Psion by Joan D. Vinge

[james_davis_nicoll]

Psion: Special Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Joan D. Vinge




This is the book that made me ask on Facebook if it makes sense to talk about an Andre Norton lineage of SF writers. In many ways it's what you might get if Norton had been a better writer. In others, it's what you might get if the X-Men used a draft to gain recruits.



Psion:
When we meet him, Cat is a half-Hydran, half-human [1] street kid on the run from the press-gangs of the interstellar corporations that run most of human space. Swept up despite his best efforts, he is spotted as a potential psionic and dropped into a very special training course run by Seibeling, who would be the Charles Xavier of this story if he wasn't closer to being a kapo.

Sadly for Cat, this isn't a universe where poors get to enjoy self-actualization programs for free. Not only is being IDed as a psion at best a lateral shift from being a despised half-breed gutter rat but the purpose of the program is to create a task force of psions who can be used to infiltrate and undermine The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants Rubiy's plans to organize dissatisfied psions into a force able to take Cinder away from the Federation.

The security on the program is terrible and Rubiy is completely aware of it, what it is for and who is in it. From his point of view, it's great because it's just another took for him to subvert and use.

Cinder is a planet-massed post-stellar object in the Crab Nebula, the main source of telhassium, the computronium on which the Federation runs, and it's a heck of lever for someone to use to blackmail the Federation. Rather like Dune or Trouble on Titan, the people who run the place have decided that the best way to control it is to treat the workers on whose labour they depend as badly as possible, giving Rubiy a lot of material to work with.

Unsurprisingly for a kid who has been living on the street as long as he can remember, Cat is poorly socialized and he manages to get himself ejected from the program in fairly short order. Since this is a comparatively short book, this lands him on an express train to plotsville, dropped into cold-sleep and shipped out to Cinder to spend his days mining telhassium while dodging the natives nobody seems to have questioned would be on a world that until about seven or eight thousand years ago was part of a star.

Cat spends enough time as a miner to get a good idea of what that is like (being a street kid was better) and to learn what's up with the natives before getting sucked back into the struggle between the Federation, that corrupt and vast organization that is the only hope of billions for something like rule of law, and Rubiy, nihilisitic, self-centered but also in the short run a lot closer to looking like an ally for the oppressed psions than anything the Federation cares to offer, with Seibeling's organization and the poor natives of Cinder caught up in the struggle as well.

Psiren: This picks up shortly after Psion. Cat, still suffering the consquences of how Psion's plot played out, encounters a Hydran woman a lot further down the slope of despair than he is, which has left her even more vulnerable to exploitation than Cat is and Cat was a slave for a while. She doesn't see a way out for herself aside from death, leaving Cat as the only one interested in her fate willing to actually help her.

The Tor edition also includes an introduction Joan D. Vinge but since I am cheaping out and reading the copies I already own, I have not read it (This also means if there are egregious errors in turning this from book to ebook like the rn > m issue I have run into elsewhere, I will not be aware of it.

Having mocked The Phoenix Legacy for the way it feigns concern for the lower orders while choosing an assortment of aristocrats as protagonists, I will give this points for picking someone from the bottom of the heap (2) something that isn't very common in SF. The great and powerful still hold all the cards but at least in this that's not presented as the best one should hope for.

That said, there is a certain level of learned helplessness where the alien Hydrans are concerned. Humans or at least some humans feel kind of badly that humans destroyed most of the Hydran culture while they were stealing bits for themselves, something that mirrors anxieties in SF about the treatment of Native Americans but doing anything that's actually helpful or useful to the Hydrans is not really on the menu. Kindly doctor Seibeling married one but it worked out about as well for her as Pocahantas marrying Rolfe did for Pocahantas. Actually, worse. I think we're supposed to see Seibeling as a sympathetic character but I have to admit if at some point he had been shanked by an outraged psion, I would not have cried.

Speaking of the Hydrans, there are a number of elements most easily explained by the fact Cat is an ignorant street kid or by invoking what Kung Fu Monkey called "You uncurious motherfuckers" when discussing Lost.

A: Why does nobody wonder why something that was part of a star in historical times has humanoid natives? That's answered by "You uncurious motherfuckers"; knowing the answer won't make anyone more money.

