23 August, 2001
Psion (1982, 1996, 266 pp (PB))
Catspaw(1988, 454 pp (PB))
Joan D. Vinge
This review was posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. You can read the discussion here.
These are two novels about the adventures of a half-human, half-alien telepath named Cat, set in an interstellar civilization dominated by huge mega-companies. Psion introduces Cat, a street punk living in the worst slum on one of the prime worlds of the Federation. When he's arrested and sentenced to hard labor, his only way out is to "volunteer" to be a research subject in a psionic research project. This leads him into a whole mess of interstellar intrigue and adventure, during the course of which he makes the first friends he's ever had, and manages to save the Federation itself along the way.
Catspaw takes place three years later. In this novel, Cat gets roped into acting as a bodyguard for a lady who is both a member of one of the most important combine families, and a fairly high-ranking official in the Federation's government. This leads him into another mess of intrigue and adventure, with some sex and politics thrown in for good measure.
The world Vinge has created in these books is not a pretty one. The future may hold great wonders, but human nature will not change, and the rich will still exploit the poor, the strong will trample the weak, and people will still fear and persecute those who are different from themselves. As a half-breed, poor, and telepathic, Cat is at the bottom of the social structure, and suffers for it. A lot, and he's not the only one. Vinge's world is filled with unhappy, desperate people who often hurt themselves and others out of pure ignorance and misery. But, all the darkness serves to make the bright points of the characters' lives more intense and their victories more meaningful.
While a great deal of physical and mental pain is inflicted upon poor Cat, he isn't a pure victim. He's a survivor, and he can be as much of a rat-bastard as any of them. (For example, he shows no compunctions about rifling through somebody's mind to root out their deepest secrets.) That's part of why I find him so appealing. The other part is that, in spite of the fact that he has every reason to be a completely self-serving jerk, he isn't. He's deeply loyal to his friends, and has a sense of common decency and a desire for justice which come into play whenever he has to make a hard decision.
Of the two books, Catspaw is the deeper, more complex work. Psion is pretty much a straight-up adventure novel, but it does explain a lot about where the Cat of the second book came from, and why he does what he does.
There is a third novel about Cat, Dreamfall, but I have not read it yet.
A note on marketing: The covers of all three novels feature the character Cat, but at least two of them show him as a pale-faced whiteboy, when it is clear from the text that he's dark-skinned. (The cover of Catspaw has weird lighting; it's hard to tell the subject's skin tone.) Actually, the cover of Catspaw does a very good job of capturing Cat's description.
