Primary Inversion (The Saga of the Skolian Empire) [Mass Market Paperback]

Catherine Asaro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1996 | Series: Saga of the Skolian Empire

The Skolian Empire rules a third of the civilized galaxy through its mastery of faster-than-light communication. But war with the rival empire of the Traders seems imminent, a war that can only lead to slavery for the Skolians or the destruction of both sides. Destructive skirmishes have already occurred. A desperate attempt must be made to avert total disaster.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the distant future, Asaro's debut novel pits Sauscony Valdoria (Soz) and her crew of Jagernauts-bioengineered fighting empaths-against the Trader Empire. Traders are a race that derive pleasure from the amplified pain and anguish of empaths-especially Jagernauts, as Soz knows from personal experience. Soz is also a likely heir to the powerful Skolian Empire, rival of the Traders. On a neutral planet, she meets the Trader heir and discovers he has the unusual psi abilities her race possesses. The two link mentally and fall in love. But will Soz be forced to kill her lover to protect her empire? Though Asaro, a physicist, provides more than enough esoteric detail on faster-than-light inversion drives, cybernetic enhancements and computer networks, she manages to anchor her story with thoughtful, engaging characters and an intriguing vision of the future-and she leaves the door open for a sequel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In a distant future where three empires battle for control of the galaxy, Sauscony Valdoria, the heir apparent of the Skolian Empire, finds herself inexplicably attracted to Jaibriol Qox, the son of the Emperor of Tarnth and the symbol of everything Sauscony has been taught to despise. Asaro's sf debut features strong male and female protagonists and a well-realized far-future world. Blending hard science with a familiar tale of star-crossed lovers, this novel deserves a wide readership.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (May 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812550234
• ISBN-13: 978-0812550238
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #740,882 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Catherine Asaro: Renassaince Woman

Propped against the bookcase in Catherine Asaro's home office is the framed diploma of her Harvard Ph.D. in chemical physics. Nearby, dangling from the doorknob, is a bag stuffed with the tights and leotards she wears when she pulls herself away from her writing for ballet classes. A former professional dancer, this California native has little time for the ballet barre these days. Instead, she's fielding speaking offers and meeting deadlines for her novels.

Winner of the Nebula (R) Award for her novel, THE QUANTUM ROSE, and her novella, "The SpacetimePool," Catherine blends exciting adventure, science, world building, romance, and strong characterization into her fiction. Her latest science fiction novel is DIAMOND STAR (Baen), and her most recent fantasy is THE NIGHT BIRD (Luna). She also writes thrillers, including ALPHA and SUNRISE ALLEY.

DIAMOND STAR (is about a rock star in the future. The book's release is the culmination of what Catherine describes as "one of the most exciting collaborations I've ever done." Working with the Baltimore rock band Point Valid, she recorded a music CD that offers readers a soundtrack to the book. Starflight Music released the CD, also titled Diamond Star, performed by Point Valid--Hayim Ani, Adam Leve, and Max Vidaver--with Catherine as a guest artist. Catherine wrote the lyrics for most of the songs, and Hayim wrote the music with Point Valid. Catherine also composed several cuts on the album, and Hayim offered her several of his original compositions.

After Point Valid dispersed to college, jazz pianist Donald Wolcott joined the project as the accompanist for Catherine's vocals. Asaro and WOlcott perform and book conventions and other venues, doing selections from the soundtracks to Catherine's books as well as jazz and pop songs.

Catherine's short fiction has appeared in Analog magazine and various anthologies, including "Walk in Silence," "A Roll of the Dice," and "Aurora in Four Voices," which all won the Analog Readers Poll for best novella, and were nominated for both Nebula(R) and Hugo Awards. Her novella, "The Spacetime Pool" (Analog, March 2008), is currently up for the Nebula(R). Catherine has also published reviews and essays and authored scientific papers in refereed academic journals. Her paper,"Complex Speeds and Special Relativity" in the The American Journal of Physics (April 1996) forms the basis for some of the science in her fiction. Among the places she has done research are the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She was a physics professor until 1990, when she became a consultant and writer.

In Catherine's youth, the arts were her focus. She studied ballet from age of five, trained in classical piano, and spent hours curled up with books. She successfully pursued London's Royal Academy of Dance syllabus through the first professional level and enrolled at UCLA as a dance major. Then she discovered she loved math and science. "I hadn't studied it much in high school, but at UCLA I ended up taking a lot of science and math," she remembers. "I struggled at first and sometimes I felt like I had no clue. Then one day I read the chapter in my chemistry book on quantum theory--and I was hooked. It felt more right than any other subject I had studied." She went on to earn a BS with Highest Honors from UCLA, a masters in physics from Harvard, and a doctorate in chemical physics, also from Harvard.

