Tuf Voyaging

Baen Books brought Tuf Voyaging out in hardcover in 1986. George R. R. Martin had already published most of its stories separately, starting with A Beast for Norn in 1976, and he added a prologue and a new storyline to hold the collection together as a book, drawing part of that material from the S'uthlam sequence in the magazine Analog.

The book's central figure is Haviland Tuf, a space trader who is exceptionally tall, bald and pale, heavy, hard to ruffle, vegetarian and fond of cats, and solitary by preference. A deal between some of his more ruthless passengers goes wrong, and he is left in charge of the Ark, an ancient seedship thirty kilometres in length that is both a warship and a machine for engineering ecologies.

Tuf then travels from one world to the next, fixing environmental trouble where he can and now and then imposing a solution of his own devising. Environmentalism and the effects of absolute power are the two things the book keeps turning over, along with the question of what it means to interfere in the affairs of a world for that world's own good.