A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast, complicated, wonder-filled!Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer MichaelFlynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of richechoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, TheJanuary Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact ofgreat power, and the people who found it.Starting with Captain AmosJanuary, who quickly loses it, and then the others who fought, schemed, andkilled to get it, we travel around the complex, decadent, brawling, mongrelizedinterstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectorswant the Dancer; pirates take it, rulers crave it, and they’ll all kill ifnecessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love, revolution, music, andmystery, and it ends, as all great stories do, with shock and abeginning.