behind, soon followed them...
But the land over-mountain was in turmoil, for the goblins had declared war. The kingdoms the princes had come to find had all been ravaged. No sooner had the brothers crossed out of Maggiar than their party was ambushed. Bogdan was carried away to the fortress of the goblin queen herself. Yuri wandered lost through an evil wood, in search of his brothers. And Tamas was caught up in darkest sorcery, for he fell in with Ela, a witch's apprentice...
Ela possessed a shard of the goblin queen's magic mirror. With that single sliver of the queen's great power, she planned to challenge the goblin queen herself. And Tamas would be the focus of her battle...

Faery in Shadow

A curse, a sin, and a dark bargain with the Sidhe had condemned Caith mac Sliabhan to wander the wild woods, outcast from all humankind. Only Dubhain--a pooka, a Sidhe sprite--was his companion.

Collections

Visible Light
David A Cherry

Cassandra
Threads of Time
Companions
Thief in Korianth
The Last Tower
The Brothers
Endpiece

Additional Cover Art

C.J. Cherryh's Home Page