To the Confluence, humanity is the most terrifying species in the galaxy.
Not because humans are violent, though they are. Not because they are unpredictable, though that too. What terrifies the Confluence is something far more fundamental: humans are alone. Each one isolated in a single skull, cut off from every other mind, unable to share emotions or feel what others feel. They exist in permanent solitary confinement and somehow call it normal.
The Confluence calls them the Unjoined. They have watched Earth for centuries, equal parts fascinated and horrified by creatures who wage war against their own kind, who ## and lie and scheme, who experience loneliness as a temporary condition rather than an existential constant.
Keth is an engineer assigned to the observation program known as the Reaching. His mission is simple: study the humans, maintain his cover among them, file his reports. He is not supposed to be noticed. He is certainly not supposed to form attachments. He is absolutely not supposed to fall in love.
Vera Chen is a systems integration engineer who sees through Keth's disguise on day one. Sharp, curious, and utterly unafraid of the alien in her midst, she becomes the crack through which humanity floods into Keth's carefully ordered mind. What begins as contamination becomes transformation. What his people see as damage, Keth begins to understand as gift.
When he returns home, Keth carries the weight of human feeling in a consciousness designed for consensus. His testimony before the tribunal will shake the foundations of Confluence society and force his people to confront questions they have suppressed since the Fade-the catastrophe that nearly destroyed them and gave birth to the Protocols that govern their existence.
What is lost when minds merge completely? What is gained when they remain apart? And what if the species they pitied has discovered something the Confluence forgot millennia ago?
The Unjoined is a literary first-contact novel that inverts the genre's conventions, making humanity the mystery and finding in our isolation not a tragedy but a different kind of beauty.
For readers of Solaris, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, and Embassytown.
