Binging on Space Opera

[bibliogramma]

My excuse is that I had a week of relative down-time (work was slow) and I really wasn't feeling very well, and I wanted some light reading that was interesting and engaging but not intense or overly challenging. And I'd gone out and bought a number of books in this particular series based on my enjoyment of the first one. So I read seven more of Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire books.

The sheer fun of a sprawling space opera continues, along with enough strange dynastic and family secrets, ancient artifacts from long-lost civilizations, political intrigue and adventuring to satisfy just about anyone who'e into that sort of thing.

Schism
The Final Key

These two books are set before the time period of Primary Inversion, and focus on first introducing us to Sauscony Lahaylia Valdoria Skolia and her very unusual family, and thenshowing us how Sauscony becomes the kick-ass warrior and Imperial Heir that we met in Primary Inversion.

The Radiant Seas

This book immediately follows the events of Primary Inversion and covers about 15 odd years in familial and political developments for the Skolia family and the Empire they head. It ends with a really big space war, which is of course a necessity in a space opera, sooner or later.

Ascendant Sun
Spherical Harmonic
The Quantum Rose
The Moon’s Shadow

All four books cover roughly the same time period, from the perspectives of, respectively, Sausony's brother Kelric, her aunt Dyhianna, her brother Havyrl and her son Jaibriol. I found it very cool the way the four books interlocked, each one telling a little more of the events in the year or so following The Radiant Seas as the invlove the family of Skolia, and the politics of the Skolian and Eubian empires, until in the final book of the quartet, all the lines pull together and you finally have the full story of what's going on.

One thing I will note that became annoying for me was the increasing emphasis put on some of the more annoying of romance tropes, including the ones about people meeting for just an instant and becoming totally obseesed with each other, and forced marriages turning into real love. Sure, with telepaths, you can, I suppose, get an instant grokking of eachother - but not all of the relationships that form in weeks or even days are between two telepaths. And sure, royal families have been forced into political marriages for as long as humans have had royal families - but that's not always the reason behind the forced marriges in this series. I found The Quantum Rose particularly disturbing on this count, and it is my least favoured of the series to date. The later books of this series are definitely not for someone who in not able to deal with such tropes as extensions of romantic or sexual fantasies that, one hopes, are not sought after in real life.

The space opera aspect of these books is, for me, far preferable to the romance aspect, which I am largely ignoring at this point.

So, mixed feelings. There are three more volumes in this series, and I do intend to read them all, and I'll probably check out Asaro's other series to see if the blend of sf and romance remains acceptable, but I really hope that whatever romance there is in them is a little more realistic and a little less Wuthering Heights.

Comments

[sauscony.livejournal.com]

I've found the romance in the Skolian series more and more troubling too. I like Soz and Jaibriol because of the gender role reversals and the Romeo and Juliet quality of their relationship, but all of the forced marriages later on take a lot of the spontaneity out of the relationships and every couple seems very much the same after a while. I prefer romantic SFF to romance, but some authors depend on romance tropes and stereotypes and it's getting on my nerves. I wouldn't recommend Asaro's Luna books to you since those all have the same forced marriages, plus I found the fantastical elements to be too cutesy and silly in some of the books, and the female characters aren't as strong. Her AI books are pretty good and the romances in them are a bit rushed, but more realistic, plus the tech is cool.

I'm looking forward to the new Skolian book because it doesn't seem to be as relationship-focused, at least from the excerpt I read in Baen's Universe. It's about Kelric and Jai and finally advances the plot. I actually found the retelling of events from multiple perspectives to be very frustrating and to me it was just a symptom of never-ending-series-itis. Asaro has said on panels at conventions that she could write 30 or more books in this series and I have nightmares that it will end up unfinished like The Wheel of Time.