CoDominium is a series of future history novels written by American writer Jerry Pournelle, along with several co-authors, primarily Larry Niven.
The Outies, systems that retained enough technology to pose a threat, serve as a constant challenge for the Imperial Navy.
Jennifer R. Pournelle's novel Outies is a sequel that explores themes of alienation and the impact of biology on destiny.
In that time, it achieves peace of a sort, as well as interstellar colonization, but at the price of a complete halt in both scientific and political evolution.
The CoDominium (CD) is a supranational alliance of the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The CD did not unify the United States and the USSR, who appear to retain their separate identities and mutual distrust.
For instance, the world of New Washington and its sister planet Franklin orbit a red dwarf at some distance from the Solar System.
Beyond 50 light-years such stars are below sixth magnitude and therefore invisible to the naked eye, so they are unnamed and largely unrecorded, except in astronomical sky surveys.
During the CoDominium era, instantaneous interstellar travel as a result of the Alderson Drive gave humanity the ability to explore, colonize, and exploit various star systems.
The presence or threat of Outies is mentioned in all the Second Empire stories as a reason for the Imperial Navy having to deal with events in the most expeditious way possible, rather than allowing time to achieve ideal solutions.
Pournelle's daughter, Jennifer R. Pournelle, has drawn on these themes, writing Outies, an authorized sequel[7] to King David's Spaceship, The Mote in God's Eye, and The Gripping Hand, that attempts to marry hard science fiction with social science fiction as it explores what it means to be an "alien" in this Empire, and to what degree biology is destiny.