Union World

Union World is an unpublished novel by Alastair Reynolds; according to http://alastairreynolds.com/about/formative-years it was his first novel, and he has no plans to publish it."It started off being influenced by prevalent media SF of the time such as Battlestar Galactica and the early Star Wars films, but by the time I finished it (endless painful rewrites later) it owed a more obvious debt to written SF such as the Known Space stories of Larry Niven."It had an also-unpublished sequel, Dominant Species. Reynolds contrasts the style of their shared universe with that of the subsequent Revelation Space universe:"I was dissatisfied with many of the underlying assumptions of the universe and decided my next book would be proper serious hard SF with no faster-than-light, tractor beams etc. There would be no cosy aliens with similar technologies to our own."