One Night Stand: Skyfall, Catherine Asaro
Aug. 12th, 2004 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseSummary: 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.
Anyone familiar with Asaro's main series knows that Roca and Eldrinson are going to raise ten kids (literally), so the romantic tension that might drive their plotline is weakened. Asaro tries to re-up that tension by tying Roca's plot to the threat of war with the Aristos, but it didn't do much for me personally except demonstrate that yeah, Darth Kurj is morally ambiguous on his light and cheery days. The sudden introduction of the Kurj paternity drama late in the book comes out of almost nowhere (shortly before it blew up I actually thought, "well, that hasn't shown up yet, Asaro must plan to deal with it in a different novel") leading to his grandfather's melodramatic death scene in the closing pages of the novel.
So essentially the series can't really even be called fluffy and if I picked it up today I'd write reviews that made the scathing Green Rider commentary seem affectionate. So why am I still reading it?
One of my unkillable narrative loves is elaborate backstory, and Asaro delivers that with surpassing consistency. Every character has a dramatic history - lost loves, hidden powers, suffering at the hands of Evil - relayed to the audience in capsule form in some novels and played out completely in other stories. There's the Six Degrees of Kelric game, and the Who's Not Really Dead game (neither of which really apply in Skyfall, alas). Shameless, I know. Still, this is a universe where the ex-Imperator's son becomes the Emperor of the Evil Empire his mother fought relentlessly. And he incidentally marries the woman who bought his uncle at a slave auction, then fell in love with him (the uncle, not the Emperor; it took a while longer to fall for the young Emperor). The family trees are hopelessly tangled. The novel may be fairly bad, but the story is fun in that campy space opera way.
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.
Anyone familiar with Asaro's main series knows that Roca and Eldrinson are going to raise ten kids (literally), so the romantic tension that might drive their plotline is weakened. Asaro tries to re-up that tension by tying Roca's plot to the threat of war with the Aristos, but it didn't do much for me personally except demonstrate that yeah, Darth Kurj is morally ambiguous on his light and cheery days. The sudden introduction of the Kurj paternity drama late in the book comes out of almost nowhere (shortly before it blew up I actually thought, "well, that hasn't shown up yet, Asaro must plan to deal with it in a different novel") leading to his grandfather's melodramatic death scene in the closing pages of the novel.
So essentially the series can't really even be called fluffy and if I picked it up today I'd write reviews that made the scathing Green Rider commentary seem affectionate. So why am I still reading it?
One of my unkillable narrative loves is elaborate backstory, and Asaro delivers that with surpassing consistency. Every character has a dramatic history - lost loves, hidden powers, suffering at the hands of Evil - relayed to the audience in capsule form in some novels and played out completely in other stories. There's the Six Degrees of Kelric game, and the Who's Not Really Dead game (neither of which really apply in Skyfall, alas). Shameless, I know. Still, this is a universe where the ex-Imperator's son becomes the Emperor of the Evil Empire his mother fought relentlessly. And he incidentally marries the woman who bought his uncle at a slave auction, then fell in love with him (the uncle, not the Emperor; it took a while longer to fall for the young Emperor). The family trees are hopelessly tangled. The novel may be fairly bad, but the story is fun in that campy space opera way.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 06:39 pm (UTC)Reflection on this pattern, I think it's the elaborate backstory, presented in infodumps, that make me put her books down half-read and never get back to them.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:17 pm (UTC)Like I said in another comment, I really liked The Radiant Seas, but that's also the most SFnal of the series. The main conflict is much more concerned with action than romance, unlike almost all of Asaro's other novels. It's also the novel that does the most to advance the over-arching story*, advancing or killing off several key characters. The static backstory is altered by all this, unlike the action in The Last Hawk, which sort of happens off to the side and isn't going to impact the rest of the series for some time. That may be why you found it easier to get into tLH: it's the novel where the Skolia/Eube (Ruby/Aristo) background is so tenuously related to the actual story that Asaro can curtail or drop the backstory chunks that break up the narrative.
YMMV, of course. What particularly makes you think you should like her novels? (I've got a similar problem with C. S. Friedman's books. She has the niftiest ideas, and inevitably presents them in a way that falls flat for me.)
*My best guess: Skolia wins, the Aristos get the hardwired sadism yanked from their genetic code, and the star-spanning empires fuse their strengths to research the ancient telepathic sciences, creating a happier, more peaceful universe; possibly the series ends with enough number of high-level telepaths appearing to assure that the Skolian FTL web will always have sufficient power sources. I like to think I know my space opera tropes.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 05:47 pm (UTC)Of the ones I read, the romance was ok, but the Science just bothered me, and there was way too much handwaving, like the escape in book 1(?)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-15 06:21 am (UTC)There's a strong preference for empaths and telepaths, since they project their emotions and suffering more clearly. So if you could find a bunch of masochist psions, you'd be set. Although... in more conventional S/M relationships, aren't there safewords and other means of assuring the masochist(s) have a say in how much pain they're subjected to? The Aristos, being Evil (tm), don't seem particularly keen on that sort of thing, so the arrangement might fall through eventually.
Of the ones I read, the romance was ok, but the Science just bothered me, and there was way too much handwaving, like the escape in book 1(?)
I had a slightly different reaction: the romances tended to bug me a bit (particularly sexgod!Kelric, argh), but I only know the broadest outlines of quantum physics, so it's very easy for me to nod in time with the plot when the science is invoked.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-16 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-16 02:01 pm (UTC)Within the worldbuilding context - there were a few, created as part of a genetic engineering project, and no one realized how Evil they were until they killed their creator(s), sacked the lab, and started their galactic conquest/domination spree. Apparently everyone was too shocked to deal with them until they'd conquered and colonized a sizeable empire. It's slightly sloppy worldbuilding: look at the premise too closely and a lot of questions arise. In sneakier authors' hands, this might lead to interesting backstory revelations in later books, but Asaro's put her cards on the table too consistently for me to believe that she plans to upset reader expectations that much.