The Exile Waiting (Handheld Science Fiction Classics, 3)

About the Author\nVonda N McIntyre’s most well-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. She was a biologist by training, and the author of several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and many short stories. Her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun was filmed in 2013 as The King’s Daughter. She died in 2019.\nUna McCormack is a British-Irish academic, scriptwriter and novelist. She is the author of The Baba Yaga (2015) and The Star of the Sea (2016), two books in the Weird Space series from UK science fiction publisher Abaddon Books. McCormack taught at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, as a lecturer in creative writing. She was also a co-director of the Anglia Ruskin University Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is best known as the author of numerous tie-in novels based on the science fiction TV series Star Trek and Doctor Who.\nThe first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, The Exile Waiting introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake.
In post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet’s resources and are strangling the city’s economy by their decadence, Mischa, a thirteen-year old sneak thief, is struggling to support her drug-addict elder brother Chris, and their predatory uncle who uses their telepathic link with their captive younger sister Gemmi to control them. The alien pseudosibs Subone and Subtwo have come to Earth to take over Center’s resources. Subone is attracted by the decadent living on offer and begins to unlink from his sibling’s conditioning. Subtwo has fallen unexpectedly in love with a slave.
When Mischa defends Chris from Subone’s malice, Subtwo hunts her beneath Center’s foundations, and discovers how terrible Center’s cruelty has been to its inhabitants with genetically distorted bodies and minds. They have to rescue them and leave… but how?