Author’s Note
Of Starlit Balls and Starship Captains owes a lot to many stories I love: Star Trek and discovery and the joy of exploration, space opera and The Fifth Element and the work of the Wachowskis, novels by Jane Austen and Julia Quinn and Eloisa James and Courtney Milan and Catherynne M. Valente and Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and more!
I wanted a version of a Galactic Empire that was also unabashedly a Regency romance, with balls and fashion and the importance of every minute detail of attire, from a Captain’s uniform to bejeweled eyelashes; I wanted an Emperor who, in the best sort of fairy-tale quality, has essentially been kept in a tower—confined to the capitol, under his uncles as the Regents—but who knows exactly what he wants, just as soon as a dashing lady starship
