Catherine Asaro exploded on to the science fiction scene in 1995 with the publication of her widely acclaimed debut novel, Primary Inversion, which introduced readers to the vast and intricate future Saga of the Skolian Empire. She won wide acclaim for her innovative blend of cutting-edge physics, interstellar intrigue, and passionate romance.
Booklist praised Primary Inversion as "an unusually masterful first novel combining hard speculative science and first-rate storytelling to look at the galaxy's distant future. This is one of the best SF first novels in years, a likely candidate for the genre's major awards." And Romantic Times called Catherine Asaro "a formidable new talent. Primary Inversion is a stunning, fast-paced novel of a future war between two human empires. Asaro's elegant scientific concepts of space and time play an exciting role in this absolutely nifty space drama."
Asaro continued the saga of the Skolian Empire in six subsequent volumes - Catch the Lightning, The Last Hawk, The Radiant Seas, Ascendant Sun, The Quantum Rose, and Spherical Harmonic - gaining a legion of devoted readers and regularly garnering nominations for the field's highest awards, culminating in her winning the 2001 Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Quantum Rose--in addition to winning the two most recent Romantic Times Awards for Best SF Novel.
With The Moon's Shadow, Catherine Asaro begins a thrilling new chapter in this galaxy-spanning epic, as the titanic conflicts which have raged across the cosmos at last come to a climax.
At the age of seventeen the young nobleman named Jaibriol Qox becomes ruler of a vast galactic empire - and loses everything he has ever valued.
Born of a clandestine liaison between a renegade daughter of the Skolian Imperialate and a scion of the genetically engineered Eubian Traders, Jai Qox grew up in exile, unaware of the powers that coursed through his noble blood.
In the waning days of the bloody Radiance War that ravaged the galaxy, Jai was captured and returned to the Traders to play a role as a puppet Emperor in their scheme to consolidate their domination of space.
Now Jai must walk a razor's edge, to seize the power that is his by birthright without succumbing to its dark seduction and wield it for the good of all, and to avert a conflagration that threatens to engulf a thousand worlds.
Industry Reviews
Despite generous appendices containing family trees, dramatis personae, a time line, and other series data, newcomers will be lost in this space opera as Asaro brings the not-always-nice Skolians closer to a reconciliation with the not-completely-naughty Aristo traders. With the two pan-galactic empires still in ruins from the Radiance War, the 23rd-century intergalactic battle that also destroyed the psiberweb, a psychic Internet that provided instantaneous transmission of information-and more-throughout the galaxy, the teenaged Jaibriol, one of four children (he'd been secretly hidden on Earth) from the union of Skolian Imperator Sauscony Valdoria and Eubian (Aristo) Emperor Jaibriol Qox II is swapped for Jai's uncle, Prince Eldrin, consort of Ruby Pharaoh Dyhianna Seli, who had been held captive by the Aristos. The young Jaibriol hides a secret: he has the kind of telepathic talents that would normally have doomed him to a life of slavery (Aristos can't experience love, and so they torture telepaths so that they feel a kind of cosmic orgasm they call transcendence). After he's crowned Emperor Jaibriol III, he discovers that his uncle, Corbal Xir, who, unbeknownst to Jaibriol and the rest of the Eubian empire, has undergone an operation that prevents him from transcending and, thus, allows him to love, just might know his secret. Xir also knows that Jaibriol is a Ruby Key, that he can restore the psiberweb and thus deliver total dominance of the galaxy. Xir's plans become entangled with Highton Finance Minister Tarquine Iquar, who, having undergone a similar antitranscending operation, could end up as the young Emperor's bride. Can these schemers, as well as far too many additional characters who have fled or are thought dead, bring peace to a wounded universe? Tedious, confusing, pointlessly self-referential. Fans only. (Kirkus Reviews)
