Alexandra

Queen Alexandra, barely seventeen, has married Genevieve, a princess of New Hope, from the Southern Continent. As they tour Alexandra's own lands and cities, dealing with petitions and meeting her subjects, word comes in that there has been an invasion from the East.

The couple rushes back to the capital, where all is chaos. They are separated when there is an assault on the beaches near the capital, and Alexandra finds herself begging for military aid from her Western neighbors, while Genevieve is put before the television cameras, to raise morale to resist the invasion. Alexandra and Genevieve remain separated for the duration of the war.

An ancient invention enables a lesbian couple to conceive a child. Before they parted, Alexandra and Genevieve had used the device, in one of the more pleasant episodes they had enjoyed, but it's Alexandra who unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. Instead of leading the war, as was the tradition in their island nation of strong women, Alexandra is sidelined, and finds herself in very un-warlike occupations, forced to watch Genny's television appearances from far away, and to admire her increasingly brilliant oratory, and her overwhelming charisma on the tube.

With the help of the beautiful Nevenka, a girl of the enemy people who falls in love first with one of Alexandra's agents, and then with the general of the enemy army, the war is brought to an end, after the loss of many thousands of lives. But it appears that Alexandra and Genevieve's marriage will not survive the war.

This novel is the second, historically, from this author, and the clumsiness of the writing in the earlier chapters gradually works itself out. A few episodes are unusually violent, but the story is relentlessly pacifist in spirit. Despite some of the technologically fantastic elements in the story, it may as well have taken place before WWI on Earth, or in the Flash Gordon universe (with a lot less flying involved!) For all intents and purposes it is not a Science Fiction novel at all. Like PERN, the world of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider novels, the knowledge of technology is mysteriously low, except for Medicine. And there aren't any dragons, either! And, except for a few strong men, the protagonists are all women.