To Ride Pegasus

Anne McCaffrey has a series I have read and reviewed called The Tower and the Hive, and in this universe people with psychic talents are responsible for providing telepathic communication and shipping services through teleportation. It is an interesting series which I enjoyed, but it leaves open the question of how we get from here-and-now to the universe she created. It is clear that it is supposed to be the same universe in some way, and in her Pegasus books she creates that link.

To Ride Pegasus is book #1 of the prequel series, and begins with someone who is very successful as an astrologer because he is in fact someone with precognition talent. He founds a research center and looks for others to join him. Then a talented telepath becomes his successor, and guides the organization into an accepted role in society. In McCaffrey's telling, it would seem that all/most people have some kind of psychic ability, only in most people it is weak or suppressed. There is some notion that genetics is involved, and that selected breeding might intensify the abilities people have.

This book is not a novel so much as 4 linked novellas that tell the story.

McCaffrey's DragonRiders of Pern series and her Crystal Singer series are better books than this. While McCaffrey was ground-breaking in her status and writing, this book seemed a little haphazard. There was no plot much of the book and felt more like a collection of scenes.

In addition, it was written in a very different cultural time. It took me some time to figure out what dystopian future McCaffrey was imagining and had to think about what the culture was in the 1970s when she wrote the book. Oddly, the book seems to start out set only 25 years in the future and yet the USA is overpopulated enough to warrant government control. Her idea of the amount of socialism in existence was way off track. I found some of the things she seemed to be writing as positive and heroic not to be, which gives the story much more depth. I suppose she expected you to root for the Talents and that they got their laws and tax breaks, but I didn't really support that. It really did smack too much of privilege, which is a huge theme in this book.

Anyway, a fun read if you are interested in sci fi, especially that written by one of the very few women in the field in the 1970s. And it is also really interesting to read from a feminist point of view in the twenty-teens.