This informal guide to the order of events in the Andrea Cort stories will be updated whenever a new story appears in the series. Last updated February 16 2022.
The Andrea Cort stories are part of what I now call the “AIsource Infection” universe, which details a substantial alteration in the nature of humanity.
As the stories in this larger universe take place over a period of many years, and in fact begin approximately a century from now, some stories merely use this history as background and others are more important to the grander story being told. Andrea Cort is one woman whose life is especially touched by the critical events of the phenomenon being talked about.
Most stories now being written take place at the beginning of her career.
“Burning the Ladder.” (ANALOG, May/June 2022) Her very first recorded adventure. She is 17 years old in this one, a prodigy respected by none.
“With Unclean Hands.” (ANALOG, November 2011). She is still an unformed thing of very little personal influence, though this will change as it becomes clear to her superiors how very formidable she is.
“Tasha’s Fail-Safe.” (ANALOG, April 2015). In this story she is still suffering the political fallout from her extreme actions in “With Unclean Hands.”
“The Coward’s Option.” (ANALOG, March 2016). Once again trusted enough to be sent on a mission, though she’s not expected to be much more than a rubber stamp. As frequently happens with Andrea, there are complications.
There is now a gap of several years, into which almost all new short fiction will be inserted. During these years she is continuing to work on various missions, some of which cement her ruthless reputation. She also zealously maintains her social isolation, a situation that will not improve for her until the novels.
Following the gap, we are introduced to her again with the first Andrea story I wrote, “Unseen Demons” (ANALOG July / August 2002), by which time she is a well-known controversial figure in the Diplomatic community, and widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with. In this story she receives her mission in life, reaching the epiphany that leads into the trilogy of novels.
About a year later, she appears in the first novel, EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD, which changes her status quo, changes her agenda yet again, and introduces her to the great love of her life, the linked man and woman with one personality, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard. They remain with her for the rest of the series so far.
This is followed by the second novel, THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD, in which she travels to the planet Xana and learns something she never suspected about her past.
“A Stab Of The Knife” (July/August 2018) takes place after she returns from Xana, and is in part driven by the relationships formed there. She in fact still has the very un-Andrea hairstyle she obtained in that novel, though she didn’t like it at the time; maybe the Porrinyards do.
The final Andrea Cort novel for now, WAR OF THE MARIONETTES, the one currently available in English only as an Audiobook, wraps up the trilogy and ends with her making a very personal decision that will change her forever.
The novella “Hiding Place” (ANALOG, April 2011), takes place less than a year later and will likely remain the final Andrea Cort story chronologically, as it concludes with her facing significant changes. At this point Andrea Cort will either move on and become a completely different person, or will retreat from her personal growth and back off from its implications. I cannot move on from this point at shorter than novel length, and that is unlikely to occur unless things change spectacularly. (But there’s always talk.)
OTHER RELATED STORIES
Among the stories unrelated to Andrea Cort that are especially important to the events that impact her life are the Draiken cycle, which launches with “Sleeping Dogs” and takes place at the same historical moment, their relevancy to the overall arc not yet established; though he shows up in “A Stab of the Knife.”
There are also “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” and “The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes,” which lead into the third Andrea Cort novel, WAR OF THE MARIONETTES.
Some of these stories reference a notorious terrorist called The Beast Magrison, who for ideological reasons unleashed a biological weapon called Magrison’s Fugue on hundreds of worlds, re-wiring the brains of the inhabitants in various nasty ways. Magrison is first briefly mentioned, but does not appear, in “The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes.” We get to meet a fanatic follower of Magrison’s, at the point when Magrison is believed to be still at large, in THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD, and that’s where we learn just what Magrison is wanted for doing. It’s nasty.
Magrison’s crimes have not yet been examined close up, nor have we gotten to see him at the height of his power. His ultimate fate, which is not pretty, is described in the novella “Our Human.” Note that the novella does not specify how its events relate in historical time, to the events of the Andrea Cort stories. They may take place contemporaneously, or many years later. The existence of this story seems to suggest that Andrea Cort, who vowed in THIRD CLAW OF GOD to bring this man to justice, will never quite catch up with him. This is not likely to change. Just because somebody rocks your universe doesn’t mean that you will necessarily meet him. But the aftermath of his crimes will continue to be referenced, in multiple places, in stories yet to come.
Many of the stories in the AIsource Infection universe hinge on emerging technologies in mind control. The religiously-motivated aliens of “Evangelist” have one such technology. Andrea Cort encounters others in a number of stories including “The Coward’s Option,” and in THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD. Draiken spends much of his own cycle, most notably the upcoming novella”Blurred Lives,” investigating the same developments. These are all little puzzle pieces, adding to the bigger picture.
There are other stories set in Andrea’s time and place that just happen to share the same milieu, in the same way that I suppose THE FRENCH CONNECTION is not at all inconsistent with SEINFELD. “Among The Tchi” is one of these. If any given story doesn’t seem to connect with the larger picture in any substantial way, it honestly, likely doesn’t.
MORE DISTANTLY RELATED
There are a few stiriesset many years before the Andrea Cort novels, in our own immediate space-faring future. These are “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s” and “Gunfight On Farside” and “The Gorilla In a Tutu Principle” (all ANALOG). I place these in the AIsource Infection sequence out of personal inclination, but the precise line that connects these stories to events taking place millennia afterward will likely always remain fuzzy. Maybe the third story in this sub-sequence will make matters clearer, or maybe not.
Finally, Andrea Cort’s universe is connected via a dotted line even more tenuous to a series of slapstick stories involving the inept space rogues Ernst Vossoff and Karl Nimmitz (whose misadventures are chronicled in the book called VOSSOFF AND NIMMITZ, naturally enough). Dejah Shapiro, who has been married at different times to both men, is an important character in THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD, and she discusses her current husband Nimmitz at significant length therein; also, the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, an interstellar entity introduced in those stories, which is important in THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD and in stories yet to come, is referenced at least once in almost almost every Vossoff and Nimmitz story. I would like to note here that the continuity only flows one way. The Vossoff and Nimmitz stories are comedy salad and impossible to accurately reconcile with the events of the greater AIsource Infection universe, in part because certain alien races mentioned in both have wildly different descriptions depending on where you encounter them, in the Vossoff and Nimmitz stories or in the wider AIsource Universe. Really, if this bothers you, consider them apocrypha, or stories fatally distorted in the telling. They are only part of the same history in the most cartoonish way.