The Braided World

“Come find what you have lost...”

Heeding this cryptic message from deep space, the crew of the starship Restoration journeys from Earth to a distant planet, hoping to find humanity’s lost genetic diversity. But with the human race on the verge of extinction from the twin horrors of plague and a mysterious scourge of dark matter, how can an alien world harbor any remedies for Earth’s declining populations?

Worse, the Restoration arrives depleted: its captain is dead, its crew demoralized--except for an indomitable old woman whose power and wealth give her the privilege of naming the new captain. Anton Prados, a young, untested officer, will now preside over humanity’s first contact with an alien race. An alien race that, improbably, looks exactly like humans. Only, the Dassa possess highly unusual breeding habits--and a reproductive process that seems to be the nullification of all that is human. And they think much the same about humanity…

Kay Kenyon sold her first science fiction novel, The Seeds of Time, to Bantam in 1997. Within a few years she left a career in consulting to become a full-time writer. Several subsequent novels were short-listed for such awards as the Philip K. Dick (Maximum Ice) and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (The Braided World.) Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies such as Fast Forward 2, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and Shine, An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. In  2007 the first book in her sci-fantasy quartet, The Entire and The Rose, was published by Pyr. Publishers Weekly listed book one, Bright of the Sky, among the top 150 books of the year. The series (rounded out by A World Too Near, City Without End and Prince of Storms) has twice been shortlisted for the American Library Association Reading List awards. The four books  are available in trade paper, Kindle, and Audible.com versions. Bright of the Sky is free on Kindle. Kenyon is a founding board member of the Write on the River writers' conference in Eastern Washington. She regularly writes on fiction topics and the writing life at her blog, Writing the World.