Catch the Lightning

The continuation of the Skolian Empire series features a young Californian girl who befriends a representative from a parallel universe who has stumbled briefly into her world. Anna Fields creates clear pictures of a variety of characters with a range of motives, including "bionic" humans and computers whose artificial intelligence gives them more personality than some of the people. She moves easily between them, at the same time giving them distinct voices. Once again, Fields brings her formidable narration skills to a story of adventure and political intrigue. J.E.M. 2003 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

December 2, 1996
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.