Catherine attributes her ability to entertain a broad reading audience in part to her upbringing. "My father is one of the four scientists who postulated that a comet hitting the earth caused mass extinctions, including the demise of dinosaurs. My mother was a student of English literature who loved to write, so from the beginning I was influenced by both the sciences and arts." While pursing her degrees, Catherine continued to dance, founding the Mainly Jazz Dancers and Harvard University Ballet. Perennially on deadline, she now focuses more on her writing than research, but she often speaks on the intersection of science and art at venues such as the Library of Congress and Georgetown University.

Catherine is also proud to coach the Howard Area Homeschoolers, whose students have distinguished themselves in numerous national math programs, including the USA Mathematical Olympiad, MathCounts, and the American Regional Mathematics League. She has served two terms as president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA).

Born in Oakland, California, Asaro grew up in El Cerrito, north of Berkeley. A challenger of rules since her childhood, she explores the boundaries of genre fiction in her novels. "It's like stretching different muscles for dance class," she says, adding that dancing and math aren't as dissimilar as people may think. "There is a beauty in seeing a math problem come together just as there is in performing a ballet. And the discipline it takes to do ballet well is similar to that needed to do math." But no matter what the style of her novels, she writes from the heart. "The flashy adventure is fun," she says, "but the characters mean the most to me, both as a reader and as a writer."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique sci-fi, January 7, 2005

By 

Reviewer (Near Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Primary Inversion (The Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Mass Market Paperback)

Asaro's future universe:

There are essentially 3 civilizations in Asaro's future universe. The Allied Worlds are those established by humans from Earth. The Skolian Empire and the Eubians (the Trader Empire) are remnants of another human civilization (the Raylicon Empire) that left Earth long ago and established a presence in the stars. When the Allied humans left Earth to explore the universe, they were suprised to find that humans were already there.

Allied humans are much like you and me. Skolians, however, are generally empaths, and their civilization is based on a royal family with exceptionally strong empathetic abilities. They are "psions", who can read emotion almost as well as communicating with words. The Eubians (or Traders) literally derive pleasure from the pain of a psion, who transmits the emotion and amplifies it like an antenna. Some of the Eubians are pretty nasty in their taste for the pain of their Skolian pleasure slaves. Other Eubians, however, aren't so bad.

The Skolians and Eubians are always either on the verge of war or are at war, and the Allieds try to be neutral.

This book, in particular, deals with one Skolian heir who is admirable in the way that she is a strong and amazingly capble woman. Sauscony Valdoria (or "Soz"), heir to the Skolian throne, is a Jag pilot, an elite fighter group composed entirely of highly empathetic psions. Soz can deal out some serious butt-whoopin' when she needs to, but her personality is more of an INFP for those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggss personality test. Soz is an introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving person who is exceptionally intelligent. The plot is well written and intriguing.

The science:

"Inversion" is a concept developed by Catherine Asaro to account for rapid transit through large distances in space; a possible solution to the problem of time dilation. Einstein kind of put a stick in the mud when, in 1905, he told everyone that Special Relativity wrote in a universal speed limit at ~3x10^8 m/s, citing anyone caught travelling near this speed with a significant time penalty. Some authors embrace time dilation, like Poul Anderson in "Tau Zero" and Joe Haldeman in "The Forever War". Others find ways around it, like Gene Roddenberry in the "Star Trek" series. Other authors ignore it altogether. The neat thing about Asaro's solution, however, is that it is mathematically explicit, even if it is not possible by today's understanding of real and imaginary numbers and their role in real space.

-- For the reader who is not fond of math, skip this paragraph. For everyone else, read on -- All numbers have a real and imaginary part, i.e., a+ib, where "a" is the real coordinate and "b" is the imaginary coordinate. "i" is the imaginary number i=sqrt(-1). In Einstein's equation for time dilation, if one simply makes a substitution "iV" for the velocity "V", one gets an i^2 term in the equation, which is simply "-1". This completely changes the behavior of Special Relativity. It breaks the speed limit, and time dilation can even become "time reduction". Similarly, length contraction becomes "length elongation", and the mass inflation term (defined in terms of momentum), actually becomes "mass reduction".

It's pretty neat how it all works out, actually. It would be to one's benefit to simply flip oneself out of real space and into imaginary space, and then hit the gas pedal. The faster you go, the lighter you get, and you can actually make time on the way. In fact, you could go back in time if you felt like it (if Hawking finds a way around the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). With this simple mathematical trick, Asaro has opened up a science fiction can of worms, where she can put an infinite number of spins on a fundamental plot line.

