Tuf Voyaging

Tuf Voyaging is a science fiction novel by George R. R. Martin, first published in 1986. It is a darkly comic meditation on environmentalism and absolute power. He has also cited Jack Vance as a big influence on the Tuf stories, trying to emulate Vance's style in many of them.

This fix-up novel is a collection of short fiction works published over several years beginning in 1976 with "A Beast for Norn", and did not incorporate the S'uthlam stories (all of which were published in Analog) until late 1985, shortly before the fix-up was collated, given a Prologue, and published in book form. The novel concerns the (mis)adventures of Haviland Tuf, an exceptionally tall, bald, very pale, overweight, phlegmatic, vegetarian, cat-loving but otherwise solitary space trader. Due to the venality and cutthroat tactics of the party chartering his one-man trading vessel, Tuf inadvertently becomes master of Ark, an ancient, 30-kilometer-long "seedship," a very powerful warship with advanced ecological engineering capabilities. Tuf travels the galaxy, offering his services to worlds with environmental problems, and sometimes imposing solutions of his own.