The January Dancer - Spiral Arm, Bk 1 Author:Michael Flynn 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 sto... more »ry 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.« less
I enjoy Michael Flynn's work but for some reason I just couldn't get through this. I never could feel connected to the characters, and had trouble following the plot.