The January Dancer

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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.

Reviews

“Carl Sagan meets Umberto Eco…. Bursting with pungent historical detail and Big Theme musings, this dense, provocative novel offers big rewards to patient readers.” —Entertainment Weekly on Eifelheim

“Heartbreaking. Flynn masterfully achieves an intricate panorama of medieval life, full of fascinatingly realized human and Krenken characters whose fates interconnect with poignant irony.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Eifelheim

“Wonderful, mesmerizing.

A finely written and deeply considered SF novel that deserves to stand with the classics in the field.” —Robert Charles Wilson, Award-Winning Author of Spin on Eifelheim

About the Author

Michael Flynn lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. He is the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein award, and a Hugo Nominee for Eifelheim. He is the author of the Firestar series of novels, and is an Analog magazine alumnus whose fiction now appears regularly in all the major SF magazines.

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Books By Michael Flynn