Treated like an outcast in a genetically engineered world, human throwback Gray Bridger hopes to escape Testament and the powerful Bridger matriarchy that plots to use Gray for its own devices. **From Booklist In her second novel, Freireich returns to the deftly imagined human-colonized worlds that helped make Becoming Human a success. In the Polite Harmony of Worlds, Testament is a small planet isolated by a quarantine of its genetically modified Altereds, each of whom embodies the memories and personalities of significant ancestors of one or another of Testament's clans. Desperate to explore the other Harmony worlds, non-Altered human Gray Bridger discovers that his politically connected grandmother has bound him to the quarantine's rules by arranging his marriage to an Altered, a beautiful woman with no identity apart from those of the predecessors she embodies. Abandoning his initial plan simply to kill her, Gray is increasingly attracted to her dominant personality, who agrees to help him escape Testament. Freireich's command of characterization and her masterfully rich portrayal of the Polite Harmony's complex mixture of cultures already make her small body of work an important contribution to contemporary science fiction. Carl Hays

The clone of a traitor, sub-human spy "probe," August is catapulted into the midst of an interplanetary war as the planet Neuland is threatened with alien annihilation and August himself confronts his dream of becoming fully human. **