Novels

THE DOOMSDAY EFFECT
1986
By Thomas Wren
(An early pen name)

A remnant of the Big Bang, a micro black hole smaller than a hydrogen atom with the mass of a mountain, wanders into the solar system and by chance falls into the Earth’s gravity well. Instead of passing through and beyond, in a parabolic orbit, the invisible mite goes into a comet-like orbit, circling around and through the planet. At first, the first effects are small, almost unnoticeable: a whip-crack here, a landslide there. But the menace is growing and the Earth’s surface, imperceptibly at first, is starting to subside. Grace Porter and Alex Kornilov head a team of robotics scientists and engineers from Pinocchio, Inc., in trying to deflect or capture the black hole. They enlist the help of Jason Bathespeake, a cyber blind from birth, who uses his direct perception of data streams to devise a solution that will change the solar system forever and put a new moon in Earth’s sky.

The forces of regionalism and factionalism, abetted by the decision to repudiate the national debt and a rogue nuclear attack on Washington, DC, splits the United States into a clutch of warring provinces led by strong men with private armies. James Granville Corbin—"Granny" to his friends and enemies—returns from an adventurous war in Mexico to settle old scores. He eventually defeats the second strongest army on the continent and reunites the nation in the role of First Citizen. The story is told from Corbin’s own first-person chronicles, with commentary by his bodyguard and henchman, the renegade Billy Birdsong.

AN HONORABLE DEFENSE
First in the Crisis of Empire Series
1988
With David Drake

The assassination of the emperor disrupts the carefully crafted balance of power in an empire that blends humans and other sentient species. Who will give up the peace first in a move toward domination? The blow falls on the paradise world of Palaccio, a green and blue planet of fair winds and playtime for humans, which most other species avoid as "Stink World." When the war breaks out, the man who must devise a defense is the least likely to succeed, Taddeuz Bertingas, a public relations functionary who never took basic military service. He finds himself the point man in an interspecies coalition to save the last remnants of empire.

A shard of semiprecious agate, a fragment of the Stone, links the time of the Crusades and the Knight Templar Thomas Amnet with the twenty-first century world of jazz pianist Tom Gurden. Both must battle the spirit of a dead Hashishiyun magi and assassin to unravel the betrayal that led the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem to its defeat at Hattin. By overcoming chaos in his own time, Gurden heals the breach that has divided the Holy Land for a millennium.

ME, A Novel of Self-Discovery
1991

Part computer virus, part experiment in artificial intelligence, ME—which stands for Multiple Entity—is the first self-replicating operating system kernel. Launched by the cybernetics experts at Pinocchio, Inc., he tracks the networks of the world, stealing a secret file here, finessing a poker hand there. And all the time he tries to understand his human creators and sort out the intersecting connections he has with them. When a trip to Canada lands him on the other side of a broken wire, he has to go hardware: uploading into an automaton still in its crate, assembling himself by rote, and walking back across the Canadian border.

In the mild climate of a decades-long Maunder minimum—a recurring cessation in sunspot activity—humankind has explored the solar system and expanded to the farthest planets. No one is prepared when the Sun awakes with a massive flare that has been a million years in development deep within the stellar core. Its burst of electromagnetic energy, followed by a shower of ionized particles, rips across the system with devastating results. A team of astronomers led by the indomitable Sultana Carr reestablishes the science of solar physics and helps to heal the devastation.

CRYGENDER
1992

When the career of an international terrorist and assassin comes to an end, she can elect to go underground forever—or remake herself in full public view as the world’s first surgical hermaphrodite: half man, half woman, all sizzle and flash. In this guise she builds a pleasure palace on the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay and nourishes a sideline business in body parts. Only an old man with a bionic spine, the detective Jean Metis, can pick up her trail and bring the fugitive to justice.

Forty years after the mission that put cyborg Roger Torraway on the surface of Mars, human colonists have far outstripped his antique mechanical adaptations. Roger is now the old man of the hills, wandering the unexplored areas and only rarely visiting the new underground warrens. A looming political crisis brings Demeter Coghlan, daughter of a Texas political dynasty, to the Red Planet. There she joins fortunes with Torraway to save the colony and resolve the human/machine nexus that was formed in Frederik Pohl’s seminal book Man Plus.

Novellas

Cast adrift from a damaged luxury liner deep in the Belt, a young crewman discovers a failed asteroid colony. He also discovers the fate of the feral colonists when they take him captive. They have made a remarkable low-tech adaptation to life among the tumbling rocks and fear all contact with the system-wide civilization outside. Now all he has to do is prove his worth to them and stay alive long enough to get home.

A human crew in search of Slaver artifacts crash-lands their General Products-hulled ship on what they believe to be an uninhabited world dominated by a girdle of high forest canopy. When they descend to ground level, however, they find the landscape is strangely "manicured" with meter-wide slash marks at the base of every tree. Only after one of the galaxy’s last remaining Bandersnatchi has sucked out the insides of their ship do they discover how much of the Slaver Empire is still around—and how badly the Kzinti want a piece of it.