Entertaining. I like the setup, with the telepathic group. The main character takes a bit too long to make decisions on his own, instead of just going with the flow and I found some of the telepathic experiences a bit too vague and taking too long, but other than that I liked it. ( )

The idea at its heart (psychics all need hella trauma therapy) is pretty interesting, but then it's cluttered up with much too much unrelated plot. Cat is a remarkably passive character, too: I thought he'd finally made a decision of his own in the fight scene at the end, but no, he was actually manipulated into that too. wtf, seriously.

Another very strange decision was to let the question of whether Cat is related to another character just... go unanswered. The only way I can read it is that they both know it's true and really don't want to admit it to themselves? It makes the love triangle something out of a psychoanalytic fever dream. That has to be intentional?! But if it is, why did Vinge let her Freud-in-space crack!fic get so sidetracked with all this nonsense about heists?

Villain is a sinister bisexual sociopath and flirts briefly with the hero while monologuing, so far so 1982. Cat is *such* a twink stereotype however (literally a catboy rentboy) that his shock and horror at being desired by a man and massive crush on a lady are both jarring.

Come to think of it, the vibe Cat gives off is quite [book:Vanyel|28759]. "Oh dear, I just keep getting beaten up, but in a sexy vulnerable subby way." Is there a name for this genre when it's published as a mass market paperback and not as hurt/comfort slashfic? (Vanyel comes 7 years later and turned up to 11, so it's not a completely fair comparison.) ( )

Pretty clearly a first novel. While Vinge does a pretty decent job with telepaths, their interactions, and the cultural issues between them and non-psi humans, the general world-building is unsatisfying; corporate mercantilism run amok among the stars has been done more thoroughly elsewhere. The plot stumbles its way along to the finish line as if continuity was a chore; perhaps keeping this as a novella might have been better.

Oddly, it's the very imperfect characters that appeal to me. There aren't any easily likeable characters, but no out-and-out execrable souls either; each has a past, a set of bugaboos to deal with, and no one seems to be made of infinite patience or avarice. This can be frustrating to a reader, but it makes the characters believable.

This is serviceable, journeyman SF but a pale representative of the struggling-youth, coming-of-age corner of the market. ( )

His psychic powers are traumatically sealed away, until he's trained to use them to save the current economic system against an evil psychic super-power. Moderately entertaining...but ignores a major premise in the plot: the people with super psychic powers are basically ignored after their initial introduction. ( )

There was a time I really would have enjoyed a book like this. That time is past. One might say I 'outgrew' this kind of thing, but that would not be accurate, at least not in my case. It feels more like I have lost something, an imaginative capacity that allowed me to access what made these novels good, to me, then. ( )