That's not all Asaro came up with. Her background in chemical physics has given her the ability to take relevant real world problems and incorporate them into her fiction. Imagine Klein Bottles that maintain objects in imaginary space while being transported through real space. Quantum stasis fields that freeze all the atoms in an atomic state and hold them there for a finite time. An infinite information network that spans all of real space while only existing in imaginary space. This is neat stuff.

Perhaps the best thing about this book (and her other books) is that Asaro balances hard science fiction with a genuine effort to write about *people*. Catherine Asaro is a unique woman because she is not only a chemical physicist (Ph.D., Harvard), but also a ballerina. Her characters often show a similar duality. Some of her books are more romance novels than hard sci fi, but there are quite a few gems in this series. "Primary Inversion", "Radiant Seas", "The Moon's Shadow", and "Schism" all tell the story of Sauscony Valdoria and her kids, and these are some of her most "hard" sci fi novels. In addition, the story of Soz's brother, Kelric, is told in "The Last Hawk" and "Ascendant Sun", and both of these novels are equally entertaining.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good First Effort, October 30, 2001

By 

AntiochAndy "antiochandy" (Antioch, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Primary Inversion (The Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Mass Market Paperback)

PRIMARY INVERSION is apparently the first scifi novel by Asaro. For a first try, it is pretty good, despite some shortcomings. She clearly is well-grounded in science, and the hard scifi aspect of her writing is intriguing and well thought out. The plot of the story held my interest (though I wouldn't quite describe it as a page-turner)and the main characters have enough depth to make you care what happens to them. On the other hand, Asaro's political set-up is, at best, fuzzy. The Skolian dynasty is "decrepit" and there is some sort or elected body, but once you get into the story Primary Valdoria's half-brother seems to rule in a very absolute sense. Further, way too much of this story revolves around special mental powers. The advanced inter-personal links that might flow from nanotechnology and computer implants aren't enough. There have to be special psychic powers as well, and these powers constitute the main difference between the rival Skolian and Trader empires. The special powers should have been left out, in my opinion. The sadism of the Trader ruling class could easily have had other sources. The "Rhon" versus "Aristo" business was, in its genetic origins, obscure and confusing. Finally, most of the action (which is well written, by the way) takes place in the first part of the book. More action in the latter part of the story would have been a plus.

Although PRIMARY INVERSION has its weaknesses, it was engaging enough to hold my interst throughout. For a first effort, it was promising. I will probably be reading more of Ms. Asaro's books. I think most scifi fans will find this an entertaining read.

34 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Promising but cut the cheese, November 5, 2001

By 

kankan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Primary Inversion (The Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Mass Market Paperback)

Primary Inversion is a heady mix of the worst of romance and the best of hardcore sf. The sadistic Traders and psionically-enchanced Skolians are fighting a continuous war. The two heirs of enemy houses(ahem, Romeo and Juliet?) fall instantly in love and cause a great ruckus. After a quick Sunday morning run-through, that is all I got from the book.

I'll probably be blasted for not giving this book stellar ratings, but hey I'm trying to be helpful by critiquing good AND bad points. I was interested in Asaro's writing because of her background in physics and was hungry for new female science fiction writers. Unfortunately, the plot reeks of immaturity. Grossly adolescent, Sauscony, the older but so sexy heroine, reads like a female version of James T. Kirk whose "heartbender" (umm, shrink) asserts that she is incapable of being with an equal. Bagging little boys is fine, but even that was boring! The galaxy seems to be chock full of strapping Jagernauts, quivering barmaids, and gorgeous little college boys, and a line of Emperors surnamed "Qox". Oh baby, whose Qox is it.. Ur Qox baby! And for "puggings sake", do adults not swear like adults? This is like the Bold and the Beautiful in Space.

There are a few positive points that, with more time and training would have made this book digestable. The underlying technology is refreshingly real and captivating, the ftl drives and antimatter weapons for example. Empathic fighters have cybernetic implants that can block their victims dying screams. The notion of love at first sight between the two heirs would seem silly if not for the fact that they had engineered "Rhon" genes that create pheremones so potent, they rack their potential mates with primal lust (like genetic soulmates). I honestly have no qualms about mixing romance with SF, but I was hoping for a more depth in character, plot, etc. You won't get compelling themes on the human condition, or strangely unique aliens or strong memorable characters. Hopefully, after this first try, Asaro will churn out much better yarns with the hope that she will dump the vacuous romantic cliches, keep the clean prose and intelligent science, and come up with a stronger plot.