B: Some people think Earth was settled by telepathic mute Hydrans. Some people also think homeopathy works. I don't have an issue with the idea people might believe this, especially someone like Cat who has never been educated, but it is nonsense. Humans and hominids on Earth have left fossil traces going back millions of years and their relatives go back even farther.

C: How is it the Hydrans never stumbled over Earth, given that they had a vast empire and their nearest colony (Beta Hydra) isn't that far away? Well, maybe they did but I cannot imagine they'd do anything with Earth aside from drawing a bright red circle around its position on a map and warning people not to go there. It's good for Terrans and bad for Hydrans that they aren't able to envision just running an asteroid into Earth.

"Psiren" was published in 1981 in New Voices 4 while Psion was published in 1982 by Delacorte Press. It would not have been out of place published in 1961 or even 1951, except the quality of the prose is much better than I would expect from a book of an older vintage. Specifically, I am reminded of such Andre Norton books as Night of Masks or the Forerunner series (3). It's not the psionics angle, although that helps, but the choice to tell the story from the point of view of someone so far down the pecking order that the closest to a happy ending they can reasonably hope for is to reach a place where they can imagine someday having a happy ending. As I said over on Facebook, the difference between Norton and someone like Van Vogt is in something like a Van Vogt if our oppressed hero tried very hard, he could become President of all the King-Popes, whereas in a Norton, they might move up from criminal squalor to a respectable blue-collar job.

It's clear from the introduction in New Voices 4 that Vinge already has the Cat series sketched out in her mind and from Psiren that she knew where Psion was going to end up.

If you would like to read Psion, the 25th anniversary edition is available
here.

1: AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHH. We will be returning to this point.

2: There is a character from a high-ranking family but due to the way society is set up she has all the standing of the mad cousin the family keeps locked up in the attic.

3: Which admittedly ran from 1960 to 1985. And O'Donnell's Flinger series, which features similarly exploited psionics (albiet with a much better reason for treating them the way they do than 'because we can'), was roughly contemporary with Psion.

Comments

[ross-smith.livejournal.com]

You describe Psion first and then "Psiren: This picks up shortly after Psion", but later you say Psiren was published first. Was Psion written as a prequel, or did you get the titles crossed somewhere, or what?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Psiren" was published first but is set right after Psion: anyone who read it would have a good idea of the rough direction Psion has to go to end up at "Psiren".

[tavella.livejournal.com]

My impression was that it was deliberately a homage to Norton. At least, the camp/refugee area at the beginning seemed very much a nod to the Dipple background for a number of Norton's characters.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Harkening back to the Grimdark thread, well, wasn't that a big part of Norton's schtick? ISTM that her protagonists almost always had some sort of terrible childhood experience.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Someone who isn't me should write an essay about figures like Seibeling and Xavier, who react to oppression by trying to convince their group has enough utility not to exterminate out of hand, and the way their opponents like Magneto and Rubiy are shaped as extremists and/or madmen any reasonable person would oppose.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I can't parse that first sentence. Who are they trying to convince of what?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

"President of all the King-Popes"

Now _there's_ something to put on your business card.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

FMA: Fuhrer-President King Bradley. (King is actually his first name. Uh-huh.)

Nanoha StrikerS: "Sankt-Kaisers" (Saint-Kings). No President level, though.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

I would be astonished if there wasn't an Andre Norton lineage of SF/F writers. In one form or another, even if not as directly expressed as Psion seems to be, from your description. Her work was very widely read (dunno if it still is) and often at an age when her readers were quite impressionable. (Speaking from personal experience.)

And ooh, the Flinger books. I was just mentioning them to someone. I really enjoyed those a lot when I first read (and re-read and re-read) them. They're all on my bookshelf. I wonder if the suck fairy's been?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Looking at isfdb I am sad to note that the series seems to have fallen out of print by the late 1980s and really couldn't have done all that well going by the lack of reprints. The rest of his books seem to have suffered similar fates and unlike other author, I see no sign anyone picked up on the ebook rights before he died.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember the suck fairy visiting even by the time I read the third book. At least, I recall being creeped out when (spoilers)

the protagonist killed his friend for, as I recall, fighting the enslaving of people with powers. Which would have been fine as character development/disintegration, except I got an impress of authorial agreement.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Norton was one of my top five authors as a kid (del Rey was number one[1]). How does she hold up on rereading? And are the 'updates' -- I'm guessing -- something to run screaming from?


