Doona

About the Doona series

Earth's population crisis pushes a group of human colonists to the lush planet Doona, only for them to discover it's already inhabited — by the Hrruban, a feline humanoid species whose own government considers the planet exclusively theirs. Anne McCaffrey's 1969 debut in this universe, Decision at Doona, imagines a first-contact story resolved not through conflict but through Doona's youngest colonists and Hrruban cubs simply befriending each other faster than the adults can build a diplomatic crisis, forcing both governments to accept an unauthorized shared colony as a fait accompli.

McCaffrey left the world alone for over two decades before returning to it with co-author Jody Lynn Nye for two further novels, Crisis on Doona (1992) and Treaty at Doona (1994, also published as Treaty Planet), which follow the now-adult children of the original settlers as the fragile human-Hrruban arrangement is tested by outside political interests looking to exploit the planet's unofficial status. The trilogy is smaller in scale than McCaffrey's other series, but its premise — that children raised without inherited prejudice can out-diplomat their parents' governments — gives it a distinct, optimistic register within her body of work.