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(More customer reviews)Asaro's future universe:
There are essentially 3 civilizations in Asaro's future universe. The Allied Worlds are those established by humans from Earth. The Skolian Empire and the Eubians (the Trader Empire) are remnants of another human civilization (the Raylicon Empire) that left Earth long ago and established a presence in the stars. When the Allied humans left Earth to explore the universe, they were suprised to find that humans were already there.
Allied humans are much like you and me. Skolians, however, are generally empaths, and their civilization is based on a royal family with exceptionally strong empathetic abilities. They are "psions", who can read emotion almost as well as communicating with words. The Eubians (or Traders) literally derive pleasure from the pain of a psion, who transmits the emotion and amplifies it like an antenna. Some of the Eubians are pretty nasty in their taste for the pain of their Skolian pleasure slaves. Other Eubians, however, aren't so bad.
The Skolians and Eubians are always either on the verge of war or are at war, and the Allieds try to be neutral.
This book, in particular, deals with one Skolian heir who is admirable in the way that she is a strong and amazingly capble woman. Sauscony Valdoria (or "Soz"), heir to the Skolian throne, is a Jag pilot, an elite fighter group composed entirely of highly empathetic psions. Soz can deal out some serious butt-whoopin' when she needs to, but her personality is more of an INFP for those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggss personality test. Soz is an introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving person who is exceptionally intelligent. The plot is well written and intriguing.
The science:
"Inversion" is a concept developed by Catherine Asaro to account for rapid transit through large distances in space; a possible solution to the problem of time dilation. Einstein kind of put a stick in the mud when, in 1905, he told everyone that Special Relativity wrote in a universal speed limit at ~3x10^8 m/s, citing anyone caught travelling near this speed with a significant time penalty. Some authors embrace time dilation, like Poul Anderson in "Tau Zero" and Joe Haldeman in "The Forever War". Others find ways around it, like Gene Roddenberry in the "Star Trek" series. Other authors ignore it altogether. The neat thing about Asaro's solution, however, is that it is mathematically explicit, even if it is not possible by today's understanding of real and imaginary numbers and their role in real space.
-- For the reader who is not fond of math, skip this paragraph. For everyone else, read on -- All numbers have a real and imaginary part, i.e., a+ib, where "a" is the real coordinate and "b" is the imaginary coordinate. "i" is the imaginary number i=sqrt(-1). In Einstein's equation for time dilation, if one simply makes a substitution "iV" for the velocity "V", one gets an i^2 term in the equation, which is simply "-1". This completely changes the behavior of Special Relativity. It breaks the speed limit, and time dilation can even become "time reduction". Similarly, length contraction becomes "length elongation", and the mass inflation term (defined in terms of momentum), actually becomes "mass reduction".
It's pretty neat how it all works out, actually. It would be to one's benefit to simply flip oneself out of real space and into imaginary space, and then hit the gas pedal. The faster you go, the lighter you get, and you can actually make time on the way. In fact, you could go back in time if you felt like it (if Hawking finds a way around the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). With this simple mathematical trick, Asaro has opened up a science fiction can of worms, where she can put an infinite number of spins on a fundamental plot line.
That's not all Asaro came up with. Her background in chemical physics has given her the ability to take relevant real world problems and incorporate them into her fiction. Imagine Klein Bottles that maintain objects in imaginary space while being transported through real space. Quantum stasis fields that freeze all the atoms in an atomic state and hold them there for a finite time. An infinite information network that spans all of real space while only existing in imaginary space. This is neat stuff.
Perhaps the best thing about this book (and her other books) is that Asaro balances hard science fiction with a genuine effort to write about *people*. Catherine Asaro is a unique woman because she is not only a chemical physicist (Ph.D., Harvard), but also a ballerina. Her characters often show a similar duality. Some of her books are more romance novels than hard sci fi, but there are quite a few gems in this series. "Primary Inversion", "Radiant Seas", "The Moon's Shadow", and "Schism" all tell the story of Sauscony Valdoria and her kids, and these are some of her most "hard" sci fi novels. In addition, the story of Soz's brother, Kelric, is told in "The Last Hawk" and "Ascendant Sun", and both of these novels are equally entertaining.
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Primary Inversion (The Saga of the Skolian Empire)
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