When Lois McMaster Bujold took a break from her Vorkosigan and Chalion serieses to write the Sharing Knife books, most of her pre-existing fans went "I am not digging this age gap rural fantasy romance" and romance novel fans went "this age gap romance in the fantasy American countryside is not romance novel enough" and I went "gosh she's having fun" because when someone is creating a piece of art or media that's wholly for them, I love their love for the work.
This is, I think, different from a certain kind of writing that Drops References to create a positive association between what you're reading and a thing you already like.
The podcast I Don't Even Own a Television (RIP) often had long digressions about music and bands and I rarely recognized the bands they were talking about, let alone possessing any kind of blanket familiarity with genres and scenes. But I loved getting a glimpse into their passions.
I hope you enjoyed this long walk to talking about Catherine Asaro's "Ascendant Sun", because I'm not sure I have ever read an author who is writing for herself and her passions as much as Catherine Asaro does.
I'm going to drop some creds both because I've literally never seen anyone but me talk about Catherine Asaro and also because I went to wikipedia to see if there were any egregious controversies like you maybe do about speculative fiction authors in this the year of our cursed lord 2023, so I have her wikipedia article open and it's fascinating stuff.
Asaro is a trained ballet and jazz dancer.
Asaro has master's degrees in physics and chemistry and a doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard.
Asaro is the daughter of one of the nuclear chemists involved in the discovery that lead to the theory that an asteroid collision caused the mass extinction event that took out the dinosaurs.
Until his death several years ago, Asaro was married to a NASA astrophysicist.
Asaro's main work is a series called the Skolian Saga. Some of the books in the Skolian Saga contain mathematical equations and quantum mechanic wave diagrams. The interstellar travel method she uses is based on a paper on special relativity that she wrote for the American Journal of Physics. I can't even begin to figure out what "spherical harmonic eigenfunctions" are. I don't understand any of it, but it appears to be the hardest of hard science baked into Asaro's worldbuilding.
Naturally, after assembling her world, Asaro has written a sprawling intergenerational political intrigue space opera full of fucking, incredibly tall, powerful, beautiful, and jacked men and women, complicated family trees and arranged marriages leading to genuine love and telepathy and telepathically enhanced super empathy sex, a planet of people who all have metallic gold pigmentation due to genetic modification for survival in that particular planet's hostile atmosphere and sun combo, AI cyberimplants and supersoldiers, with a key focus on the romantic entanglements of the members of this large family of aristocratic telepaths, members of whom are integral to the existence of intergalactic wifi.
I cannot overstate how thorough a manifestation of a certain kind of twelve-year-old girl's psyche this is, but also she has a phd. Did you ever make huge family trees because you wanted to have characters with all the different hair and eye colour combinations you thought of but also every character you came up with had to be related so they could always interact but also sometimes you just needed to make a new character to slap onto that family because you have a new interest or just saw a name in something that was too cool not to use?
Catherine Asaro is living that dream and making rocket scientists beta read about her over-powered OCs fucking.
"Ascendant Sun" is ALL OF THAT, in this specific case about Keldric, a prince of this empire and super telepath and interstellar fighter pilot and theoretical mathematician who's been missing for almost twenty years because he was stranded on a planet cut off from the wider galaxy, one ruled by warring matriarchal clans with harems of men whose value and rank is determined both by what they're bringing to the table physical-wise and what they're bringing to the table in the realm of ADVANCED MATHEMATICAL QUANTUM DICE PROBABILITY POLITICAL PREDICTION GAMES. He spent those years getting kidnapped and traded by various women and doing dice math and fucking but that was a different book, THIS book is after he fakes his death to both escape the planet and to settle some kind of brewing civil war, only to find that a tentative truce exists between his empire and their longtime enemy empire (made up of black-haired, red-eyed anti-empaths who get boners from suffering and love slavery) and also most of his immediate family is either dead or missing making him technically maybe the new hereditary military leader of the empire. Keldric has to find out what the fuck has happened while he's been presumed dead and figure out a way to claim his title and its wifi link without revealing that he's alive to definite enemies and potential enemies and yes it does involve a slave auction and a discussion on how to circumvent paying exorbitant tax on secret slave auctions.
It's fun. I can't comment on the accuracy of the science/math/sex, but it's a fun read, a sprawling, tumbling sort of narrative and we all know if a George R.R. Martin were writing this, dudes would be all over it.
It's got a buff shirtless Keldric in sex slave clothes on the cover while a sexy lady all in black ogles him from her setee.
I hope Catherine Asaro's having a good day.
