Empress of Light

Kati used the light of creation to win a war, and now, as empress, she must forge new alliances with former enemies. When her daughter, Yesui, is born with powers exceeding her own, Kati discovers that raising a super-being is no simple task. Yesui, a willful prankster, enjoys torturing her baby brother, Mengjai, who also turns out to be much more than he seems. But Yesui is the true Empress of Light and is later called upon to save a dying gaseous planet by adding mass to its core. There she falls in love with a gentle empath and must help in resisting a coup that endangers his family. Along the way, she discovers beings with powers even greater than her own, and learns that death is only a transformation to something new. "Shanji is rich in good things. Here is hard science with all the gorgeous colors of fantasy, and storytelling with the sweep of historical epic." -M. J. Engh, author of Arslan"Well written, and all of a piece, and it comes pretty close to singing." -Algis Budrys James C. Glass is a retired physics and astronomy professor, whose expansive career in the field found him in an array of roles including working on ion and arcjet engines at Rocketdyne and serving as a college dean. Glass retired from academics in 1999 to pursue writing full-time. His first piece of fiction was published in Aboriginal S.F., and soon after he won the 1990 grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest. Since then, he has published over nine novels and four short story collections. He lives in Spokane, Washington, and Desert Hot Springs, California, with his wife, Gail.