Skyfall (Asaro, Catherine) [Hardcover]

Catherine Asaro (Author)

Book Description

Series: Asaro, Catherine | Publication Date: October 24, 2003

Catherine Asaro exploded onto 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 far-future Saga of the Skolian Empire. She won widespread acclaim for her innovative blend of cutting-edge physics, interstellar intrigue, and passionate romance. Over the next few years she garnered nominations and awards in both SF and romance. Then in 2002, Catherine Asaro won the Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Quantum Rose, the sixth installment in her Saga of the Skolian Empire.

If you haven't caught on to the myriad pleasures to be found in this multiple award-winning epic SF series, here's the perfect chance. Skyfall goes back to the beginning, to the re-birth of Skolia, showing how a chance meeting on a backwater planet forged a vast interstellar empire.

Kurj, a provincial ruler on a primitive planet, is plagued by inner demons. But when he meets Roca, a beautiful and mysterious woman from the stars, he whisks her away to his mountain retreat, inadvertently starting a great interstellar war, and birthing the next generation of rulers for the Sklolian Empire.

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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Catherine Asaro's Saga of the Skolian Empire may be the most important and entertaining science fiction series to originate in the 1990s. However, its novels have not always been published in chronological order, and they share a vast cast. Newcomers should start with the ninth novel, Skyfall (2003); it takes place a generation earlier than, and sets the stage for, the previous novels.

Roca Skolia is not only the imperial heiress; she's one of the exceedingly rare Rhon psions, gifted with great telepathic and empathic powers. She's been traveling alone and incognito through the galaxy, but now she must return home. She's the Skolian Empire's sole hope of preventing interstellar war with the Eubian Concord.

Traveling the galactic backwaters has its risks, however, and Roca finds herself on Skyfall, a primitive, isolated planet. Skyfall isn't connected to the interstellar information network, so Roca can't contact Skolia; and if she misses the next starship, there won't be another for months--or years. Roca is abducted from the tiny starport by a barbaric local lord, Eldrinson Althor Valdoria--a man who, against all odds, may be another Rhon psion. Roca finds herself trapped in Eldrinson's remote mountain castle as blizzards pile the blue alien snow high...and the army of Eldrinson's barbarian rival surrounds the castle. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

Intrigue, drama and romance converge in Nebula winner Asaro's latest Skolian Empire adventure (after 2003's The Moon's Shadow), an enthralling stand-alone that fills in the early history of the empire. Married and a widow twice over, Roca is not only the heir to the Ruby Dynasty's pharaoh, Lahaylia Selei, but also the Skolian Empire's foreign affairs councillor and an unwilling pawn in her son Kurj's efforts to rid the empire of its enemy, the sadistic Aristos. In a bid for freedom from her overbearing, manipulative son, Roca escapes and finds herself marooned on a backwater planet, Skyfall, whose inhabitants have mysterious genetic traits that connect them to the Ruby Empire of long ago. Roca becomes the hostage, captive, confidant, lover and finally wife of the bard Eldri. Though their technology is primitive, the inhabitants of Skyfall have a no less advanced society than her own. Eldri teaches Roca to trust men again, and in the end, to find a love that can surpass the demands of her position as heir to the Ruby throne. Some SF fans may be disappointed to find so little of the physics the author, a former physics professor, usually puts into her books, but romance readers will have no cause to complain. FYI: The Quantum Rose, the sixth novel in the author's Saga of the Skolian Empire, was named Best SF Novel by Romantic Times Bookclub.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (October 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765306387
• ISBN-13: 978-0765306388
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,777,719 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

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Skolian Imperialate Backstory, April 1, 2004

By 

Arthur W. Jordin (Smyrna, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Skyfall (Asaro, Catherine) (Hardcover)

Skyfall (2003) is the ninth novel in the Skolian Imperialate series, but is the first in internal sequence. Around 4000 BC, a group of humans were transported from Earth by aliens to the planet Raylicon and, over the next twelve centuries, built an interstellar empire. This empire was ruled by the Ruby Dynasty, a line of empaths and telepaths. They achieved a level of technology that was capable of rearranging solar systems and of modifying the genetic structure of their colonists. The collapse of the Ruby Empire left the colonies isolated from Raylicon.

