New technology, new choices . . . but who gets to choose? Conjoined twins Gordon and Johnny have never let their condition keep them from living full and fulfilling lives. Gordon looks forward to many years of closeness and cooperation. Johnny, however, faces their future with increasing restlessness, even dread. When the boys are in their teens, the new technologies of accelerated human cloning and brain transplants are combined into a single medical procedure. Someone whose body has suffered such extensive damage as to make normal life impossible may -- with court approval -- be cloned and...

Book One of the Twin-Bred series asks: can interspecies diplomacy begin in the womb? Humans have lived on Tofarn, planet of creeks and rivers, for seventy years, but they still don't understand the Tofa. The Tofa are an enigma, from their featureless faces to the four arms that sometimes seem to be five. They take arbitrary umbrage at the simplest human activities, while annoying their human neighbors in seemingly pointless ways. The next infuriating, inexplicable incident may explode into war. Scientist Mara Cadell's radical proposal: that host mothers carry fraternal twins, human and Tofa,...

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us " But what if it's the other way round? New technology records the highlights of emotional experience for others to share. Buy a helmet and you can feel the exhilaration of an Olympic ski jumper, or the heat of a lucid dreamer's erotic imaginings. Commit a crime, and you may be sentenced to endure the suffering you inflicted on others. But such recordings may carry more information than the public has realized. What will criminals learn about their victims? When a husband is wrongfully convicted of injuring his wife, how will...

They fled Tofarn and found a new home. Should they care what happens to the old? The Twin-Bred are finally ready to welcome visitors to New Landing, the refuge they found after fleeing the former Tofa regime. They have invited Lan-sol, child of the only Tofa Twin-Bred still on Tofarn, to cross the galaxy through the same wormhole that channels communications between the two planets. But suddenly, all communication becomes impossible. Lan-sol must decide whether to venture into the now-silent unknown. And the Twin-Bred must ask themselves whether the fate of those they left behind is important...