Juniper Time

Man reached for the stars - and failed to keep the Earth in his grasp. With the western United States devastated by drought, the survivors huddle in squalid concentration camps in the east. And still the dream won't go away. In high orbit, an artefact is found that may be man's first contact with aliens. The only woman who can decode it has found her future in the past, in the remote Indian territories of the Pacific Northwest. But in which direction does the planet's survival lie?

Kate Wilhelm (1928-2018) Working name of the US writer Katie Gertrude Meridith Wilhelm Knight, born in Ohio in 1928. She started publishing SF in 1956 with 'The Pint-Sized Genie' for Fantastic, and continued for some time with relatively straightforward genre stories; it was not until the late 1960s that she began to release the mature stories which have made her reputation as one of the 20th century's finest SF writers. She was married to noted author and critic Damon Knight and together they have had a profound influence beyond their writing, through the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference and its offshoot, in which she was directly involved, the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop. She won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, and has won the Nebula Award three times. Kate Wilhelm died in 2018, aged 89.