Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Pt. 1) [Hardcover]

Catherine Asaro (Author)

Book Description

Series: Saga of the Skolian Empire | Publication Date: November 25, 2004

In 2002, Catherine Asaro won the Nebula Award for The Quantum Rose, the sixth novel in her Saga of the Skolian Empire. This very same novel was also named Best SF Novel by the Romantic Times. Schism: Part One of Triad is the tenth novel in this multiple award-winning series, and represents an excellent entry point into the series.

For Schism harkens back to the early years of the Skolian Empire, back to the beginning of the war between Skolia and the Euban Traders. Twenty-three years have passed since the fateful vote in the Skolian Assembly that Roca missed in Skyfall. It created the first open hostility between Eube and Skolia, which has only deepened over the ensuing years.

Now, Eube senses an opportunity, for strife has riven the first family of the Skolian Empire. Sauscony, the daughter of Roca and Eldrinson, is ready to seek her fortune as an officer-in-training in the Skolian military. When her father forbids her to undertake such a dangerous path, a wedge is formed as Soz chooses duty over family. Eube hopes to make this permanent, a divide that will leave the Skolian Empire ripe for conquest. And they're willing to kill anyone to make it happen.

Revel in the latest adventure of this Nebula Award-winning series.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tensions escalate between the Skolians and their enemies, the Aristo Traders, in Nebula-winner Asaro's dizzying yet accessible SF soap opera, the 10th installment in her Skolian Empire saga and the first in a sequence exploring the childhoods of some of the earlier books' major players. Young Soz secretly applies to become a Jagernaut, a member of the Skolian elite fighting force, against the wishes of her father, Eldrinson. Soz's high scores and powerful psychic abilities guarantee her entry, but when her brother Althor comes to collect her, Eldrinson disowns them both. Soz's brother Shannon runs away, and when Eldrinson sets after him, Eldrinson is kidnapped and tortured by nasty Aristo Trader Vitarex, an event that presages war. Meanwhile, Soz, brilliant and difficult, excels at school, driven by her hatred of the Aristos and what they did to her father. There are plenty of exciting firefights, but the novel's focus on emotional connections, forgiveness, love and growing up will appeal more to a female than a male sensibility. YA readers will identify with the mostly teenage protagonists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The story of the Skolian Empire continues in the follow-up to Skyfall (2003). Roca and Eldrinson now have a numerous and respectable family, which includes Althor, a trained Imperial Jagernaut (cybernetic warrior), and 17-year-old Sauscony, who wants to become an IJ, despite her father's violent objections. Not all the conflicts on hand are within the family, however; sent into battle, Althor dies winning a crucial victory. Eldrinson and Shannon, the son Eldrinson thinks is wayward, face the Aristo trader Vitarex, whose unpleasantness fits his infelicitous name, and prevent him from kidnapping Eldrinson to use against the empire. At the military academy to which her obvious talents have gained her admittance, Sauscony survives cheating scandals, sexual harassment, and the punishing regimen to emerge a Jagernaut reconciled with her father. Asaro's series is beginning to resemble Georgette Heyer crossed with Dune: the best of large-scale romance interleaved with the best of space-operatic saga. And Asaro seems ready to carry on for all readers minded to do likewise. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (November 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765309513
• ISBN-13: 978-0765309518
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,589,746 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Now this is more like it..., May 12, 2005

By 

Lost in Space (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Pt. 1) (Hardcover)

After Skyfall, with its cliche Roca/Eldrinson romance plot, I was a bit apprehensive about what I'd find in this book. Happily, I can report that this novel is a definite improvement over the last one.

While it does deal heavily with Eldrinson and Roca again, this time Roca comes across as a person, rather than a perfect fantasy romance heroine. And Eldrinson actually grows as a character; he starts out as quite provincial and sexist, and is forced to open his eyes to the realities of the harsh universe he lives in. Eldrinson's never been a favorite of mine, but in this book I enjoyed reading about him.

There is a very strong focus on Soz, Roca and Eldrinson's daughter who in earlier books was a great warrior and even became the leader of the Skolian military (Primary Inversion, The Radiant Seas). In this book, a much younger Soz defies her father and goes to the Skolian Jagernaut military academy. Even in her youth, she's a terrific character, with a nice balance of strengths and flaws. I found her reaction to all the pressures she was under quite believable, especially near the end where she behaves in a way that will be recognizable to overstressed students and cadets everywhere. She gives in to temptation, justifies it to herself, but comes clean in the end.

