PRIMARY INVERSION
Catherine Asaro
TOR 1995
PB 369 pages
ISBN # 0-812-55023-4

Romeo and Juliet in space ... with a strong focus on how that space works. Actually, this is the beginning of the story, to be concluded in Asaro's The Radiant Seas. "Primary" is our heroine, Sauscony (Soz) Valdoria Skolia: Primary--meaning her Jagernaut rank, equivalent to an admiral. "Inversion" is what space ships do in order to bypass time and space, to travel to other worlds in hours rather than millennia. Asaro is a physicist who pulls off science fiction very nicely, her attention to the detail of working systems is masterful.

Primary Inversion is written in first-person, which means as a reader you're not jumping around from one character to another but living inside one head only. Soz is a Jag pilot and leader of a squad, she is also the heir to a throne. Her brother Kurj, the current Imperator of Skolia, has set a challenge for his heirs presumptive, placing siblings into rivalry against each other for the honor of following him. The contest in staying alive is not fear of each other, but survival in the war with Eubia where they are constantly placed on the front lines. One brother has already died (or so Soz thinks--see The Last Hawk).

Soz travels through many painful ordeals, which she has to work through to keep her sanity. Along the way she meets--on a peaceful planet in the war's neutral zone--her ultimate rival: heir to the Eubian throne, her enemy, Jabriol Qox. An Aristo! Skolians like Soz hate Aristos because they sadistically torture telepaths. Soz is a telepath of the highest level: a Rhon. She really wants to know what this guy is doing out here on this planet. She crashes into his rented estate to find out. She discovers, through telepathy, that Jabriol Qox is only a quarter Aristo. Ever so secretly, his father the emperor had his child genetically designed to win this war for him, a child with Rhon blood. When like meets like these enemies are too stunned to do anything but learn about each other. Later, when Jabriol begs Soz to come with him, she turns him down. So he tips her off to the coming battle. Soz and her squad fly in fast, saving one third of a planet's human population before the Eubians destroy it. Later the Eubian emperor blames Skolia for the attack and deaths.

Soz has her own problems, though. Her fiance was permanently injured in that battle and now wants nothing more to do with her. She's still upset over her brother's death and the time when she had been taken prisoner of an Aristo and tortured for three weeks. Now, when she sees Jabriol on the holo she sees beyond the front his father puts forth to the masses: his son is drugged. And when her brother captures Jabriol and tortures him for information, Soz is torn. Like needs like: she had never before dared dream that she could find a Rhon mate. But she is also in line for the Skolian throne. Which does she want more? She cannot have them both.

I found this book a good read, though I didn't like it as much as Asaro's Kelric stories (The Last Hawk and Ascendant Sun) which had more romance in them. It does not surprise me to hear that Asaro not only wins science fiction awards, but romance awards as well.

KC Heath