Planet Pirates

About the Planet Pirates series

The Planet Pirates trilogy grew out of a shared-universe experiment: Anne McCaffrey developed the premise, of interstellar piracy and a genetic-plague conspiracy threatening the Federation of Sentient Planets, and then co-wrote each of the three novels with a different collaborator, following two women whose lives are upended by the same conspiracy from opposite directions. Sassinak (1990, with Elizabeth Moon) follows a girl sold into slavery by pirates who grows up to become a decorated Fleet commander hunting down the same pirate networks that destroyed her colony. The Death of Sleep (1990, with Jody Lynn Nye) runs in parallel, telling the story of Lunzie, a doctor whose faster-than-light travel has left her stranded generations out of her own time, as she stumbles onto evidence of the plague conspiracy at the trilogy's center.

Generation Warriors (1991, back with Elizabeth Moon) brings Sassinak's and Lunzie's separate investigations together — the two women turn out to be aunt and niece — for a joint assault on the conspiracy's source. The trilogy's structure, with McCaffrey rotating collaborators across installments while keeping the overarching plot continuous, is unusual even within her own extensively co-authored bibliography, and gives Sassinak and Lunzie distinctly different voices depending on which co-writer is driving a given book.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Sassinak (1990, with Elizabeth Moon), The Death of Sleep (1990, with Jody Lynn Nye), Generation Warriors (1991, with Elizabeth Moon). The first two books run in parallel, following different protagonists — Sassinak's military career and Lunzie's displaced-in-time medical mystery — who don't actually meet until the trilogy's conclusion, so reading them in publication order (rather than trying to interleave chronologically) is the intended experience and the way the reveal of their relationship is meant to land.