As Cherryh has herself stated, the various tales in the variously interconnected series are meant to be read separately, though each volume is intended to maintain a reasonable consistency with the overall history in any case, her default narrative strategy – her narratives are usually non-omniscient, being restricted to the point-of-view of third-person protagonists – generates a continuing sense that there is always more untold in an Alliance-Union novel than that novel could possibly reveal. A third force whose influence is felt throughout human space is Earth itself, hugely populous, dominated by aggressive supra-planetary corporations, still the heartland of Homo sapiens, though under increasing stress as the expanding sphere of human endeavour inevitably passes beyond her sphere of influence. In all her work – which runs a gamut from Shared-World fantasies to Hard SF – an almost unfailingly creative tension can be sensed between argument and fantastication and her underlying instinct for construction was confirmed in the late 1980s by a retroactive and ongoing coordination of more and more of her work – singletons and series both – under the aegis of her sf-grounded Alliance-Union Future History, which embraces most of the home Galaxy through the third and fourth millennia, during which period the Alliance, structured around the Merchanter cultures which operate the huge interstellar freighters necessary for trade, manages to survive at the heart of the more ruthless, expansionist Union. Her first novel was Gate of Ivrel ( 1976), initiating the Morgaine series – continued in Well of Shiuan ( 1978) and Fires of Azeroth ( 1979), the trilogy being assembled as The Book of Morgaine (omni 1979 vt The Chronicles of Morgaine 1985), with the much later Exile's Gate ( 1988) added to make The Complete Morgaine (omni 2015) – a romantic Heroic-Fantasy quest epic whose interplanetary venue and underlying rationality prophetically underpin a hectic and perhaps rather florid imagination. Eventually she accumulated enough short fiction to publish The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh (omni 2004), comprising Sunfall (coll 1981) and Visible Light (coll 1986) plus 16 further stories, one – 'MasKs (Venice)' – newly written for the collection. Since 1976 – when she won the John W Campbell Award for most promising writer – she has produced more novels than stories, publishing several before her first story, the Hugo-winning 'Cassandra' (October 1978 F&SF).

Working name of US author Carolyn Janice Cherry (1942- ), who taught for some years (1965-1976) before becoming a full-time writer she is the sister of David A Cherry.

Betrayer cj cherryh