The Radiant Seas

Buy this book. After reading a short biography of Dr. Asaro, I purchased Primary Inversion, Catch the Lightning, The Last Hawk, and Radiant Sun. I had hopes that she might be another five-star writer of hard science fiction (i.e., in the same league as Benford, Bear, Clark, and many others). She is: compared to her peers, she rates five stars. She writes like a very smart (and nice) person who, after years of gorging on books, movies, and television, now presents us with a collage of intelligent scenes and characters, avoiding using formulae from a writer's workshop. This book should appeal to mostly everyone. It will NOT appeal to the reader who is seeking a novel with an unoriginal, stupid, poorly-crafted plot and uninteresting, simple characters. Try Catch the Lightning while you're at it.

I love Catherine Asaro's range--she can do everything from narrowly focused, character-based stories to a vast, complicated epic like The Radiant Seas, where she expertly weaves multiple story lines together, without losing track of the individuals involved. All this plus good science (though admittedly some of it is over my liberal arts head.) I'm thoroughly hooked on the Skolian Empire and look forward to the next entry in Asaro's series.

I can't agree with the reader below. I just finished reading the 4 books also, and found them to be a wonderful mixture of adventure and science, with a little romance thrown in. I'd say don't buy them if you like your SF to be an emotionless mix of techno-babble. But if you like original ideas, a non-stop plot, and real humans who think and feel and love, these books are for you.

The scene in which Soz returns from exile to wreck her revenge on the Trader empire HAS to be made into a movie. Half throwback to the Ruby empresses, half cyborg war machine; Soz is totally human and (hard to believe) a strong woman that loves men! Love doesn't conquer all; Soz conquers all in the name of love! Believable science: we are all familiar with particle beams; only Asaro tells how they are created. Everyone has FLT, Asaro uses her own theory (as published in a journal of physics) to bend space. Psi WITH an organic explanation! Oh, and space battles with microsecond timing and lots of explosions. Romance that doesn't make you barf and hard SF that works. If there is a New Renaissance coming, it follows on Asaro's heels.

Building on her three previous Skolian empire books, Asaro has produced a new story that is epic in scope, yet maintains a firm grasp on the human realities and dilemmas of her characters. The story has three threads--the life of the exiled lovers, Soz and Jaibriol, heirs to two empires that are irrevocable enemies, and what is going on in their respective homelands. With intricate plotting, the threads eventually converge for a dynamite, deeply satisfying conclusion, while at the same time making it clear that there must be another book to take the stories forward to full resolution. A week after finishing The Radiant Seas, I find myself still thinking about the story and characters.