What do you think?
Rate this book
Princess of the Void: Princess of the Void, Book 1
To survive as an alien tyrant's husband, he'll need to grab his new life by the horns.
A late shift watching an empty cell in a middle-of-nowhere facility? Sign Grant up. If the money's good, he'll gladly take the peace and quiet of a long, boring night.
And then he meets the Subject B-31. Blue, beautiful, and inhuman.
He's told to think of her as a test subject, not a person. He's told to ignore the sorrow on her face and the desperation in her crimson eyes. Maybe he should have listened. Because his rescue attempt quickly turns into an alien abduction.
B-31 is Sykora, a princess of the tyrannical Taiikari Empire, who whisks Grant into a galaxy filled with alien cultures, deadly rivals, and the sinister smiles of the Taiikari royal court. Grant will have to learn a new life, and learn it fast.
Because when the Princess of the Void looks at Grant, she doesn't just see a savior—she sees a husband.
And she isn't asking.
What to expect a long-developing mono romance taking place within an amoral (but not cartoonishly evil) galactic empire; royal intrigue within a large, colorful cast of aliens; moral ambiguity and some tricky questions without clear answers; a strong-willed, ethical protagonist who starts as an everyman way over his head and gradually accepts his powerful new position.
A late shift watching an empty cell in a middle-of-nowhere facility? Sign Grant up. If the money's good, he'll gladly take the peace and quiet of a long, boring night.
And then he meets the Subject B-31. Blue, beautiful, and inhuman.
He's told to think of her as a test subject, not a person. He's told to ignore the sorrow on her face and the desperation in her crimson eyes. Maybe he should have listened. Because his rescue attempt quickly turns into an alien abduction.
B-31 is Sykora, a princess of the tyrannical Taiikari Empire, who whisks Grant into a galaxy filled with alien cultures, deadly rivals, and the sinister smiles of the Taiikari royal court. Grant will have to learn a new life, and learn it fast.
Because when the Princess of the Void looks at Grant, she doesn't just see a savior—she sees a husband.
And she isn't asking.
What to expect a long-developing mono romance taking place within an amoral (but not cartoonishly evil) galactic empire; royal intrigue within a large, colorful cast of aliens; moral ambiguity and some tricky questions without clear answers; a strong-willed, ethical protagonist who starts as an everyman way over his head and gradually accepts his powerful new position.
- GenresRomanceScience Fiction
Audible Audio
Published January 13, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 13, 2026
2:19:38 into the audiobook. [Spoilers] What do you think of my thoughts author?
This story reminds me of Urusei Yatsura, Outlanders or the original Teen Titans Cartoon Network series.
The princess is attributing collective guilt to the humans as a whole Instead of blaming the individuals or government involved in her capture. You see this trope in a lot of stories, people blaming entire collectives instead of very specific groups or individuals. They are misguided as their thought process is motivated more by emotion then logic.
You need to understand the nature of private property rights to know why slavery is wrong. Private property is defined as someone possessing the sole ability exclude or transfer scarce assets that they own. The Non-Aggression Principle is an ethical concept that asserts that [aggression] defined as initiating or threatening forceful action against individuals or their property, is illegitimate and should be prohibited.
This basically means violating a persons private property rights is wrong. Two examples would be stealing and trespassing. You are attempting to access someones property without their consent.
Your body is considered a scarce good and your consciousness is the sole controller of that scarce good. This is why the right to self ownership falls under private property rights. This means actions like physical assault, sexual assault and rape also violate the Non-Aggression Principle. When you defend yourself, you are exercising your right to exclude others from accessing your property.
Using lethal force to defend yourself is permitted under the Non-Aggression Principle. So the Princess was well within her rights to kill her way out of the facility. The [NAP] does not allow for the initiation of force but it does allow the use of force in self defense.
Slavery is illegitimate because the slave owner is not the sole controller of the scarce good. At any point in time, you can disagree with the slave owners orders. This is why slavery violates the Non-Aggression Principle. Slavery can never be fully voluntary.
The princess violated the Non-Aggression Principle by asserting ownership over the protagonist. She even considered destroying Earth despite the billions of innocence people that played zero part in her capture. She is also a hypocrite because she was captured by an aggressive state and once freed, she then used her power as the head of a state to enslave the protagonist. She is operating on a eye for an eye mentality.
