Search Worlds Without End

In the year 3016, the Second Empire of Man spans hundreds of star systems, thanks to the faster-than-light Alderson Drive. No other intelligent beings have ever been encountered, not until a light sail probe enters a human system carrying a dead alien. The probe is traced to the Mote, an isolated star in a thick dust cloud, and an expedition is dispatched.

In the Mote the humans find an ancient civilization--at least one million years old--that has always been bottled up in their cloistered solar system for lack of a star drive. The Moties are welcoming and kind, yet rather evasive about certain aspects of their society. It seems the Moties have a dark problem, one they've been unable to solve in over a million years.

Robert Heinlein called it "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read." The San Francisco Chronicle declared that "as science fiction, The Mote in God's Eye is one of the most important novels ever published." Now Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, award winning authors of such bestsellers as Footfall and The Legacy of Heorot, return us to the Mote, and to the universe of Kevin Renner and Horace Bury, of Rod Blaine and Sally Fowler.

There, 25 years have passed since humanity quarantined the mysterious aliens known as Moties within the confines of their own solar system. They have spent a quarter century analyzing and agonizing over the deadly threat posed by the only aliens mankind has ever encountered-- a race divided into distinct biological forms, each serving a different function. Master, Mediator, Engineer. Warrior. Each supremely adapted to its task, yet doomed by millions of years of evolution to an inescapable fate. For the Moties must breed-- or die. And now the fragile wall separating them and the galaxy beyond is beginning to crumble.

<>In a return to the CoDominium universe of the Second Empire of Man, Outies pauses at the fringes of human space, on an outworld that never knew fossil fuels. New Utah instead pushed crude solar technologies to the limits of everyday utility. But a planet is a big place - and it's time for the New Utahns to meet the neighbors.

Blending hard science and social science, Outies explores complexities of biology, geology, and ecology at the heart of alien Motie society and evolution. While military science fiction in a sense, that sense is very much of the wars of our time. Outies plunges through the confusion, chaos, factionalism, and unpredictability of low intensity conflict with realism, but largely through civilian eyes.

In a twist on traditional space opera, it introduces Asach Quinn - a wily, thoughtful, genderless, and diplomatic foil to reckless pilot Kevin Renner. Leaving the aristocratic manors of Sparta, Quinn burrows deep inside the heads of members of the Church of Him - who believe that the red dwarf visible twinkling through the Coal Sack Nebula is literally the Eye of God.