Kurj, Roca's eldest son, also comes across as more of a person than he has in the past. While I like that he's getting more development and is no longer being treated as an unfeeling antagonist, I do fear that he will become less intriguing with too much exposure. After Spherical Harmonic, I found Dyhianna Selei to be more sympathetic but much less interesting. I'd hate to see Kurj go the same way.

We also get some background on Soz's older brother, Althor.

There was a lot of development done on Shannon (another of Roca and Eldrinson's many children) and his relationship to the Blue Dale Archers. The Archers are fascinating (if a bit elvish *G*), but again, too much exposure will probably make them less intriguing. Sometimes the mystery is more interesting than the explanation. I thought we got a good balance in this novel, though. Still, I look forward to finding out more about why the old Ruby Empire engineered the Lyshriol system and its occupants. This mystery has only grown over the last few novels, but I'm enjoying it immensely.

Once again, a member of the Skolian royal family is captured and tortured by an Aristo. That part seemed rather repetitive, as this is a common occurrence in Asaro's books. By the time she's through, that whole family is going to be completely traumatized and dysfunctional. *G* However, in this case it is done so that Eldrinson's character can change and grow, so I'm not going to complain too much.

Overall, this book was a good read. We got a lot of character background and development. There was a decent amount of technical science fiction, but nothing too overwhelming. Asaro's last couple of books only included the science fiction aspects as set dressing, so seeing the advanced tech treated with some depth and as integral to the story was nice.

To sum up, I enjoyed this book and would even recommend it as a good entry point into Asaro's Skolian Empire series.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Excellent Addition to the Skolian Saga, January 17, 2005

By 

LA Reader (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Pt. 1) (Hardcover)

Schism is another excellent entry into the Skolian universe of books. It features one of my favorite characters - Sauscony - that Asaro has created. The manner in which Asaro has written these books (this is the tenth novel), moving many years backwards and forwards in time and shifting from character to character as she fills in the stories of the Ruby pharoh clan gives one an interesting and sometimes dizzying perspective on the characters. One would think that already knowing a particular character's fate would make a story about the early years of that character less than compelling, but Asaro pulls it off. As ever, I am looking forward to the next entry in this saga.

P.S. Amazon Readers/Buyers beware. Beware reviewer Harriet Klausner, who supposedly read reviewed many thousands of books on Amazon, including this one. She always gives four or five stars (usually five stars) and her reviews are utterly formulaic, making one wonder if she/he/they actually read the books. In any event, how can anyone love every one of the thousands and thousands of books she/he/they have supposedly read?

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Asaro's back on track, February 10, 2005

By 

C. Glover (Langhorne, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) (Pt. 1) (Hardcover)

This book is a bit different from the more recent entries by Asaro in her Skolian series, better. For all of us who have not been thrilled by her trend toward sexy romance, Asaro returns to complex sci-fi in Triad. We learn about the military and the commitment required of cadets at the academy as seen through the experiences of the 17-year old Soz, a novice, whom we already know will be the future leader of the Skolian Empire. We also begin to understand the personal conflict Soz has with her father over her decision not to marry and stay on her home world, but to pursue a career in the military that will put her in harm's way during the coming war.

This book is not a good place to begin the series. Triad is a backstory. (I prefer to start with Primary Inversion.) Asaro does not publish this series in chronological order. The books may be about any one of the 15 or so main Rhon characters during three generations at any point in their lives. If you have read any of the other books in the series you know how the story began in Triad turns out. Rather, Triad fills in gaps in the Valdorian family saga and helps us understand why they are the way they are. They do not always behave as I would have expected them to. After all, they are Rhon and considered royals. Eldrin is more close-minded. Soz is more hotheaded. Kurj is more human. Althor is more confused. Shannon is more complex. In some ways it is very comforting to know that things are going to work out for these people, at least for a while. I found this book to be much more interesting than I expected. I cannot wait for the next installment. I just wish the books had better cover art. No sex or sexy thoughts in Triad; some general references to bi-sexuality and homosexuality.