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Pzyche
Light rubbing / wear along DJ edges.
- GenresFictionScience Fiction
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1982
15 people want to read
About the author
Amanda Hemingway
17 books20 followersShe has also written under the pseudonyms of Jan Siegel, and Jemma Harvey.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 1, 2026
If you're going to read this book, be aware there's a lot of sexual threat, which develops into sexual assault fairly regularly. Even with all of the violation content removed, it's not a read I could really enjoy, and I found myself skipping through the later bits. Which is a shame because there's some good clear description of living with neurodiversity that I could get into - if only it moved beyond victimhood, powerlessness and dissociated moments of vicarious revenge.
"The girls made breakfast. The men made plans." ~ there's a sort of constant sexism throughout, a binary in which new characters are introduced to keep the story moving but they're either bleak and powerless (female) or corrupt and rapey (male). It reads very like Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series in that sense ~ and as with Elizabeth Moon there's a sort of frustrated meta story there that the author's exploring and perhaps processing. So in a way it's a good book and should definitely have been written; it just makes for quite difficult reading.
The narrative also jumps back and forth through flashbacks and back-story fill-ins so you risk losing track of the timeline, which adds to the sense of disconnection. If it was intentional to use both writing style and chronological structure to make the reader feel utterly bleak and depressed then it has worked very well. And certainly given the topic it's exploring (violation), it makes sense to convey dissociation, a very normal human response to trauma.
The writing generally struggles to engage, though. For example, page 62 of my copy introduces us to a scene with "Several different kinds of wine." ... full stop. Was it good wine? Bad wine? Do we care about the wine? Did the dusty labels suggest a collector, or trigger memories of a bygone era??!!?!! No; it's just some wine. There it is. There's this indifference, this numbness of description that pervades all things, the narration of someone looking through a telescope at a scene and describing it dispassionately.
On the plus side, the writing finds its voice as it goes, and the bleakness is intentional - why else base it in the desolate landscape of a planet on the edge of a galaxy? So perhaps the author has achieved what they intended.
If you want to feel bleak and you dislike men (and women) then this may be the book for you.
"The girls made breakfast. The men made plans." ~ there's a sort of constant sexism throughout, a binary in which new characters are introduced to keep the story moving but they're either bleak and powerless (female) or corrupt and rapey (male). It reads very like Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series in that sense ~ and as with Elizabeth Moon there's a sort of frustrated meta story there that the author's exploring and perhaps processing. So in a way it's a good book and should definitely have been written; it just makes for quite difficult reading.
The narrative also jumps back and forth through flashbacks and back-story fill-ins so you risk losing track of the timeline, which adds to the sense of disconnection. If it was intentional to use both writing style and chronological structure to make the reader feel utterly bleak and depressed then it has worked very well. And certainly given the topic it's exploring (violation), it makes sense to convey dissociation, a very normal human response to trauma.
The writing generally struggles to engage, though. For example, page 62 of my copy introduces us to a scene with "Several different kinds of wine." ... full stop. Was it good wine? Bad wine? Do we care about the wine? Did the dusty labels suggest a collector, or trigger memories of a bygone era??!!?!! No; it's just some wine. There it is. There's this indifference, this numbness of description that pervades all things, the narration of someone looking through a telescope at a scene and describing it dispassionately.
On the plus side, the writing finds its voice as it goes, and the bleakness is intentional - why else base it in the desolate landscape of a planet on the edge of a galaxy? So perhaps the author has achieved what they intended.
If you want to feel bleak and you dislike men (and women) then this may be the book for you.
Displaying 1 of 1 review