The Quantum Rose: A Novel of the Skolian Empire

I was hoping this would be better than "Catch the Lightening" and more like "Primary Inversion", her first 2 books of the series...but it sort of fell in the middle for me. The plot was hard to grasp, because the main focus of the book was the romance. The one thing I really like about Asaro's writing is her beautiful descriptions of other worlds with their multiple moons, stained-glass forests, exotic creatures...and that's the only reason I will keep reading her, because the plots and the characters just don't have a lot of depth.

This is the first Skolian Empire book I've read. It's good, and I like it. It's a good companion for the mindless labor I have to do for the next few days, It's well-written and competently plotted ,and the romance is fun.

However. I'm on chapter 5 and so far there've been one scientific inaccuracy and two evolutionary impossibilities that should have been edited out.

The people on the planet have either to be a result of parallel evolution or descendants of human space travelers, with human DNA. [I suspect the latter--how else could they interbreed?] Asaro gave them physical characteristics that preclude either possibility. The hero's response to oxygen deprivation was spot on; so she really should have looked up how the human brain reacts to an oxygen-rich environment.

The Audible bio says Asaro is a physicist who belongs to a seriously talent-rich writers' group. I expect she knows something of evolution and biology---you can't get a BS in any science or technical field without taking physics, chemistry and biology along with the math, even if you love one subject and would rather be beat with a stick than take the other two.

I suspect that a writer with her educational credentials knows her stuff. I'm wondering if she and her readers decided that these discrepancies were too trivial to matter and were less important than the development of the fictive world.

Logic counts. The little things matter. And just you get one thing wrong, no matter how arcane, and somebody will always write you to tell you about it.

AND I LIKE THIS BOOK. I'D RECOMMEND IT TO ANYBODY!

"Since a boy he only wanted to be farmer..." What a HORRIBLE way to end a supposed science fiction book!! A few fantasy factoids. . .they have 8 fingers because of their binary world. No science to this book. .I did keep hoping. Much, much more romance than fantasy or SCIENCE FICTION(???) I WAS SO DISAPPOINTED.