My life in books

The Last Hawk, by Catherine Asaro, is one the one hand firmly a part of her Skolian Empire space opera/romance series, and at the same time, an interesting entry into the body of science fiction and fantasy works that address, from various perspectives, "the battle of the sexes."

It follows one of the classic plotlines of the "battle of the sexes" novel: a man from a society where male and female roles are much as we see them in our own 21st century North American society is somehow transported, alone and in need of help, to a land where women rule, and what our society thinks of as the "natural order" of gender roles, abilities, characteristics and interests are reversed.

In this case, the lost man is Kelricson, brother to the Skolian Imperator and one of the most powerful psis among his people; he is also a cybernetically enhanced soldier. with ship and cybernetics damaged in battle, Kelricson crash-lands on Coba, a Restricted planet - one which has requested to have no contact whatsoever with the Skolian Empire. With his cybernetics damaged, his psi powers malfunctioning, and his ship destroyed (by the inhabitants of the planet, to prevent him from escaping and bringing word of their civilisation to the empire) there's little Kelricson can do to get word out of his whereabouts.

Kelricson's personal beauty, and his unusual gift for playing the game of Quis (although as it turns out, it is far more than a game, but an information network and a way of thinking, formulating and exploring new ideas, and negotiating conflicts and debates), make him both interesting and valuable to some of the most powerful women on the planet - the Estate Managers, hereditary rulers of the various city-state - and over the course of 18 years in captivity, he moves from the estate of one woman to another, by gift, trade, theft and conquest, fathering two children along the way.

Where the novel departs from the classic scenario is that Kelricson does not, of his own, spark a rebellion among the downtrodden men of Coba, nor does he convince one of the women who own him along the way to give up everything to either change her world, or follow him into exile from her people. There are signs that a desire for a more egalitarian relationship between men and women was already beginning to surface even before his arrival, and while he does influence some men further in this direction, there's still no sign of revolution at the end. And it is true that his last wife - who ends up the overall ruler of the planet - has some doubts about many of the ways that life on Coba is organised, and is likely to spend her reign engaged in significant social reforms, when Kelricson finally escapes, he does so alone, and whatever changes will come to Coba, will come as a result of the actions and choices of the people of Coba.

I enjoyed reading this more than I expected to. I'd been getting a little tired of Asaro's brand of space opera/romance, but this book came at me quite out of the blue, and was in some ways like reading a strange combination of Herland, The Odyssey and The Glass Bead Game. An interesting book indeed.

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.