Anala Nadim is a free woman until she travels to the planet Mehtar to procure supplies for her father's mining operation on Mehtar's impoverished sister world—the colony planet Avasa. When a twist of fate enslaves Anala to the Lord Prince Jaya Sarojin, Anala is engaged in a battle to free herself from slavery and her world from subjugation to a corrupt Mehtaran consortium. So begins a tale of greed, betrayal, political intrigue and love that threatens to tear Anala from her spiritual path, and introduces both her and Jaya to true darkness.Laldasa is Sanskrit for "e;beloved slave"e; and I think it's a fitting title for a story of class boundaries, racial prejudices and the one power capable of overcoming them. It's the story of one small woman battling a political machinery over which she has no control and one supposedly powerful man who realizes that he is as much a pawn of the machinery as the casteless woman he befriends.As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, I've often sat on convention panels with titles like, 'Hey, you got mystery in my fantasy!' or 'Oops, there's romance in my science fiction!' I don't have a recipe for what happened in Laldasa—I just wrote it to taste. So if I got mystery in your SF, I only did it because, darn it, I think it makes for a richer 'dish.'— Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