After more than four millennia, the Raylicons began to regain their lost technology and reattained interstellar flight in 1843 AD. Shortly thereafter, genetic experiments by Doctor Hezahr Rhon created a new breed of psions, the Aristos, who could receive but not transmit. Moreover, these Aristos experienced pleasure when receiving the pain of others. The Aristos separated themselves into a new polity, the Eubian Concord, and started conquering Raylicon planets and enslaving the populations.

In 1904 AD, Lahaylia Selei founded the Imperialate in opposition to the Eubian Aristos and activated an ancient Lock to restore the Kyle interstellar web, thereby giving the Skolians the huge advantage of instantaneous communications. After two centuries of reigning as the Pharoah and sole Ruby psion of the Imperialate, Lahaylia found and married another Ruby psion, Jarac, who activated a second Lock to increase the power and scope of the Kyle web. Jarac became the Imperator, the commander of all Imperialate armed forces. Their marriage produced two daughters, Dyhianna and Roca.

In this novel, in 2203 AD, three centuries after the founding of the Imperialate, Roca is trying to evade the agents of her son Kurj in order to return to Parthonia for the debate and vote on invading the Platinum Sectors. The Eubians have brashly taken over the entire region against the prior claims of the Imperialate and the metals in those sectors are urgently needed to maintain Imperialate technology. Roca is against the invasion plans. However, Kurj has her proxy and is determined to keep her from attending the session so that he can use her votes to support the proponents of the invasion. Kurj has been so warped by his mistreatment by his abusive stepfather and by later experiences with the sadistic Eubians that he is totally opposed to any accommodation with the Eubians. Moreover, he will do anything to protect his mother, even if she doesn't want him to do so.

In her flight, Roca is stranded on Capsize, an antiquated spaceport that doesn't even have foul weather guidance systems. Her only transportation is a rusty bucket of bolts that looks like it can't get off the ground unassisted. However, it holds together long enough to take her to Skyfall, where she should be able to transfer to another ship going in the right direction.

Her first glimpse of Skyfall is captivating; it has blue clouds in a lavender sky. The grasses propagate by releasing bubbles that float away on the breeze. The local inhabitants reside in a storybook castle.

Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat less picturesque: the water contains harmful chemicals and the castle is necessary for protection from raiding neighbors; however, the grass is benign. The Allied administrator, who is the entire staff of the spaceport, is friendly and makes her comfortable. She learns that Skyfall is a low tech world with a feudal-like society. Although the Allied Worlds of Earth have claimed the world, it is obviously an ancient colony of the Ruby Empire. As they are talking, a crowd of locals ride up on their animals and surround the port house. In the ensuing conversation, the locals get excited, their leader Eldri lifts her up onto his lyrine, and the whole party gallops away.

Eldri is a strong psion, probably with Ruby Dynasty genes. Her first glimpse of him floods her mind with his feelings and thoughts. Although he doesn't know what is happening, he too receives her feelings and an inkling of her thoughts. They are immediately infatuated with each other, but Roca forces him to behave and almost talks him into returning her to the port. However, his charming personality and the Ruby pheromones overcome her resistance to the point that she agrees to ride with him to his home and return the following day. Unfortunately, his castle is located in the nearby mountains and the weather turns to snow. Lots of snow. So much snow that she misses the supply ship for which she is waiting. Now she is stranded on Skyfall for at least a year.

Meanwhile, back on the Orbiter, the mobile command post of the Imperialate armed forces, Kurj is quietly going crazy over his mother's disappearance. He knows that she has fled because of his actions and he is desperately hoping that she has not come to any harm. He has all available intelligence resources searching for her and he himself spends hours at a time in the web checking obscure databases for references to her. Unfortunately, his mother was a famous dancer even before she became a high level politician and the sheer number of references is overwhelming.

