Finisterre ("End of the Earth") is an Earth-like planet targeted for colonisation, but the colonists soon discover that what they thought was a hospitable world is not suitable for humans at all because the local fauna is telepathic. These creatures send and receive images to and from the ambient, which the unwary humans intercepted, resulting in a mind-clouding "noise" that distressed many of the settlers and even drove some of them mad. To make matters worse, the mothership that delivered the colonists to the planet never returned. Underscoring the colonists' difficult situation, Cherryh has described Anne McCaffrey's Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover worlds as having the same underlying characteristic as Finisterre in terms of being "a bad real estate deal."