Diamond Star: Including the song Diamond Star by Point Valid with Catherine Asaro

Written by Catherine Asaro

Narrated by Andy Paris

Two-time Nebula Award winner Catherine Asaro takes her immensely popular Skolian Empire saga to new heights. The renegade son of the Ruby Dynasty, Del prefers rock music to interstellar politics. His singing career has recently gained momentum on Earth, which has an uneasy relationship with his family's empire. But with intergalactic tensions running high, Del finds it harder and harder to avoid family expectations. "Asaro's Skolian saga is now nearly as long and in many ways as compelling as Dune, if not more so ."-Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440760433

Catherine Asaro

Catherine Asaro is the author of thirty books, ranging from thrillers to science fiction and fantasy. Her novel The Quantum Rose and novella The Spacetime Pool both won the Nebula Award, and she has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards. Asaro holds a doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard; her research specializes in applying the mathematical methods of physics to problems in quantum physics and chemistry. Asaro has appeared as a speaker at many institutions, including the Library of Congress, Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program, the New Zealand National ConText Writer's program, the Global Competitiveness Forum in Saudi Arabia, and the US Naval Academy. She has been the guest of honor at science fiction conventions across the United States and abroad, including the National Science Fiction Conventions of both Denmark and New Zealand, and served as president for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She can be reached at www.catherineasaro.net and has a Patreon page at www.patreon.com/CatherineAsaro.

Reviews for Diamond Star

[suzemo · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Oh, Catherina Asaro, what have ye done.

I love the Skolian Saga because Asaro writes interesting space opera with actual science(!) in it and does a great job describing some of the physics going on with interesting space tricks. I like most of the characters in the universe, and I also like that she has a romance angle through the stories.

This book, judging by its cover (I know , I know) and the blurb about it, looked like it might not be so great. It's about one of the Ruby Dynasty scions, Del-Kurj Valdoria, son of Roca and Eldrinson. He gets left behind on earth when the rest of the family is rescued (he's on another continent), and he decides to hang out and go at a music career.

This book is incredibly slow and boring. There are entire swaths of the book I can't really remember and don't care about. I listened to it on audio book and if I missed several minutes because I got distracted, I didn't even bother to go back.

I hung in there for occasional Ruby family stuff, because even though Asaro's novels in the Skolian universe are largely stand-alone, there is information about the background war and politics of the empire that are good to stay up on.

This book feels like it was written, not by a physicist/author with a string of awesome books under her belt, by a groupie who dreams about a famous life - and it's full of references to the drinking/boozing/sexin' culture of the famous rocker with a side of commentary about what they think of the kind of people that populate the entertainment industry (producers, labels, mostly behaving badly and trying to choke the individuality and genius of the art and what not).

Del-Kurj plays like a young, self-centered idiot, going through this great learning process that just falls really, really flat (with a side of family conflict because no one! understands! him! or supports his genius, or whatever. Boring.)

I'm still looking forward to any books in the Skolian Saga that Asaro writes, assuming they're nothing like this book. If I had read this first in the series, I would have never continued with it, and if the next book is anything like this, I'll quit.

[miched_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Since the moment I picked up this book, I did nothing but read it (and unfortunately go to work, eat, and sleep), took me 4 days. So it must have been good. This book thankfully stood on it's own so it was okay that I didn't remember much about all her other books, though there were characters I really wished I remembered how their story went. For the first 3 quarters of the book I found it less sci-fi'ish than I had hoped, yeah it took place in Asaro's future world, but there were no space ships or politics and other greatness that I had come to expect. The last hundred pages though had all that and more. I was disappointed by the romance aspect of the book, it fell flat, and the progression of it just left me going WTF?! The book felt like it was written completely and then the editor or someone was like 'I think this book needs a relationship' so one is inserted practically as an afterthought.While the book could have had a better central relationship and more fleshing out of the non-main characters, it was a great book that I couldn't put down and I haven't found a book that did that to me in years.

[dw0rd_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Once upon a time, at least 10 years ago, I subscribed to a science fiction literature listserv where Catherine Asaro was a frequent poster. Following a link I discovered she was a writer, lived in the DC area, and was a physicist. Hmm, reminded me of my friend Roy Young, another physicist/writer. I’d listened to Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey during my commutes into DC and liked them, but they were fantasy writers and I wanted to listen to more sf. I had found this articulate and intelligent woman sf writer and was eager to listen to her. The local libraries were just beginning to stock audio books and I checked them out as they came in. I caught up on the classics I should have read in school and discovered westerns, romances, historical fiction, and other genres I had avoided. No Catherine Asaro though.My career intensified and I neglected the listserv and my recreational reading ceased. Now I’m retired and my free time is back. Yippee! There are so many more audio books, I have to pick and choose. I discovered ebooks, blogs, SFWA, the whole online literary scene. I checked the listserv. Yes, Catherine was there. I was ready but where to begin? She’s written so much and some were series. Listserv to the rescue again! It said Diamond Star, her latest release, was good on its own even though it inhabited the Asaro universe.Diamond Star also came with a CD, not a reading of the story, but a “soundtrack” of songs from the book. I was hooked. As a boy, I enjoyed listening to classical music while I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and Pellucidar books. Would Diamond Star give me the same experience?Yes, and more. Del-Kurj Arden Valdoria is a renegade prince of the Skolian Empire. He enjoys singing and is accidentally discovered by a major label. His awkward rise to fame puts him in conflict with his family and in jeopardy with their enemies. The CD contains the songs he writes and sings. It all fits together.I played the CD as background music as I dug in. Aside: “Repeat” on a CD player is a lot smoother than flipping LPs every half hour or so. The music was unobtrusive but not banal and matched the aura of the narrative. The musicians are a local group and Ms Asaro wrote most of the lyrics and even does some vocals. At the end of my reading, I replayed the CD paying particular attention to the lyrics, which are provided in the book. That gave me another level of comprehension and enjoyment. Remember my discovery of all those different genres? Diamond Star has lots of them. At times it’s a western as in space opera (literally!), a light romance, a sexier romance, a high tech adventure, a social commentary, hard science fiction . . . historical novel? . . . it’s there too in the form of the Skolian geneology and time line.That may all sound cumbersome but it’s all part of the plot as Del progresses, screws up, falls in love, fails, succeeds, fights bureaucracy, is kidnapped . . . . Ms Asaro’s writing style keeps it light and moving forward. Some of my favorite parts are what might be called “Young Adult tech aware interludes.” Del is messaging, he's in virtual reality, signing virt cubes, at the mall, the bookstore. Second Life becomes Life Million. I also liked the local references to the Columbia Sheraton and the Merriwether Post Pavilion, and the Baltimore Sun becoming the Baltimore Solar Site, and the airport becoming the Thurgood Marshall Starport off the Interstate 95 Air Lane. That local band, Point Valid, even gets a retrospective mention. The sex scenes were interesting too. They were written in such a way that they could be interpreted differently depending on the experience of the reader. Neat trick. Diamond Star really does stand on its own. You don’t need to know anything about the Skolian universe to enjoy it. Warning: You may want to know more about it after reading it.