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

[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.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The sf ones are very straight forward but not without pulp charm, plus she did things with protagonist choice I find interesting. I found her witchworld stuff kind of dire.

Avoid Quag Keep.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Oh, gods, yes, avoid Quag Keep. I say this as a diehard fan.

On the other hand, I find three or four of the Witch World books to be comfort reads, and still enjoyable. Three or four--maybe more?--are pretty dire, and the rest are, you know, they're ok, but I haven't re-read them in a long, long time.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know what is worse than Quag Keep?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ask me how I know, he said with a hollow laugh.

This was also an unreadable labour of love:

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Norton holds up on re-reading, for me, granted a fair amount of obvious old-fashionedness. I'm probably not an impartial judge here, though, because my love for Norton in my youth was long and deep, and I don't think I'm yet able to read her without that lens in place. Just overhearing people's comments, I gather that most readers who don't come to her at the right time--middle school or high school, perhaps?--aren't going to find her appealing.

Some of the updates/late co-authored stuff...well, some of them I enjoyed and some I've run screaming from, and I find myself pretty much entirely uninterested in them as a whole.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

My daughter wasn't grabbed by Norton in her elementary/middle school years. I'm pretty sure it was the the old-style dialogue -- no one she knew really talked that way! Same for Lord of the Rings.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I got the impression her late co-authored stuff was of the same nature as Marion Zimmer Bradley's late co-authored stuff, i.e. assuming a 90/10 split was probably generous.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

I've never read Norton much or at all as a kid, but have been indulging in what's been available from gutenberg.org and I can say that as adventure stories, much of those at least hold up.

Series like the Time Traders with its Cold War settings are of course horribly dated, as are the gender and racial relations, but not in a nasty or horribly racist way, just, you know, a product of being written in the fifties.

[felila.livejournal.com]

The right time for me was eight years old. I still remember the excitement I felt reading Star Guard.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

...women, people like Cameron, Lightner, Nourse, Norton, et. al.

This Nourse?

I didn't know about his safe sex/STD nonfiction books.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Augh!! You're right, of course. I meant Joan North (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_North). I guess creeping senility isn't really an excuse.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Still, it reminded me about The Universe Next Door.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Reading over the thread prompts my memory, I was thinking of the other Norton (The Borrowers) and North, which came out as Nourse. Don't ask me why.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I really, really hope there was no specific reason (I mean apart from friendship) that Heinlein dedicated Farnham's Freehold to him. Poor guy.

I am amused that he wrote So You Want to Be a Doctor and SYWTBA Nurse, given Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard.

My sister used to work at Virginia Mason Hospital, and some of the same doctors who appeared in Intern were still there.

[cofax7]

Her SF holds up a bit thinly (and I say this as a lifelong fan). Most of the characters, even the leads, are pretty 2d, and what character development there is, is from "uncertain and lost" to "kind of competent, with a chance at a place/home". That said, the narratives tend to move briskly, there's some real creativity in the alien environments, and a diversity of representation not expected for the time she was writing. Although she didn't get around to writing books with female leads until well into the 1960s, I believe--many of her earlier novels didn't have any female characters at ALL.

But James is spot-on about her positioning of many/most of her characters: when their stories start, most of them are orphans, foundlings, lost in some way, powerless and dependent on charity and their own wits to get by. In the fantasies, they tend to grow into figures with both political and magical power, but in the SF they often can only hope for a certain amount of support and independence.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

I've never read an Andre Norton novel. What would be a good selection for a beginner? What are her best works?

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Depends on how well you can set aside dated settings. I quite liked _Galactic Derelict_ and _Key out of Time_ when I read them *mumble* years ago, but _Time Traders_ and _The Defiant Agents_ (I think) didn't appeal as much. The duology of _The Zero Stone_ and _Uncharted Stars_ was reasonably good, if slow-starting, and I enjoyed the Solar Queen stories.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I would recommend Night of Masks as well.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

One of these days I'm going to get The Zero Stone, Uncharted Stars, and um, Moon of Three Rings in hardback. Fantastic cover art, or so preteen me thought.

[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)