Official Kate Elliott Website

The Novels of the Jaran

"Jane Austen meets Genghis Khan on the set of 'Lawrence of Arabia'"

It's hard for me, the author, to describe this series save that it is science fiction set a few centuries from now and that it focuses on character, culture, and events more than nifty concepts or pure plot. My influences in writing it have been history, anthropology and archaeology, the romance of the nomadic tribe (in the old sense of the word 'romance,' that is, the idealized version of a thing), old adventure / explorer fiction like H. Rider Haggard, speculation about gender roles and how other peoples might bring different expectations to what it means to be and act female and/or male, speculations about how Earth's cultures might change as technology and space travel change us, and a kind of undifferentiated wish to live in a time when we can travel between the stars.

It's about people, mostly, and about the historical process: what happens when two cultures come into contact -- and conflict.

It's about consequences.

Map of Rhui (Eric Elliott):

full-sized
(big enough to read text,
but a large file!)

screen-sized

Click on any bookcover thumbnail for more information.
(Books #2 and #3 are in fact one novel, and go to a single subpage)

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