Matriarchies of Muirin

In the distant future on a far away planet, humanity has encountered an ancient and powerful alien species.

Unfortunately, the particular group of humanity that found them didn’t realize it when their failing colony ship limped into the solar system. Muirin, the spaceship, was in the process of complete failure with all life support systems shutting down. The people on board Muirin abandoned their colony ship and landed on the world which was their only hope of survival. It was a fertile, productive world with strange crystalline formations in the oceans that almost looked like cities.

The rag-tag band of colonists began to build new lives on the world they named Muirin in honor of the spaceship that had brought them there. Some people explored those crystalline cities and encountered the people who lived below the surface of the water: the cephalopodic Ladies. They were alien enough that neither side could communicate effectively despite the human’s best efforts and the Ladies’ telepathic abilities. The Ladies were confident enough to assume that they could alter humanity in any way they wished so they created a virus that changed the way that humans perceived them.

To the Ladies’ surprise, the virus was had lethal effects on a significant portion of the population. It also caused changes to the various survivors descendents, removing the size and strength differences between men and women. As time went on those alterations propagated into dramatic changes to the human’s social structures. The Ladies decided that humanity was worth observing. Races which respond in those ways to their technology were very rare in their experience and could be very destructive.

Ten thousand years later, the population of Muirin has almost entirely forgotten their origin as space farers but there still a few families among them who have the daring that it took to travel between the stars in a fragile ship with no guarantee of finding a habitable world. The Ladies are still watching and studying humanity from under the waves, their motives and desires unknown.

Map of Muirin

Find the books available in the Matriarchies of Muirin series over here