That’s a cute title for a book review that no longer seems to inhabit the Web.
It’s about a four-parter (or three-parter depending on how you look at it) SF novel I flew through over the past week which is, I guess you would have to say, strong-and-intelligent women’s fiction (the Jane Austin bit), though the men are both as well and a lot nicer than Ghengis Khan, or at least the way he’s portrayed in most histories. They do tend to kill their enemies without remorse, but that comes off as practical rather than blood-thirsty.
It’s author Kate Elliott’s (apparently her real name is Alis A. Rasmussen) Jaran novels we’re talking about and I recommend them if you like horses, sabers, cavalry battles and a nevermind-physics space opera subplot. Sometimes I get tired of all the hard science and just like wave-of-the-hand technology. It works, got it? I got it.
I like these four (or three) novels so much that I probably won’t go on and read any of her other novels which tend to alternate-history, sword-and-sorcery fantasy. That kind of thing never interested me. She has spoken of as many as four more Jaran novels (though not since 2009) and even then with caveats:
“Let me again be blunt. Having just bought a house, having several children in college, living in a region with higher-than-average cost of living because this is where my spouse was offered a job, I can’t actually afford to write the Jaran novels at the moment because there is less demand for them in comparison to my other work. In other words, because I have to make decisions based on a number of factors, it makes more sense economically for me to write fantasy.”
Alas. But she’s young, so I’ll hope they appear before too much longer and, meanwhile, move on to something else.
P.S. I did enjoy another of her SF novel series, The Highroad Trilogy, which I also recommend. In some ways it’s better than the Jaran. More space.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 