[1]Looking back through the cataract lens of memory, I think most of my fave authors were women, people like Cameron, Lightner, Nourse, Norton, et. al. I don't know why that was except perhaps that writing for kids maybe wasn't considered terribly manly.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I reread the series about a year ago; overall, they hold up rather well.

[cyphomandra.livejournal.com]

I loved the Flinger concept, but agree with the comment below about the series taking some odd turns as it went on (I think there was also a suppressed homosexuality sequence - on the watery planet where everything costs? - that struck me as perhaps belonging to a story the author didn't quite confront).

I always wondered if there were more books in the series out there, or at least the plans for them.

(On topic, I love Psion unreservedly, although by Dreamfall this was wavering. I read it and Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy at similar times, and was all about street kid teen protagonists undergoing rapid rises through society, preferably with a lot of angt and psychic powers. I would, however, also have loved to see James do Vinge's World's End, which I find a fascinating read)

[dsrtao]

Are there any SF novels where the planet of Galactic Wealth Resource is operated by a mutual-benefit society which simultaneously defends itself against outside attack while maintaining a reasonable level of wealth and civil liberties for its entire population?

Possibly _Mirkheim_, IIRC.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Norstrilia?

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

That isn't nearly as easy to turn into an interesting story - at least before someone attacks it.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! I enjoyed reading these when I was younger.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

One of the nicer things about reading Psion in 2014 is that she described every computer / electronic interface using touch screens. So as of this moment, it doesn't feel dated, nor to far-fetched.

I do have to admit something about Cat's language rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of "damn"s, not nearly as many "fuck"s. Felt old-fashioned.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Rather like Dune or Trouble on Titan, the people who run the place have decided that the best way to control it is to treat the workers on whose labour they depend as badly as possible

Hmmm, is that an accurate description of the Arrakis economy? I thought the actual spice harvesting was done by the Harkonnens, and the Fremen were troublesome locals who didn't actually play a role in gathering melange.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

IIRC, there were more than a few descriptions of bad treatment. Also there was definitely stuff about how most of the populace was facing water shortages while the Harkonnens actively showed off how they could waste water, (large decorative plants and a 'welcome to my palace' ritual that involved washing hands and throwing sopping wet cloths to the floor).

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I never really cared for Andre Norton's writing, but I liked the setup of a number of her SF books, like Solar Queen and so forth: the ones I think of as freighter SF. The stakes are believably low, it's mostly about working people going about their business. I wish there were a whole lineage of it; if there is, it seems to be moribund at the moment.

Alien is in the Norton school.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

Well, I have run into some freighter SF over in the Chakat universe. The big[1] one being Tales of the Folly.

Fair warning: It's a furry setting, (so if you're allergic to feline aliens... although Earth-sourced genetic uplifts are more common in the stories), and the stories tend not to hide the sex.

Some good news: Ship crew sizes are sane! It's not uncommon for small freighters to be family-run things with a crew of 3-4 adults and a similar number of teens. Even the larger crews are justified, (travel times mean that help will often be over a week away).


[1] Both in story size and ship size.

[gary-farber.livejournal.com]

"From his point of view, it's great because it's just another took for him to subvert and use."

"Nook"?

[gary-farber.livejournal.com]

No, wait! "Take"!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There is one plot detail that gets screwed over by Science Marches On: there's a subplot about the fact Seibeling's son vanished when his wife was murdered; Cat is the right age to be that son. Nobody suggests doing a DNA test.

[owlmirror36.livejournal.com]

There were paternity tests before DNA sequencing became cheap and easy.

Says WikiP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_testing#History):

In the 1960s, highly accurate genetic paternity testing became a possibility when HLA testing was developed, which compares the genetic fingerprints on white blood cells between the child and alleged parent.[13] Paternity testing technology advanced with the isolation of the first restriction enzyme in 1970, and accuracy was further improved with the development of PCR between 1975 and 1980.