Speaking Stones

I got onto these books because the first was excerpted at the end of Halfway Human. This is a story of an interstellar expedition which visits, and then gets stranded on, a world on which a formerly sophisticated civilization thrived for millennia and then mysteriously became extinct.

These books (in my opinion) do a masterful job of examining issues of gender and gender roles, fear of change, conquest, colonialism, and cultural appropriation in juxtaposition with the harsh reality that once cultures clash, there is often no good resolution possible. I really recommend these to anyone who read and liked Halfway Human.