Warrior queens

Catherine Asaro is my new favourite writer. Her Skolian Imperialate series deals with a future where three human civilizations exist: the Allieds (Earth), the Skolians, and the Eubians/Traders. This is a rough outline of her history:

• About six millenia ago, unknown aliens transplant a bunch of humans from South America to another planet.
• The humans form the Ruby Empire, which has space travel and highly psi-based technology. The Ruby Empire is ruled by warrior queens who keep their men in seclusion.
• Ruby Empire collapses.
• A few hundred years ago, humans redevelop spaceflight.
• Genetic engineering accidentally creates the Aristos, a race of anti-empaths who derive pleasure from torturing psions. The Aristos rule the Eubian Concord.
• An Aristo project later creates the Rhon, extremely powerful psions who escape and establish the Skolian Imperialate, rediscovering and using ancient Ruby technology. The Imperialate is a semi-democracy with a parlimentarian system but the Ruby Pharoah (female, as in the ancient empire) and other nobles holding considerable power.
• About a century and a half from now, the Allieds develop spaceflight and meet the two other human empires.

I rather like Asaro's approach to gender relations - feminist without being the sort of dreamy New Age or the Valerie-Solanas-man-hating-radical types. Here's a sample from the preview of her latest, The Ruby Dice:

Across the amphitheater, the Majda queens were sitting at their consoles, tall and aristocratic. Only their women held Assembly seats; even in this modern age, they followed ancient customs that forbade their men to inherit power.

When Earth's people had finally discovered the Imperialate, they had scandalized the noble matriarchs of Skolia. Apparently on Earth, men historically held more power than women. The matriarchs claimed this was why it had taken Earth's people so long to reach the stars. They asserted that if women had been in charge, Earth would have achieved that pinnacle of technology thousands of years earlier. Their arguments conveniently ignored the fact that their ancestors had developed star travel because they had starships to study.

Earth's annoyed males responded by pointing out that Earth had achieved a far greater degree of peace than the Imperialate, which surely had to do with the fact that bellicose, aggressive women had been in charge of the Imperialate rather than peaceful men. Naaj Majda hadn't understood why Kelric found this so funny. She even acknowledged the Earth men had a point. Kelric told her to go read Earth's military history.

Asaro herself has had a really interesting career - she went to college to become a ballet dancer but ended up becoming a physicist - and a terrific SF novelist. Her writing is truly unusual in that the stories have both deeply emotional character development as well as "hard SF" math and physics.