The Quantum Rose

Kamoj Argali governs Argali Province on Balumil, a shabby and half-forgotten world that has lost most of the technology its settlers arrived with, and her province is poor enough that her marriage is a matter of accounting rather than affection. She has been betrothed since childhood to Jax Ironbridge, whose wealth her people need and whose temper they have learned to work around. Then an offworlder living in the ruined palace above the valley outbids him. Havyrl Valdoria is a Skolian prince, exiled by his own family and struggling with more than one kind of damage, and his intervention is well meant and catastrophically ill informed, because Jax has no intention of relinquishing anything he considers his. Asaro's novel begins as a planetary romance in the older tradition and widens into the politics of the Skolian Imperialate, where a marriage contract between two obscure provinces turns out to bear on an interstellar war. The frame is a deliberate retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and the author, a physicist, structures the whole thing as an extended analogy to quantum scattering theory, though the reader is free to enjoy it without noticing.