Charon was the most ruthless—and brilliant—criminal of the twenty-first century, a practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. He is dead now, and General Thomas Wharington believes his team of experts has deleted all the electronic copies that the megalomaniacal inventor created of himself. However, one major problem remains: Alpha, the only android survivor of Charon’s cybernetic empire.

Outwardly indistinguishable from a human woman, Alpha has superhuman strength and speed, and perhaps even more deadly capabilities still unknown. Thomas’ superiors want her dismantled and studied, but to Wharington, it feels like murder. He stalls for time, a move that could prove disastrous. Alpha escapes from an escape-proof compound, kidnaps Wharington, and takes him to one of Charon’s hidden installations. Charon might be dead, but Alpha continues to carry out her late master’s orders, and she refuses to elaborate on what those orders entail.

Meanwhile, her behavior is becoming more human, or so it seems. Is she developing emotions and a conscience, or is she just learning to counterfeit them as a means of carrying out her enigmatic orders? And do those orders include Wharington’s death sentence?

Ascendant Sun is the direct sequel to The Last Hawk, in which Kelric, heir to the Skolian Empire, crash landed his fighter on the Restricted planet of Coba and was imprisoned by the powerful mistresses of the great estates. After eighteen years of living in their gilded cage, Kelric finally made his escape.

Kelric returns to Skolian space, only to find the Empire in control of the Allied forces of Earth, thanks to the upheaval of the Radiance War. With little more than the clothes on his back and with his family imprisoned by the Allieds, Kelric is forced to take work on a merchant vessel. But when that vessel enters Euban space, Kelric finds his worst nightmare realized: he is auctioned as a slave “provider” to the cruel Aristos, who subject slaves to torture and sex as the ultimate aphrodesiac.

TOUGH FEMALE P.I. EXPLORING THE UNDERWORLD OF A VAST STAR EMPIRE. Book two in a new series set in the world of Catherine Asaro’s Skolian Empire series. Major Bhaajan achieved the impossible. Born to the Undercity, the slums below the City of Cries on the planet Raylicon, she broke free from crushing poverty and crime to become a military officer with Imperial Space Command. Now retired from military duty, she walks the mean streets of Undercity as a private investigator. And she is about to embark on her most challenging case yet. Summoned by no less than the Ruby Pharaoh herself, Major Bhaajan is tasked with finding a killer. But this is no ordinary murderer. The Ruby Pharaoh witnessed a Jagernaut cut down Assembly Councilor Tap Benton-which shouldn’t have been possible. The Jagernauts are the elite of the elite soldiers in the Imperial Space Command. What’s more, the spinal node implanted in all Jagernauts should have prevented the murder. But the Ruby Pharaoh is sure of what she saw, and she has reason to believe that the Jagernaut will kill again. Now, Major Bhaajan must hunt down a killer before it is too late. To do so, she must return to the one place on Raylicon she knows best: Undercity.

Revered SF novelist Catherine Asaro has twice won the coveted Nebula Award. In Carnelians, the Eubian empire and Skolian Imperialate have forged a peace treaty. But when an explosive pop anthem sweeps across the civilizations, unrest breaks out, and renewed warfare threatens to shatter the fragile peace. Asaro’s Skolian saga is now nearly as long and in many ways as compelling as Dune, if not more so.”-Booklist

When a young girl from Earth falls in love with a handsome stranger, she becomes a pawn in an interstellar war.

In the distant future, the Skolian Empire rules one third of the human galaxy, and is the most powerful of all. For the ruling family has the power of telepathy, and through it, the ability to communicate faster than light, across interstellar space. But their most determined enemy, the traders, who thrive on human pain, need to interbreed with a Skolian to gain their powers. And now they have her.

Full of action, adventure, space and time travel, and romance, this second installment in Catherine Asaro’s saga of the Skolian Empire is a gripping tale.

Two-time Nebula Award winner Catherine Asaro takes her immensely popular Skolian Empire saga to new heights. The renegade son of the Ruby Dynasty, Del prefers rock music to interstellar politics. His singing career has recently gained momentum on Earth, which has an uneasy relationship with his family’s empire. But with intergalactic tensions running high, Del finds it harder and harder to avoid family expectations. Asaro’s Skolian saga is now nearly as long and in many ways as compelling as Dune, if not more so .”-Publishers Weekly

The Skolian Empire rules a third of the civilized galaxy through its mastery of faster-than-light communication. But war with the rival empire of the Traders seems imminent, a war that can only lead to slavery for the Skolians or the destruction of both sides. Destructive skirmishes have already occurred, and a desperate attempt must be made to avert total disaster.

