Firstborn, Lastborn Books in Order

Firstborn, Lastborn is less a tight same-cast series than a growing future history. The books and stories share a universe shaped by ancient human technology, interstellar drift, old wars, and the wreckage left behind when powerful systems break but do not entirely disappear. That gives the whole sequence a mythic feel, even when the characters are worrying about cargo, debt, disease, or whether a job is about to kill them.

The Ancestors are the shadow over everything.

Their ruins and machines are still scattered across inhabited space, and later generations live among the leftovers. In Finders, that means salvage. Cassilde Sam makes a thin living hunting relics, especially the color-coded Elements that power much of present-day technology. She is also living with a terminal illness, so when a former lover offers a shot at a massive find in the wreck of an orbiting palace, the gamble is personal as well as financial.

Fallen moves to a different era and a different protagonist, Nic en Doroney, but the pressures feel related. Once again Scott is interested in people whose bodies and futures have already been bargained over. Nic has been promised education and status in exchange for bearing a nanite burden in her blood, and the story drops her into a world of freight, war, and old power that is much less orderly than the promise made to her.

These are books about inheritance in every sense.

Who gets the useful parts of the past? Who gets stuck with the dangerous parts? What counts as civilization when so much of your technology is salvage, compromise, or half-understood legacy code from people long dead? Scott handles those questions through characters who work for a living, which keeps the scale human even when the background is huge.

If you want sleek military SF, this is not really that. If you want far-future adventure with strong worldbuilding, queer characters, dangerous relics, hostile or ambiguous machine intelligence, and a persistent sense that history is never finished with anyone, this shelf is exactly where to start.