Catch the Lightning

Catherine Asaro

Book 2 of Saga of the Skolian Empire

Language: English

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: Jan 1, 1996

Description:

The author of Primary Inversion returns to the interstellar Skolian Empire to tell the story of a young girl from present-day Earth taken into the future and made the focus of a murderous plot to bring down the empire.496 pp.

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From Publishers Weekly

Alhough Asaro returns in her second novel to the far-future Skolian Empire of her first, Primary Inversion, she begins the story in 1987, on an alternate Earth. In Los Angeles, narrator Tina, 17, rescues Althor, a Skolian Jagernaut (elite space-pilot) whose ship has flung him back in time and into Tina's alternate universe. Before their adventures conclude, Tina and Althor return to Althor's own future and get married. Many of the novel's complications spring from the pair's common Mayan ancestry, which has bequeathed to both of them powerful telepathic and empathic faculties, from Althor's status as a cyborg who is in effect a royal prince and from the Skolian Empire's ability to generate all the bloody plots and counterplots one would expect of any self-respecting interstellar empire. Asaro, who's a physicist, offers an intelligent exploration of possible links between telepathy and quantum physics and informs many of the scenes between the lovers with power and tenderness. But her story is too often comprised of a jumble of elements derived from myriad commercial-fiction genres. Despite strong characters and many fine passages, it fails to cohere and to deliver the vibrant reading experience that her first novel offered.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Returning to the Skolian Empire she first created in Primary Inversion (LJ 2/15/95), Asaro introduces Tina, a contemporary Mestiza teenager living in California, who is transported to the future with a Skolian pilot named Althor. In this sensual tale of telepathy and love between Mayan descendants of different worlds and times, Asaro continues to develop the Skolian culture. Recommended for sf/fantasy collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.