Edit: Mind control also violates the NAP. But that can be debated since you are essentially making someone consent. Thereby making you the sole controller of the scarce good. But If the mind control is not all encompassing, allowing for some degree of free will and by extension the ability to disagree, then I would say it violates the NAP. If the mind control also wears off then that also implies there is an underlying baseline that does not consent. If she used mind control in self defense then that is another matter. Which at least excuses her behavior up until she realized the protagonist was an ally who aided her out of his own free will. His slavery going forward is unjustified.
Thankfully the protagonist put his principles before his dick. I may rate this series higher once I finish the audiobook.
The physical characteristics do not make all that much sense to me. Humans are a sexually polymorphic species with the males being bigger and stronger on average compared to the females. It seems like the princesses race is the same. The princess marvels at the protagonists large size which creates a striking contrast between her three and a half foot stature and the protagonists six feet. Do you know how small three and half feet is?
The protagonist should be a lot stronger and the princess even mentions he should be strong enough to pick her up with one hand. Yet, the princess is easily capable of over powering him.
This story reminds me of Urusei Yatsura, Outlanders or the original Teen Titans Cartoon Network series.
The princess is attributing collective guilt to the humans as a whole Instead of blaming the individuals or government involved in her capture. You see this trope in a lot of stories, people blaming entire collectives instead of very specific groups or individuals. They are misguided as their thought process is motivated more by emotion then logic.
You need to understand the nature of private property rights to know why slavery is wrong. Private property is defined as someone possessing the sole ability exclude or transfer scarce assets that they own. The Non-Aggression Principle is an ethical concept that asserts that [aggression] defined as initiating or threatening forceful action against individuals or their property, is illegitimate and should be prohibited.
This basically means violating a persons private property rights is wrong. Two examples would be stealing and trespassing. You are attempting to access someones property without their consent.
Your body is considered a scarce good and your consciousness is the sole controller of that scarce good. This is why the right to self ownership falls under private property rights. This means actions like physical assault, sexual assault and rape also violate the Non-Aggression Principle. When you defend yourself, you are exercising your right to exclude others from accessing your property.
Using lethal force to defend yourself is permitted under the Non-Aggression Principle. So the Princess was well within her rights to kill her way out of the facility. The [NAP] does not allow for the initiation of force but it does allow the use of force in self defense.
Slavery is illegitimate because the slave owner is not the sole controller of the scarce good. At any point in time, you can disagree with the slave owners orders. This is why slavery violates the Non-Aggression Principle. Slavery can never be fully voluntary.
The princess violated the Non-Aggression Principle by asserting ownership over the protagonist. She even considered destroying Earth despite the billions of innocence people that played zero part in her capture. She is also a hypocrite because she was captured by an aggressive state and once freed, she then used her power as the head of a state to enslave the protagonist. She is operating on a eye for an eye mentality.
Edit: Mind control also violates the NAP. But that can be debated since you are essentially making someone consent. Thereby making you the sole controller of the scarce good. But If the mind control is not all encompassing, allowing for some degree of free will and by extension the ability to disagree, then I would say it violates the NAP. If the mind control also wears off then that also implies there is an underlying baseline that does not consent. If she used mind control in self defense then that is another matter. Which at least excuses her behavior up until she realized the protagonist was an ally who aided her out of his own free will. His slavery going forward is unjustified.
Thankfully the protagonist put his principles before his dick. I may rate this series higher once I finish the audiobook.
The physical characteristics do not make all that much sense to me. Humans are a sexually polymorphic species with the males being bigger and stronger on average compared to the females. It seems like the princesses race is the same. The princess marvels at the protagonists large size which creates a striking contrast between her three and a half foot stature and the protagonists six feet. Do you know how small three and half feet is?
The protagonist should be a lot stronger and the princess even mentions he should be strong enough to pick her up with one hand. Yet, the princess is easily capable of over powering him.
May 16, 2026
Despite being a book about aliens and spaceships, this is a magic-logic story; a Fantasy story, if you will.
In this book, the galaxy is utterly rife with sapient alien intelligences, and the vast majority just-so-happen to be human-adjacent. All alien species operate extremely similarly to humans, just with slightly different appearances and cultures: it could be said that the aliens are written as people from a strange foreign country, rather than inhuman.
