The Exile Waiting

The Exile Waiting was the first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, published in 1975. It introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake: a post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet's resources, and exile the dissidents.

It is an ordinary day. A transport arrives from off-world, piloted by two pseudosibs, a powerfully intelligent threat to Center's dominant families. A girl is punished for being in the wrong room under the gaze of the wrong person. A visiting stranger defends the wrong victim, and the wrong person is attacked. These ordinary mistakes set in motion a train of events that will relieve the suffering and return the exiles. They have been waiting for Center to fall, so that they can make it better.
Also included in this edition, the first republication of McIntyre's short story `Cages', originally published in Quark 4 in 1972, in which she first created the pseudosibs and their terrible origins.
Vonda N McIntyre's most well-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. She was a biologist by training, and the author of several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and many short stories. Her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun was filmed in 2013 as The King's Daughter. She died in 2019.