INTRODUCTION:
The Crystal Variation
If this is your first venture into the Liaden Universe® you’ve arrived at an interesting start, for in terms of story they actually describe action, characters, and adventure that made the rest of the story—now more than a dozen books—possible within the story universes.
Universes? Well, yes, because (as a few braves souls have noticed) our Liaden series actually takes place in two different universes, one a closed universe and one an expanding universe (like the one we live in) and part of that story underlies and informs all three of the novels included within this book.
We should point out that while we try to use a modicum of science and theory in our work, this set in particular revolves around some esoteric theories for which hardly anyone has the math, least of all us, and instead of making these hard science extravaganzas we went with what’s worked for us all along: action, adventure, and space opera with a touch of romance and the ongoing mysteries of life with and around a particular tree.
Crystal Soldier is the story of a man holding onto his humanity—what there is of it—through continuing in the face of overwhelming odds. He’s a soldier, after all, and he’s been trained to accept that at some point in his life he will 1) face such odds and 2) be expected to prevail. Exceptional at what he does, as the war engulfing a universe goes on, Jela is pressed into duty which brings him in contact with others perhaps less human than he is. Learning to trust—and doubt—is essential. This is a wide open space opera universe where some take unfair advantage of mental abilities and where each side is constantly striving to find the right variation to play in a nip-and-tuck game which is getting deadlier and more intense as time goes on.
Crystal Dragon begins in a near-mystical space, a space where creatures once like you or the authors have transcended mere physicality, if not the rest of mankind’s tender weaknesses like emotions. Then it returns to the surviving characters met in Crystal Soldier, where the war proceeds, the enemy slowly moving on the work of crystallizing entire systems, returning them to the underlying matrix of energy. We wanted to work with characters in that kind of space because of the challenge of description on that boundary land. It was an interesting project and we hope you think so too.
Balance of Trade won the Hal Clement Award for best Young Adult Science Fiction in 2005, an award we treasure greatly, having known and admired Hal (Harry C. Stubbs) as a fan and as a pro over several decades. In this coming of age space opera, a young apprentice trader finds his future determined by the crowded condition of the ship he grew up on—and his mother, as Captain, is among the most willing to see him gone. Challenged to accept the assignment or find his own new berth, Jethri Gobelyn does so in an entirely unpredictable way, leaving behind the small Terran family ship life he’d known to join a Liaden ship’s crew. Set at a time when the prior war is nearly forgotten or wildly misremembered, Balance gave us the opportunity to work with some younger, less accomplished characters and follow them as they grew, which we—and obviously the Clement Award judges—found good.
So what’s new, if the omnibus series is your first immersion in Lee & Miller and you’ve finished those? Fledgling, Saltation, and the forthcoming Ghost Ship. The Liaden novel Mouse and Dragon is also available from Baen, and it fits into a strategic spot, feeding into and drawing from the mini arc encompassing Local Custom, Scout’s Progress and Mouse and Dragon; some will suggest that Ghost Ship only be read after Mouse and Dragon.
We’d like to thank Baen books for producing this omnibus—The Crystal Variation—as well as the others in the series: The Dragon Variation, The Agent Gambit, and Korval’s Game—which together represent much of the long work we did within the universes we first discovered in Agent of Change.
If this is your first encounter with a Liaden Universe® book—welcome. We hope you’ll find this a start to a lot of good reading. If you’re an old friend, stopping by for a revisit—we’re very glad to see you.
Thank you.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Waterville Maine
September 2010