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Book Summary and Reviews of The Spacetime Pool by Catherine Asaro

The Spacetime Pool by Catherine Asaro

The Spacetime Pool

by Catherine Asaro

  • Published:
  • Nov 2022, 120 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A collection that includes the Nebula Award–winning titular novella and "Light and Shadow," the story that begins the Saga of the Skolian Empire series.

In The Spacetime Pool, recent MIT grad Janelle Aulair is hiking through the Great Smoky Mountains when a man appears out of nowhere to request her help. Shaken by his impossible appearance, she steps away—and falls through a portal onto a beach in another universe.

That's when Dominick, the man who waylaid Janelle, reveals she is part of a prophecy. It foretells a bizarre future: if Dominick marries Janelle, he'll depose his twin brother and become Emperor of the land. If Dominick doesn't marry her, his brother—a brutal tyrant who will do anything to keep his throne—will murder him. Janelle finds herself caught in a conflict that could destroy the realm. If that's not mind-blowing enough, she discovers books that prove this civilization achieved interstellar travel five centuries ago. Yet now they're living in a culture that doesn't have electricity, riding two-horned creatures that definitely aren't horses, and sword-fighting. To find her way home, Janelle must figure out what happened between then and now . . .

The Spacetime Pool also includes Catherine Asaro's first-ever published story, "Light and Shadow" featuring Kelric, a popular character from the Saga of the Skolian Empire series, and an illustrated essay on the math in her fiction titled "A Poetry of Angles and Dreams."

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Book Awards

  • award image The Nebula Awards, 2009

Reviews

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This information about The Spacetime Pool was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Catherine Asaro

Catherine Asaro is the author of thirty books, ranging from thrillers to science fiction and fantasy. Her novel The Quantum Rose and novella The Spacetime Pool both won the Nebula Award, and she has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards. Asaro holds a doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard; her research specializes in applying the mathematical methods of physics to problems in quantum physics and chemistry.

Asaro has appeared as a speaker at many institutions, including the Library of Congress, Georgetown's Communication, Culture, and Technology program, the New Zealand National ConText Writer's program, the Global Competitiveness Forum in Saudi Arabia, and the US Naval Academy. She has been the guest of honor at science fiction conventions across the United States and abroad, including the National Science Fiction Conventions of both Denmark and New Zealand, and served as president for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

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