This on its own would be fine enough, but the story takes it to an untenable extreme: All species, across the entire galaxy, just so happen to all evolve in such a way that their Males are vulnerable to the same method of mind control. Then, one species on one planet just so happens to evolve its females with the ability to employ this manner of mind-control. The vulnerability to mind control is inextricably tied to male-ness: Hermaphroditic or Asexual species are wholly immune, and no female anywhere is ever born with that vulnerability.
These Mind-control-capable women then subjugate, enslave, and rule-over all of the rest of the galaxy, forming an interstellar empire.
This is the framework for the story: that a human man is kidnapped into the mind-control empire, and a hyper-competent sort-of-princess of this empire falls madly in love with the protagonist; high-drama action and politics ensue.
I found the baseline premise unacceptably contrived. The Mind-Control the story features never even approaches making sense, and largely works on Magic-logic, rather than science-fiction logic. It largely only brings up mind-control for the sole purpose of forcing a contrived event to take place.
There is some interesting nuance here-and-there: The story does employ some mildly interesting world-building to explore the idea of how a society might work when half the population can mind-control the other half. It also explores elements of political resistance and reform, even if only cursorily. There is even some amount of exploration of language and idioms.
But by and large, the story was mostly just a series of contrived political bullshitery, meant to add drama to the main romance of the story. I didn't hate it, but I definitely didn't love it either.
I managed to read it for-free, and that ended up being a major contributing factor to my positive emotions about the series: I would have been a bit miffed if I had paid for this story.
In this book, the galaxy is utterly rife with sapient alien intelligences, and the vast majority just-so-happen to be human-adjacent. All alien species operate extremely similarly to humans, just with slightly different appearances and cultures: it could be said that the aliens are written as people from a strange foreign country, rather than inhuman.
This on its own would be fine enough, but the story takes it to an untenable extreme: All species, across the entire galaxy, just so happen to all evolve in such a way that their Males are vulnerable to the same method of mind control. Then, one species on one planet just so happens to evolve its females with the ability to employ this manner of mind-control. The vulnerability to mind control is inextricably tied to male-ness: Hermaphroditic or Asexual species are wholly immune, and no female anywhere is ever born with that vulnerability.
These Mind-control-capable women then subjugate, enslave, and rule-over all of the rest of the galaxy, forming an interstellar empire.
This is the framework for the story: that a human man is kidnapped into the mind-control empire, and a hyper-competent sort-of-princess of this empire falls madly in love with the protagonist; high-drama action and politics ensue.
I found the baseline premise unacceptably contrived. The Mind-Control the story features never even approaches making sense, and largely works on Magic-logic, rather than science-fiction logic. It largely only brings up mind-control for the sole purpose of forcing a contrived event to take place.
There is some interesting nuance here-and-there: The story does employ some mildly interesting world-building to explore the idea of how a society might work when half the population can mind-control the other half. It also explores elements of political resistance and reform, even if only cursorily. There is even some amount of exploration of language and idioms.
But by and large, the story was mostly just a series of contrived political bullshitery, meant to add drama to the main romance of the story. I didn't hate it, but I definitely didn't love it either.
I managed to read it for-free, and that ended up being a major contributing factor to my positive emotions about the series: I would have been a bit miffed if I had paid for this story.
February 28, 2026
as an audiobook listener, I can say this is a fantastic story. the characters are really likeable but not flawless, each with their own quirks. the world is developing nicely with plenty of possibilities to keep you wanting to read /listen to one more chapter. Alex Reno has gained one more fan. Cannot wait to listen to his other work and the next chapter of the princess of the void.
April 24, 2026
The writing is nice and the concept interesting but the series goes really dark and you watch the main character slowly lose all mortality. If you like the amoral leads it's definitely worth it but the tonal shift really threw me off.
May 13, 2026
Вот вроде и неплохо написано, но не зацепило. Очень много политики и мало чего интересного происходит. Быстро потерялся среди кучи персонажей. На удивление много незнакомых слов, книга слушается даже тяжелее чем техничный Adrian Tchaikovsky.
June 1, 2026
Decent writing, pays attention to consent where consent is initially assumed as no, warns for explicit, proceeds to be very much so. Does what it does very well, gives me the weird while doing so.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews