Palace, A Novel of the Far Future

by Katharine Kerr and Mark Kreighbaum

Here's one collaboration that will be easy to shelve and find: KE and KR should fit nicely into the same slot.

Palace takes place in an area of Galaxy known as The Pinch.

The Pinch --

An area closed off from the rest of Rim civilization by the shifting of certain microshunts, as we are calling our means of getting around the problem of FTL.

Microshunts --

are not areas through which you travel in any real sense. They are, rather, tears in the fabric of being, weaknesses along a sub-continuum fault or superstring line -- in short, mathematical discontinuities in the sequencing of the universe. If you enter a shunt, you cease to be within the universe and thus you cease to exist. There is never any memory of having shunted, because during the jump, no one exists to do the remembering.

"Mathematically speaking, it is certain that you exist before you enter the shunt and that you are travelling in a given direction. Therefore, the mathematical probability that you will continue to exist and to be travelling in the same direction on the other side of the discontinuity is very very high, though by no means certain. It is possible to find yourself travelling in a very different direction upon leaving the shunt. It is also possible that you will no longer exist at all."
------ Georgie of the Gyre

Proximity --

Because of the nature of the shunts, the concept of "proximity" means something very different out in the Pinch. Since it takes at least six months to bring a ship up to relativistic speeds, that is, some high percentage of the speed of light, and another six to drop it back down again, long-distance travel by any other means than shunts is mostly impossible, simply because of the length of time it would take to go from one star system to another at sub-light speeds. Thus, two systems may be, for example, a hundred light years apart, while another pair might be five hundred lys distant, but if that second pair shares a micro-shunt, then its members will be "closer" together than those of the first pair.

Ly, a light year, is pronounced lee.

Thus a map of the Pinch will convey its information as a series of lines, the microshunts, and dots, the star systems those shunts connect. A planet such as Souk will take a "central" place if it lies at the nexus of a number of shunts, no matter where it might fall within an actual hologrammatic star map. Souk is "close" to Palace and Belie because of the pattern of microshunts; in reality it lies over a thousand lys from each, and several other systems, which lie technically closer to Souk, a mere hundred and ten lys for one and a hundred and seventy for the other, are to all intents and purposes unreachable.

An excerpt from the book . . .

Want to know who wrote what?

I have a GIF of the American cover for Palace. Since it's the best cover my work has ever gotten in the USA (the British Deverry covers are spectacular), I'm eager to show it off. The problem is, the cover is so detailed that a thumbnail is useless. I've therefore loaded the GIF on a separate page, so you can decide if you want to wait for it to load. I tried viewing smaller GIFS, but over a net browser, as opposed to a direct viewing program, they're too muddy to be worth the connect time.

Many many thanks to Brook and Julia West for scanning the cover flats in for me.