C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher won the 2020 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Alliance Rising, the first novel in their projected Hinder Stars trilogy dramatizing the early years of interstellar merchants forging a peaceful free-trading alliance within Cherryh’s Hugo-winning larger Alliance-Union series.
Now Alliance Unbound, Cherryh and Fancher’s sequel to Alliance Rising, is competing for another Prometheus Award as one of five 2025 Best Novel finalists.
As Libertarian Futurist Society members enter the final weeks of reading and voting to to determine the 2025 Prometheus winners for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame), it’s notable and illuminating – and hopefully helpful – to report on how each of this year’s Best Novel finalists has been sparking discussions and interviews and gaining recognition within the broader culture.
Certainly, Cherryh and Fancher, life and writing partners, have received significant and wide attention over the years in interviews and podcasts.
Part Four of our ongoing Prometheus Blog series highlighting the influence and impact of this year’s Best Novel finalists offers representative excerpts and links to several of the most interesting interviews of these co-authors, including insights into the novels in their Hinder Stars trilogy.
HOW THE HINDER STARS TRILOGY WAS CONCEIVED
“Alliance Rising is first of the Hinder Stars segment of the Union-Alliance sequence — a.k.a. The Company Wars — and represents the beginning of the Alliance. It comes, time-wise, before all the others, as Earth and its system try to reassert control over its colonies,” Cherryh told Paul Semel in an interview on Semel’s website.
“These books were not written in chronological order, and stand alone with rare exceptions, but they take place in the same history,” she said.
When asked where the original idea for Alliance Rising, its direct sequel Alliance Unbound and their projected Hinder Stars trilogy came from, Fancher claimed the credit.
“I began as a die-hard Cherryh fan, [but] the first hint of future collaborative work came when C.J. was working on Cyteen and nightly phone calls between Oklahoma City and Renton Washington began. C.J. would read what she’d written that day and I would react with questions and reactions, many of them grounded in how it fit in with what had already been written. And while I’m a great fan of the Foreigner universe, I’ve lamented that there had been nothing new in the Company Wars for years,” Fancher told Semel.
“If we were going to do a full-blown collaboration, as opposed to the mutual editing we’ve been doing for each other for years, I really wanted some questions answered. I wanted to fill in some of the historical blanks, to answer questions about the mechanics, if you will, of C.J.’s future history: how the economy really works, how the wars started, ultimately to see the rider ships in action…all the background bits and bobs alluded to in the other books, but never explicitly detailed, since no book had actually dealt with the events.”
Cherryh and Fancher quickly agreed on the basic concept and focus for the new trilogy.
“C.J. was as excited by the idea as I was — Finity’s End, Captain James Robert, and the beginning of the Alliance was my first choice. It was a time of massive change and James Robert is something of a background legend throughout the series,” Fancher said.
Working on the trilogy together gave Fancher a chance to stretch her talents – and imagination.
“Jane (had) never written in the Alliance side of this universe, though she was part of creating the Union side, and if we were to write together, it seemed logical to start right at the beginning for both of us, and write the story of how it all began,” Cherryh said.
“Understand that the universe we use, the physical universe, is quite real: there really is a Proxima Centauri and a Barnard’s Star, so we operate within constraints as real, if not as well known, as London and New York. We pinned down the places we’d use, and then worked out our story.”
As a bonus, the writers offered advice to those relatively unfamiliar with the Alliance-Union series about what they might want to read next.
“I’d go from here to Downbelow Station, then Cyteen and Regenesis, then Heavy Time and Hellburner,” Cherryh suggested.
“It is a universe, after all, and you can read things out of sequence with rare exceptions — Regenesis follows Cyteen; Hellburner follows Heavy Time — but they’re in different areas of the map, involving different people and stories that may touch on something you’ve read, but not that you need one to understand the others: it’ll just come to you, oh! this is a Union ship; or, they’re building the Alliance ships; or this is before Damon Konstantin, and this was Ari’s mother — the way you’d read something else, about somebody you’ve met elsewhere.”
CHERRYH’S INTERVIEW WITH AMAZING STORIES
One of the most illuminating interviews with Cherryh was on Amazing Stories magazine and website.
The interview, conducted by R.K. Troughton, begins with high praise for the award-winning author, who’s won three Hugos, a Locus, a Skylark and a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Her fantasy and science fiction works “have entertained and inspired readers for five decades,” Troughton said.
“Her stories pull the reader in with a passion and force that refuse to let go until the final page is turned. The amazing universes she has created leave the reader longing for more, desiring to return once again to their rich expanses.”
Noting that Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe “has stretched across an entire library shelf, captivating the imagination of so many,” Troughton asked her to describe that fictional universe and its scope.
“Alliance-Union is a future history for which I literally made, on sheets of glass and finally on computer, a real map of the real stars surrounding our solar system, places like Alpha and Beta Cent, Ep Eri, Tau Ceti, etc, and figured how we could use certain real places as a set of stepping stones to the stars,” Cherryh said.
“I worked out how—and humanly why—you could have an interstellar civilization with nine ships; and where that would lead. It led, in the stories, to people who wanted to be free of Earth’s influence, those that wanted to preserve it, and those who wanted to trade between them and belong to neither. It led to the evolution of a new kind of mindset, and the colonization of more places, and ultimately to contact with more than one other intelligence.”
For the full Cherryh interview, visit Amazing Stories.
For further reading: Check out the previous Prometheus blog posts in this series about interviews and podcasts with the 2025 Best Novel finalists. Part One focuses on Lionel Shriver (and her novel Mania), Part Two, on Danny King (and his novel Cancelled) and Part Three, on Wil McCarthy (and his novel Beggar’s Sky.)
Coming up: Highlights of some unusually glowing reviews of Best Novel finalist In the Belly of the Whale, the posthumous and last novel by the late Michael Flynn, a two-time Prometheus Best Novel winner.
Editor’s note: The Prometheus Blog strives to report widely with updates on all Prometheus-recognized fiction and authors, especially if and when their works are referenced in popular culture and international discourse, whether in newspapers, magazines, books, columns, podcasts, interviews, commentary and debates. Whenever and where’ve you come across such references, please bring them to our attention right away, so we can highlight them in a timely fashion and underscore the influence and impact of Prometheus-recognized fiction on our world today.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
