Search Worlds Without End

Seattle, February 2076. The Marq'ssan bring business as usual to a screeching halt all over the world, and Professor Kay Zeldin joins Robert Sedgewick, US Chief of Security Services, in his war against the invaders. Soon Kay is making, rather than writing, history.

But as she goes head-to-head against the Marq'ssan, the long-buried secrets of her past resurface, and her conflicts with Sedgewick and Security Services multiply. She faces terrifying choices. Her worldview — her very grip on reality — is turned inside out. Whose side is she really on? And how far will she go in serving that side?

Renegade, the second of the five-novel Marq'ssan Cycle, opens in August 2077 as the Pacific Northwest Free Zone, having survived the first year of its existence, faces both internal and external challenges. The US's Security Services has deployed a paramilitary covert action team to capture Kay Zeldin, Security's most wanted renegade, and destabilize the Zone's civil order. Nevertheless, Kay ventures outside the Free Zone to search for her spouse and dozens of other scientists who have disappeared, traveling through a war-torn American landscape she barely recognizes. When she encounters Security's formidable Elizabeth Weatherall, each woman risks all she has become in no-holds-barred, mortal combat.

Renegade is a passionate novel of love, trust, and betrayal as well as matters of life and death. It poses vital questions about political morality that resonate powerfully with the most significant issues of our day. With this novel, L. Timmel Duchamp, best known for her "provocative," "daring" short fiction, moves into new territory, mapping largely invisible connections between how humans negotiate the most intimate and the least intimate of relations.

Tsunami, the gripping third volume of the five-novel Marq'ssan Cycle, opens in early 2086, immediately after the signing of the Madrid Accords at the conclusion of the Global War. Many countries, including the US, have been devastated by war, and some of them turn to the Free Zones and the Marq'ssan for assistance in rebuilding their infrastructure.

In the US, the Executive, which has turned its attention to reconsolidating its power, meets with growing resistance to executive rule; and in the Pacific Northwest Free Zone, the Co-op faces an internal crisis when ugly, long-buried secrets are dragged into the light of day. Meanwhile, the lives of three very different women -- executive Elizabeth Weatherall, anarchist Martha Greenglass, and human rights lawyer Celia Espin -- become entangled as each strives to bring about the change she so passionately desires.

Blood in the Fruit, the hard-hitting fourth volume of the five-novel Marq'ssan Cycle, focuses sharp, analytical attention on human rights issues. The novel opens in October 2086. After ten years' absence, the Marq'ssan Fleet returns to Earth to determine whether humans should be quarantined, and a young alien, unprepared for the shock of human culture, becomes a dangerous loose cannon taking violent, unilateral action.

In the Free Zone, a flood of renegades led by Elizabeth Weatherall establish a fortress; even Hazel Bell, Weatherall's lover, doesn't know what they're up to. In the US, when the government responds to increasing dissent and civil disorder by ratcheting up its repressive tactics, brave and dedicated human rights activists like Celia Espin join forces with the Free Zones in a global challenge that threatens to undermine governments around the world.

Blood in the Fruit offers a grand, sweeping story through the eyes of four individuals with markedly contrasting perspectives and experience.

Stretto, the grand finale of the Marq'ssan Cycle, weaves together the major threads of the Marq'ssan story and encourages readers, as Joan Haran says, "to write beyond the ending." The novel, like the series as a whole, inquires Whose world is it? and shows several possible ways of answering the question through the respective perceptions and perspectives of the novel's five viewpoint characters: Alexandra Sedgewick, heir to the Sedgewick estate; Anne Hawthorne, Security operative; Hazel Bell, subversive activist; Celia Espin, human rights lawyer; and Emily Madden, star pupil of the maverick Marq'ssan, Astrea l Betut san Imu.

As always, never predictable, never finished, the consequences of all that has gone before continue to play out.