Alliance Unbound (2024, USA) is the second book of the latest Union-Alliance series, the Hinder Stars trilogy, co-written with Cherryh’s long-term partner Fancher. Cherryh has a whole timeline worked out for her novels, which even includes the stuff that doesn’t, at first glance, seem to fit into her Union-Alliance universe, like the Faded Sun trilogy. But this new trilogy definitely does fit in.

There’s Earth, and Earth Company (EC), and it set up a series of stations orbiting nearby stars. Initially kept supplied by near-speed-of-light pusher ships, but then one station discovers FTL, and two breakaway polities form, one based around Cyteen and the other around Pell. The EC was unhappy with this, and this kicked off the Company Wars. All of this is covered in earlier novels by Cherryh.

The Hinder Stars are those stations closest to Sol. In the book preceding this one, Alliance Rising, the EC wants to reassert control, takes over Alpha (Barnard’s Star) and builds its own massive FTL troop carrier. Meanwhile, a FTL route was discovered between Alpha and Sol, meaning pusher ships will no longer be the sole link between Earth and the expanding number of stations, which by now are carrying on very happily by themselves.

Alliance Unbound is set after those events. While visiting Pell Station, the crew of Finity’s End, a FTL megaship, which is on a mission to sign up all the merchant ships and stations to its Alliance, becomes suspicious of some luxury items it finds on the station. Which leads them to a supposedly mothballed station. And it turns out the EC is secretly supplying it with pusher ships, in the hope of… taking over the stations in the name of the EC.

At times, the prose felt almost like distilled Cherryh. It’s always been brusque and direct, but here more so; and yet there’s a lot of interiority, a lot of guessing and second-guessing. But the plot rolls on relentlessly, which makes for a fast read. I’ve read a lot of Cherryh’s novels, some of them so long ago the details are a little hazy… But even so, it felt like there was some retconning going on here. It’s intriguing stuff, and gives more of an insight into Cherryh’s universe, even if some of the details didn’t quite line up with what I remembered from other Union-Alliance novels.

It’s not like this has never happened before in fictional universes – cf John Varley’s Eight Worlds and Steel Beach (1992, USA) – and it’s more or less inevitable as authors dig deeper into previously unexplored areas of their own universes. Having said that, the pusher ships as described in Alliance Unbound struck me as a fascinating concept to explore – cut off for years, while in the outside universe decades pass. And yet I don’t believe Cherryh has written a novel about the pushers. The first explicitly Union-Alliance novel she wrote was Downbelow Station (1981 USA), which won the Hugo, and that’s set during the Company Wars.

I think I’ve said before that I enjoy exploring science fictional universes, and will often forgive most, but not egregious, deficiencies in the writing while doing that. Happily, there’s nothing here by Cherryh to forgive. She’s an excellent writer, and still going strong, if Alliance Unbound is any indication. She has a huge back-catalogue to explore, and that’s not including the 20+ Foreigner novels, and it’s definitely worth doing so.