Katherine

A book exchange yielded me a Baen paperback marked A Starfire Novel. Co-written again, this one is by Steve White and Charles E. Gannon, the later mentioned as "the newest author to the STARFIRE universe" in the Introduction to Starfire. [All-caps and bold in original.]

Imperative is apparently the middle book of the three that follow the Starfire book I read last year. (Exodus by Shirley Meier and Steve White.) So I'm not sure how comprehensible it will be. But on the never shorter to-be-read stack it goes!

I've found a bit more on the Starfire series, a 2001 Usenet post by David Webber that says

The exact sequence of events in the writing of the novel and the creation of gaming elements in the Starfire universe can be a bit confusing even for those of us who were there, so I don't suppose it should be surprising that it confuses others!

The novel Insurrection was written in 1989-1990 by Steve White and me. It was not then intended as a novel at all. Rather, I was working with the original Task Force Games, the owners of the Starfire game, on what (eventually) became The Fourth Interstellar War

Also that many of the novels are available online due to past Baen distribution, but as they're all earlier in the internal timeline than Exodus and thus I assume do not include the tentacled telepathic aliens I like in I probably won't read them. (Shirley Meier wasn't a writer for any of the other books.)

The Sharpest Edge has a map of the city, but Saber and Shadow has appendices.

Saber and Shadow has scenes from the point of view of other characters inserted or expanded. Megan's use and knowledge of magic is also more detailed, and the specifics that it is a man named Habiku she is planning revenge on; Shadow's Daughter was published five years after The Sharpest Edge and the year before Saber & Shadow.

The About the Authors at the back of The Sharpest Edge about S.M. Stirling mentioned "Currently under construction are two further fantasy novels dealing with Shkai'ra's early career."

And in a 1999 mailing list post he said
"SNOWBROTHER was originally planned as a trilogy (with THE GRASS SEA and THE RED HAWK) but that didn't pan out."

As for the short story "The Waters of Knowing", Stirling mentioned in a 2005 mailing list post "That's the first story I ever sold, btw. It took 12 years for it to get published"

The Anthology of Fantasy and the Supernatural was published in 1994, (I have the 1996 edition, which has the changed title The Giant Book of Fantasy and the Supernatural.) So counting back, "The Waters of Knowing" was presumably written in maybe 1981, around the same time as Snowbrother which was originally published in 1985.

From 1990, Harlequin novel The Other Mother by Pamela Jerrold has a bit of mixed metaphor ending the first chapter. "Until she met Sam she had regretted that Tom's only brother lived halfway around the world. But like a black sheep, he was better off separated from the pack."

I picked up from one of the free book exchanges in my neighbourhood, Sword-Singer which was published in 1988, is second in a series I'd been vaguely aware of by title but somehow missed (until senmut posted a drabble) is by the same author as the Chronicles of the Cheysuli series, which I have yet to finish but like.

Slowly re-reading The Cage by Shirley Meier and S. M. Stirling now that I've read Meier's book on the childhood of one of the main characters. Shadow's Daughter was published in 1991 and The Cage back in 1989.