When Sauscony Valdoria, linked to the powerful Skolian Web, and the Aristo heir to the evil Trader Empire of Tarnth link minds, they instantly fall in love. However, in order to prevent interstellar war, Sauscony must be either his lover or his killer.

Schism (Triad, Book I) is the tenth novel in Catherine Asaro’s multiple-award-winning Skolian saga, and represents an excellent entry point into the series. An epic story of how the Ruby Dynasty reached maturity, Triad, divided into two books, reveals how a war of galactic proportions first explodes between two great empires.

Schism is how it all began, harkening back to the early years of the Skolian Empire, back to the beginning of the war between Skolia and the Euban Traders. Twenty-three years have passed since the fateful vote in the Skolian Assembly that Roca missed in Skyfall. It created the first open hostility between Eube and Skolia, which has only deepened in the ensuing years.

Now Eube senses an opportunity, for strife has riven the first family of the Skolian Empire. Sauscony, the daughter of Roca and Eldrinson, is ready to seek her fortune as an officer-in-training in the Skolian military. When her father forbids her to undertake such a dangerous path, a rupture develops as Soz chooses duty over family. Eube hopes to make this divide permanent, leaving the Empire ripe for conquest. And they’re willing to kill anyone to make it happen.

A grand adventure, the rebirth of the Skolian Empire, and the romance that commenced this saga.

Eldrinson Valdoria is a bard and leader on the planet Skyfall, a world with a culture considered primitive by the starflung civilization of the Imperialate. As adept with a sword as he is with a ballad, he is also an undiscovered telepath of great power.

Roca Skolia, a former dancer, is now the councilor for Foreign Affairs in the Imperialate’s governing Assembly and heir to the Ruby Pharaoh of the Skolian Imperialate. Caught in a political struggle with her warlord son, she ends up stranded on Skyfall and missing a meeting of the Assembly to vote on humanity’s first interstellar war. Though trapped, she finds herself drawn to Eldrinson, whose thoughts are as clear as the words he cannot write. As their attraction deepens into a love that the laws of both their peoples forbid, the flames of war ignite among the stars.

Catherine Asaro combines her diverse talents to blend hard science fiction and heartrending romance into a sweeping epic known as the Saga of the Skolian Empire. This is her trademark series. Ever since Primary Inversion, her very first novel, this series has continued to grow, building a significant readership and receiving widespread praise.

All of Asaro’s considerable talent is on display in Spherical Harmonic, the direct sequel to The Radiant Seas.

Separated for decades by circumstance and political machinations, the Ruby Dynasty, hereditary rulers of the Skolian Empire, struggle to bring together the tattered remnants of their family in the shadow of a disastrous interstellar war. Too many have died, others are presumed lost, yet they must move quickly if they are to resume their rightful place as rulers of Skolia.

When a shipwrecked stranger washed up on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton’s home, she was unaware that he was something more than human. He said his name was Turner Pascal–but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. This man only held the remainder of Pascal’s consciousness in a technologically enhanced humanoid body. He was, in fact, an experiment by the notorious criminal Charon, a practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. Charon has been secretly copying human minds into android brains, with plans to make his own army of slaves.

On the run from this most ruthless criminal, Samantha and Turner seek help from Sunrise Alley, an underground organization of AIs and androids that have gone rogue. But these cybernetic outlaws are rumored to have their own hidden agenda–not necessarily congruent with humanity’s welfare.

The Final Key is the completion of the duology Triad, which began with the novel Schism, and which reveals the epic story of how a war of galactic proportions first exploded between two great empires and how the Ruby Dynasty reached maturity.

Schism ended with the Skolian Empire torn asunder by personal conflict within the royal family. With The Final Key, the Skolian Empire comes under all-out assault from its nemesis, the Euban Concord (Traders). They have undermined the Empire via subterfuge and assassination, leaving it ripe for conquest. The Skolian Empire’s only hope? A young woman barely out of her teens who hasn’t even completed her training as a cadet.

Selei City is the capital of the Imerialte and one of the most desired locales in all of the Skolian Empire. But its thin veneer of civilization is cracked when a series of brutal crimes implicates those in political power in a vast conspiracy. Three
prominent scientists have lost their lives to a serial killer–and notes at the scenes of the crimes lead to a connection to the Royalist political party.

Major Bhaajan, former military officer turned private detective, is called back to Selei City to solve the crime. Bhaaj and her crew of Undercity Dust Knights plunge into the Byzantine world of Imperial politics–a jigsaw world where none of the
pieces seem to fit. As the assassination plot becomes more and more convoluted, Bhaaj is kidnapped, threatened with death, and must fight for her life against the growing number of people threatened by her investigation. Bhaaj has faced all
this and more, but now she must deal with something far deadlier–interstellar politics.

