Laldasa: Beloved Slave — Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

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.'

Laldasa is Sanskrit for “beloved slave” 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.