Book Review: The Quantum Rose

Catherine Asaro
2000
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ – – – –

This book was billed as "romantic fantasy," which made me skeptical from the start. But it did win a Nebula. And an essay at the end of the book said the plot was a rough allegory to quantum scattering theory, which is what Asaro did her PhD thesis on. So I tried to keep an open mind as I read it.

It turned out that it was, indeed, all the worst things that "romantic fantasy" made me think of. It was basically a Harlequin Romance with a science fiction veneer. Our incredibly beautiful and intelligent heroine is a provincial ruler on her planet; she is forced to get herself betrothed to a beastly but wealthy man in order to save her people from starvation; she then is rescued from said awful match by a virile stranger from another planet.

For the first half of the book, the plot itself actually had potential. It takes place on a rural, backwards planet where much of the populace is in poverty. Unbeknownst to the inhabitants, the planet was purposely seeded with life by a rich, highly technologically advanced empire that is still monitoring it and interfering with it from afar, but not doing anything to reduce the suffering.

But halfway through the book the story turns into a jarringly discontinuous, space-based, mass-uprising adventure, with the main female character getting taken off her rural home world and thrust into a not really believable role as rebel leader. It's like the author was trying to combine Asimov and Clarke and Stephenson and didn't do any of them very well.

What I really couldn't stand, though, were the romance-novel-style characters, settings, and descriptions. The main character is the classic madonna/whore: an impossibly perfect, gorgeous, smart, kind, and generous woman beloved by 100% of her people and her lover, who is purportedly strong-willed and in a position of power but yet she can't make up her mind about anything and keeps getting buffeted about by the controlling men in her life. And by the fifth or sixth time that she was described as having hair in "curls that tumbled to her waist" I wanted to slap the author. 

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.