the owl and the olive tree

Dave Trowbridge and I wrote the Exordium series. The writing is awful (we wrote it in the late seventies and sold it in 1990) and I'm in the process of rewriting it, but the plot still holds up (once you get past the first 100 pages of the first one, which is a simultaneous attack that sets up the storyline) and the worldbuilding actually pretty much also holds up.