R- Catspaw (v,x) Dreamfall (v,x)
PG16- Psion (v,slight x)
Vinge has a main character named Cat, a boy with psionic powers and the features of a dying race. Cat is street scum, but there is something inside him that makes him fight that destiny. It is something other people would kill or enslave him for.
Vinge moves easily between the dark moments at the depths of human depravity and the times when they overcome all of that to be something greater. The one tone she rarely visits is light-heartedness. These novels are not brain candy; they are intensely psychological, uncovering the most basic human emotions, including fear, love, longing, and racism. Vinge's plots do an excellent job of focusing the themes and the psychological conflicts of the characters.
Psion begins the story of Cat, a street kid with the eyes of a dying race that make him feared and hated. Someone is trying to capture him, to take him above the dying slums to the world where everyone has a name and a number. But Cat wants none of this, even if his power could make his dreams come true. Because Cat knows that power leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to destruction. Yet to be powerless is just as much a nightmare, as he discovers the depraved levels to which human beings will go to make a profit.
After his telepathy was burnt out from killing a man, Cat went through life blind. He is offered special drugs to bring his powers back if he will use them to protect a rich Earth family. He is to become a Catspaw, bait in a game between the Earth forces of money and religion, all the while trying to prove that slavery and bigotry do exist with the evidence of his own body. This is perhaps Cat's most martyr-driven novel to date, and it contains scenes of graphic violence and sex. But it was very good, perhaps even better than the first.
Finally, Cat travels to the last planet with a still-living city of his mother's people. There, he encounters the incredible Dreamfall, a substance dropped by the cloud-whales and considered sacred by the natives. Humans mine the dreamfall, looking for rare substances, but many of those who enter the deposits never come back. Here also Cat finds the other half of his life, both in his people and in one person especially. But Cat's life was not meant to be this easy; sure enough, his people are dying slowly, unable to reproduce. Like the Elves of folklore, one of them has stolen a human baby since she has none of her own. But as Cat searches for the child, he begins to wonder if all is as simple as it seems.
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Last Updated: August 4, 1999
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