Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Duke of Uranium | 2002 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 2 | A Princess of the Aerie | 2003 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 3 | In the Hall of the Martian King | 2003 | John Barnes | Buy |
The Duke of Uranium opens the series with Jak Jinnaka, a teenager living in a solar system carved up among competing political powers. Jak is smart, charming, and frequently reckless, and the novels put him in the middle of schemes involving kidnapping, revolution, and high-stakes diplomacy. The setting draws on golden age space opera conventions – space habitats, Martian colonies, asteroid belts – but Barnes updates them with a more modern sensibility about politics and institutions.
A Princess of the Aerie and In the Hall of the Martian King continue Jak’s adventures, raising the stakes and expanding the cast of antagonists and allies. Barnes gives Jak a best friend and a complicated network of relationships that carry across all three books. The series has the pacing of a thriller and is accessible to readers new to science fiction.
Barnes wrote the Jak Jinnaka books as an entry point for younger readers, and they work well in that role. They are lighter in tone than the Giraut or Century Next Door novels but share the author’s interest in building coherent future societies with their own internal logic.