Earth Dreams — Janet Morris

Everything you've seen or read till now took you only to the brink . . . Neither pure fantasy, nor straight science fiction, nor earthbound dynastic saga, Janet Morris's Kerrion Empire Series is a stunning amalgam of all three. It is a family saga with the epic appeal of Dune and the action and excitement of Star Wars. It is an epic of love, power and treachery that will appeal to men and women equally; full of action, compulsively readable and quite unlike anything being published in the realms of fantasy today. The protagonist, Shebat, is a remarkable girl from Earth. She is brought to the vast empire of the Kerrion family by a renegade son; named as its future ruler on a whim of his autocratic father; abducted to the slums where the Kerrions' slaves drug themselves with powerful mystical sorcery; and finally rescued to take part in a great rebellion. She falls in love with one brother but marries another and becomes more Kerrion than some born to the name. A magical seductress of men, passionate in her lust for power, Shebat moves among those who control the destinies of millions, for whom treachery and betrayal are as easy as murder. Set in the timeless future on a primitive, savage Earth and on the sophisticated habitats of deep space, Earth Dreams is the final volume of a three-part saga.