January Dancer

A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast complicated wonder-filled!Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer Michael Flynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of rich echoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith The January Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of great power and the people who found it. Starting with Captain Amos January who quickly loses it and then the others who fought schemed and killed to get it we travel around the complex decadent brawling mongrelized interstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectors want the Dancer; pirates take it rulers crave it and they''ll all kill if necessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love revolution music and mystery and it ends as all great stories do with shock and a beginning.