Catherine Asaro, a physicist who combines believable hard science with first-rate storytelling, exploded onto the science fiction scene with her stellar debut novel, Primary Inversion. Now, she brings us the third tale of the Skolian Empire, which AudioFile calls “a classic tale of power and conflict, with a twist.”

When Kelric, a scion of the imperial family of Skolia, crash-lands his fighter on the off-limits planet of Coba, he figures it will be only a short time before he makes his way home. But he fails to account for the powerful matriarchy of Coba, the mistresses of the great estates who do not want the Empire to know about their recent cultural advances. First they take him prisoner. Then, one by one, the most powerful women on the planet fall in love with him.

At the age of seventeen the young nobleman named Jaibriol Qox becomes ruler of a vast galactic empire–and loses everything he has ever valued. Born of a clandestine liaison between a renegade daughter of the Skolian Imperialate and a scion of the genetically engineered Eubian Traders, Jai Qox grew up in exile, unaware of the powers that coursed through his noble blood.

In the waning days of the bloody Radiance War that ravaged the galaxy, Jai was captured and returned to the Traders to play a role as a puppet emperor in their scheme to consolidate their domination of space.

Now Jai must walk a razor’s edge to seize the power that is his by birthright without succumbing to its dark seduction and wield it for the good of all, and to avert a conflagration that threatens to engulf a thousand worlds.

The Quantum Roseis the story of Kamoj Argali, the young ruler of an impoverished province on the backward planet Balumil. To keep her people from starving, she has agreed to marry Jax Ironbridge, the boorish and brutal ruler of the prosperous neighboring province. But before they can be wed, a mysterious stranger from a distant planet arrives on government business in the wake of interstellar war. He sweeps in and forces Kamoj into marriage, throwing her world into utter chaos.

This interplanetary adventure, Beauty and the Beastwith a science fiction twist,focuses on a compelling love triangle while also covering the clash of very different cultures and an approach to war that science fiction has almost never considered.

Nebula Award winner Catherine Asaro’s tales of the Skolian Empire have earned tremendous acclaim and a devoted following. War between the Eubian Concord and the Skolians has devastated the galaxy before. Now another epic clash is brewing, and the leaders of both empires might be powerless to stop it. Further complicating matters, both men hide shocking secrets that could spell their doom. “Asaro uses dazzling imagery, superb storytelling ability, interesting science and intriguing drama .”-Publishers Weekly

Survive the City of Cries

Bhaajan grew up in the Undercity, a community hidden in the ruins buried beneath the glittering City of Cries.
Caught between the astonishing beauty and crushing poverty of that life, and caught by wanderlust, she enlisted in
the military. Now retired, Major Bhaajan is a private investigator who solves cases for the House of Majda, a powerful
royal family centered in Cries. The powerful elite of the City of Cries are disappearing, and only Bhaajan, who grew
up in the Undercity, can find them–if she isn’t murdered first.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the Internet, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. These two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill ablaze.

A second, seemingly chance meeting with Rashid plunges Lucia into a deadly world of desire and intrigue, for although his work has implications she cannot foresee, there are those who do understand and would turn its great power to their own destructive purposes. As Lucia is drawn deeper and deeper into Rashid’s life and work, cut off from the outside world, she finds herself becoming more attracted to him. But is her seclusion within Rashid’s well-guarded Moroccan home intended to ensure her safety–or her silence? And is it already too late to stop the terrible consequences his new technology could unleash?

BOOK ONE IN A BRAND NEW SERIES by Nebula and Hugo Award Winner Catherine Asaro set in the world of her Skolian Empire universe. In the galaxy-spanning future, Major Bhaajan is a tough female P.I. who works the dangerous streets of Undercity. Major Bhaajan, a former military officer with Imperial Space Command, is now a hard-bitten P.I. with a load of baggage to deal with, and clients with woes sometimes personal, sometimes galaxy-shattering, and sometimes both. Bhaajan must sift through the shadows of dark and dangerous Undercity-the enormous capital of a vast star empire-to find answers. “[Baahjan], who starts out keeping an emotional distance from the people in the Undercity soon grows to think of them as her community once more. Asaro . . . returns to the Skolian empire’s early history to tell Bhajaan’s story.”-Booklist “Asaro delivers a tale rich with the embedded history of her world and bright with technical marvels. Her characters are engaging and intriguing and there is even a bit of romance. What really touched my heart was Bhaaj’s interaction with the children of the aqueducts. I spent the last fifty pages of the book sniffling into a tissue.”-SF Crowsnet “I’m hooked, both on her writing and her Skolian universe. This book had everything I wanted: strong characters, a new and unique world, and a plot that isn’t as simple as it first appears.”-TerryTalk