With the release of Measure Of Adulthood, Politics Of Empire is complete as a series.
It was written loosely in parallel with the Preparations For War series, in that they both take place in the same setting and at about the same time. The differences are that while Joe and his wife Asina in the Preparations For War series are working at a grunt level on a primitive planet in enemy territory, Grace in Politics Of Empire has married into one of the most powerful families in the Empire, and she spends her time increasingly defending citizens of the Empire from incursions. She’s also a mom, and her kids will be among the next generation of those most powerful defenders of the Empire.
In Invention Of Motherhood, Grace is mustering out of Planetary Surface Forces as the novel begins. Her agenda is to start a family, but she doesn’t want to do it with artificial gestation – she was born on pre-contact Earth, and she can’t look her sisters in the eye and call herself a ‘mom’ without doing it the hard way at least once. The difficulty is that not only are her husband’s family are powerful operants, but they have powerful enemies as well.
Price Of Power begins about five years later, Grace’s husband has just obtained one of the few jobs in the Space Forces that allows ‘off base’ privileges when off-duty, and she’s looking for something she can manage while bringing up her children. The head of her husband’s family gets her a position as an investigator working for one of his subordinates, and that’s when a rival family decides to start a war with them.
End Of Childhood opens several years later. The Empire has caught their enemies marshaling troops for assault – the actual war is beginning – a war both sides have spent decades preparing for. Grace is now an experienced investigator, and the head of her husband’s family offers her a job working directly for him, defending the people under his protection from infiltrating enemies and human traitors. Meanwhile, her husband goes missing on a mission assaulting a critical enemy industrial node.
As Measure Of Adulthood opens, Grace’s oldest legitimate child has achieved legal adulthood – but she also discovers that her bastard son from a wild childhood has run afoul of the law. Meanwhile, the war grinds on – now thirteen years later, and the Empire is feeling the strain, while the enemy is getting increasingly desperate – and desperate enemies do unpredictable things.
(The links above are to Amazon e-books, but the paperback versions are also there. The links to the Books2Read sellers and library services are here (Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Overture, etcetera. Also available e-book or paperback at any of them):
Preparing The Ground (and the rest of Preparations For War series)
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