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One Night Stand: Skyfall, Catherine Asaro
Aug. 12th, 2004 09:41 pmSummary: Roca Skolia, telepath, former ballerina, diplomatic leader, falls in love with a young man from a technologically backward planet. Her son Kurj has Oedipal angst with his grandfather. Occasional discussions about starting an interstellar war thread through the family drama.
Long ago (high school) I inhaled Catherine Asaro's then-entire canon in short order and was addicted for life. That's the only excuse I have for nabbing Skyfall off the library shelf and burning through it in one late evening last week. This is shameless space opera/romance fusion: the men are real men, the women kick butt, everyone is beautiful and no one breaks a nail, and babies don't need diapers changed at inconvenient moments. The characters live in beautiful romantic worlds of white castles, blue snow, golden suns, strange and shimmering alien technologies, elegant open homes surrounded by invisible, ferocious security. And oh, they're impossibly powerful telepathswho can kill you with their brains who can be killed by their brains. Asaro paints a very colorful canvas, but it's painfully two-dimensional. Characterization and plot readability is badly hampered by clunky dialogue and infodumps as well integrated into the narrative as bricks embedded in stained glass.
Those comments are true for several of Asaro's novels, but Skyfall suffers an additional handicap: it's set a generation earlier than the bulk of the Ruby Dynasty novels and narrates events that are background knowledge in those stories. Writing prequels that don't sag under the reader's knowledge of where events will end is tough, and Skyfall really falls down on that point. Almost every important plot point has already been mentioned somewhere else in the series.
( Discussion of plot. One major plot point massively spoiled. Too bad it's backstory for the rest of the series. )
This isn't good literature, or even particularly fun techy hard SFnal lit. But this is beach reading in the most classic sense: best enjoyed with your feet dug into the sand and an alcoholic drink near to hand. Asaro can do Nifty Ideas in fiction (I keep reading her novels in the forlorn hope that she'll do something as cool as The Radiant Seas) but hasn't used that ability in Skyfall to more than color by numbers she sketched in earlier novels.
Long ago (high school) I inhaled Catherine Asaro's then-entire canon in short order and was addicted for life. That's the only excuse I have for nabbing Skyfall off the library shelf and burning through it in one late evening last week. This is shameless space opera/romance fusion: the men are real men, the women kick butt, everyone is beautiful and no one breaks a nail, and babies don't need diapers changed at inconvenient moments. The characters live in beautiful romantic worlds of white castles, blue snow, golden suns, strange and shimmering alien technologies, elegant open homes surrounded by invisible, ferocious security. And oh, they're impossibly powerful telepaths
Those comments are true for several of Asaro's novels, but Skyfall suffers an additional handicap: it's set a generation earlier than the bulk of the Ruby Dynasty novels and narrates events that are background knowledge in those stories. Writing prequels that don't sag under the reader's knowledge of where events will end is tough, and Skyfall really falls down on that point. Almost every important plot point has already been mentioned somewhere else in the series.
( Discussion of plot. One major plot point massively spoiled. Too bad it's backstory for the rest of the series. )
This isn't good literature, or even particularly fun techy hard SFnal lit. But this is beach reading in the most classic sense: best enjoyed with your feet dug into the sand and an alcoholic drink near to hand. Asaro can do Nifty Ideas in fiction (I keep reading her novels in the forlorn hope that she'll do something as cool as The Radiant Seas) but hasn't used that ability in Skyfall to more than color by numbers she sketched in earlier novels.
