C.J. CHERRYH

The constellation of Hydrus, known as the Serpent, is compact and obscure as seen from Earth's sky.  Even in the great era of interstellar colonization it remained obscure.  For it was under strict quarantine harboring an intelligent race, powerful, alien and inhuman.

Yet there were human colonies within the Serpent's Reach, cut off from the galaxy beyond, with their own inbred culture, their Families and traditions, and their special relationships to the inhuman majat.

This is the strange and brilliant novel of Raen, the last of the massacred Sul Family, and of her lifetime pledge to find vengeance.  It was to take her across the worlds of the Reach into the very center of the alien webwork, into the strands of thought and counter-thought that knit the forbidden constellation into a complex of interbred cultures that no outsider could hope to unravel.

In SERPENT'S REACH, the Hugo-winning author of THE FADED SUN and MORGAINE trilogies has written her finest science fiction novel to date.

- A DAW BOOKS ORIGINAL -
NEVER
BEFORE IN PAPERBACK

C.J. CHERRYH

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-depth confrontation between the question of reality and the reality of the question....

A different sort of interplanetary novel by the author of DOWNBELOW STATION and THE FADED SUN.

- A DAW BOOKS ORIGINAL -