Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award-winning SF writer Michael Flynn now turns to space opera inThe January Dancer, with stunningly successful results. Full of rich echoes of the space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, it 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 it might save or destroy, following the searchers for it. Collectors want the Dancer; pirates take it; rulers crave it, and they'll all kill if necessary to get it. This is as thrilling a yarn as any ever in the whole history of SF. This is a story of love, revolution, music, and mystery, and ends, as all great stories do, with shock and a beginning.