A Note From The Author
Characters make fictional worlds go round. They make stories happen, have emotions, make readers read on – and sometimes are more than, or other than, humans. In science fiction and fantasy this "other than human" can be easy to see: robots, raccoons with blasters, turtles with spaceships, mirrors or battle tanks or spaceships who speak up with opinions and special knowledge, trees. . .well, yes, all characters other than human.
There's another set of other than human characters though. There's Trantor, Gehenna, Pern, Dune – yes, those are planets – and the cities of Bellona, Diaspar, and The Dipple, on Korwar.
Science Fiction is full of place as character, and we've used it that way ourselves in a number of projects, including the Low Port anthology we edited for Meisha Merlin. When place is moody, changeable, and has depth, character is what you're dealing with.
Often, readers don't see place as character, but we're lucky in our readers and over time we've had requests for more about Delgado, or University, or – and this comes to the book you're reading now – Surebleak.
Insofar as Surebleak is a character, full of mystery, unfolding new facets all the time, we've had direct requests from readers for "more about Surebleak."
Surebleak is a planet and culture in collision not with one culture but an overwhelming series of cultures – the culture of space travelers, the culture of Scouts, the culture of a galactic Terran community that had been willing to let Surebleak and its population sink from view. And one of the ways those conflicts are best seen is through the way characters, and we mean human characters in this sentence to start, the way characters imbued with Surebleak's character hallmarks, meet the challenge of dealing with those who are not of the world.
"Chimera" – first published on Baen.com in May of 2015 – joins the original story published for the first time here,"Friend of a Friend" in Sleeping With The Enemy.
"Friend of a Friend" may feel familiar at first because it, in effect, began in Dragon in Exile and you'll find some portion of it there. But "Friend. . ." wouldn't have fit in Dragon In Exile as that book developed, and so it was written more as a "what-if" or a "it could have happened" rather than being a mere outtake from a novel.
We hope you'll enjoy and let your friends know that Surebleak is a character, and a recurring one at that. You'll be seeing more as time goes on.
-- Steve Miller
Cat Farm and Confusion Factory
July 15, 2016