In this story, Roca and Eldri fall in love and, despite her nanomeds, she becomes pregnant. Then a local enemy lays siege to Windward, Eldri's castle. Moreover, Eldri is having grand mal seizures which are coming at more frequent intervals and threaten his life.

This story starts slowly, but builds momentum to the point that the ending seems to flash by in an instance. The politics is frustrating, since it impels characters in unnatural directions. However, the call to duty is finally beat into subservience and the Skolia family members stop tormenting themselves over ideology. While the ending is not entirely a happy one, there is reconciliation, acceptance and rapport.

Highly recommended for Asaro fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of couples overcoming their own misconceptions and environmental obstacles to achieve happiness within a complex society.

-Arthur W. Jordin

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lusty Romance in the Future Past, November 8, 2003

By 

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

This review is from: Skyfall (Asaro, Catherine) (Hardcover)

Catherine Asaro cannot make up her mind. I am sure from her point of view it keeps her from being bored. I prefer the science fiction side of her writing, but I admit, I liked this romance. It filled in some past/future gaps in the ongoing Skolian story and, unlike The Radiant Seas, was an easy read. But still the characters did not always ring true to themselves as described in other novels, especially Eldri. I had a hard time believing him to be so impulsive and hot-headed as a young man. The character's edges were not as hard and sharp as they were in Primary Inversion. The intensity of the Rhon connection that I felt with other Asaro lovers like Soz and Jai, Vryl and Kamoj, or Althor and Tina, was missing. This story is tamer. If this is your first time with Catherine Asaro's Skolian Sagas it is a sweeter, softer place to start. But my personal favorite will always be Primary Inversion. Forget having babies, I love it when the Skolian women kick ....

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking descriptions, story nothing special, May 2, 2005

By 

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

This review is from: Skyfall (Tor Science Fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)

First, the good part. I love Asaro's science fiction ideas and her descriptions of alien worlds. Her descriptions of the planet Lyshriol (aka Skyfall) are always wonderful.

However, at its heart, the novel Skyfall is little more than a cliche romance story. Worse, it follows a worn-out romantic plot that I've always found insulting: woman is forcibly kidnapped and held against her will, and then falls in love with her kidnapper and comes to identify with him and his world. Can we say Stockholm Syndrome?

Asaro excuses this behavior with some of her nifty science fiction: that the people with Rhon genes are irresistibly attracted to one another (which also accounts for Kurj's rather tiresome Oedipus complex, one assumes). This explanation has shown up in a number of her books. Even with a reasonably sci-fi explanation, though, this particular plot is always guaranteed to get my hackles up.

There are some fun political machinations going on in this novel. The scenes dealing with Kurj's origins, history, and tragic choices are terrific, and demonstrate how desperate (and amoral) the Skolians are to protect themselves from their enemies, the Aristos.

But, sadly, there's just not enough of the nifty science fiction that originally drew me to Asaro's work. The main emphasis in this book is the Roca/Eldrinson romance. It doesn't help that Roca Skolia is the most perfect, understanding, stunningly beautiful woman in the whole entire universe and everyone wants her. I doubt this woman has ever had a bad hair day in her life. *G*

Roca never is more than mildly annoyed and bemused at Eldinson's initial kidnapping of her, or the fact that he basically keeps her prisoner for quite a while. She's an empath, so of course she can feel that he's really a nice guy who didn't mean any harm. So hey, why not allow her pheromone-based attraction to grow? Bleah. Much too big an overload of romance fantasy cliches.

This book definitely falls into the "Futuristic Romance" category, rather than science fiction. If it hadn't been part of Asaro's Skolian Empire series, bookstores probably would have shelved it in the romance section.

It's a tribute to Asaro's writing that I even bothered to finish reading the novel. Like I said, I love her alien worlds, and her science fiction. But then I returned Skyfall to the library. This is the first of Asaro's Skolian Empire books that I haven't bothered to buy.