The book Fire Dancer by Ann Maxwell reminds me of Andre Norton and other SF pocket books I read in the 80s that already felt as if they were decades old. The gender roles seem steeped in traditional mores with a seasoning of sixties free thinking. It's hard for me to tell if the author put this in, or if I just projected because the font and pages felt so familiar to me, with a sexy woman on the cover and a powerful man backing her up.
A lot of science fiction ideas flew about -- a world destroyed by an expanding sun, a world based on gambling where anything goes as long as you have the license, slavery enforced by high technology, good guys with a sense of fairness and bad guys without, sex as a weapon (but only off stage), a categorization of different life forms, including sentient plants and rocks, and a galactic history including lost super races. All that is fun, as are the main characters, bonded together by need and by the loss of their home world. Everything worked as long as you didn't look too hard, and nothing in the text invited close scrutiny.
A fun read, and if I see the sequels in a used book store I'll pick them up, but I won't go looking. B-.
This is book #2 for my SF challenge; 1.14159... more to go.
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