As a female who has appreciated SF/F since the age of twelve, I have been in a very small minority for most of my life. Along came validation in the form of Telzey Amberdon, the Nancy Drew of Science Fiction for her day, and suddenly I felt that I had a place in our speculative future.
Telzey is cool. Telzey is brilliant, beautiful, and a very independent-minded fifteen-year-old; and apparently, also a powerful latent psi (psychic). She's the genius daughter of some powerful politicians several hundred years into the future when humanity had expanded into the stars and founded homes on countless planets in a system called the Hub. Somehow our intrepid heroine ends up getting pulled into several mysteries and thrillers during the course of this book, and of course she handles herself with wit and self-confidence against the universe's fiends, human and non-. But the worst threat to this budding psi is the ever-watchful Psychology Service, which has its own agenda for her powerful talents even as it purports to protect and serve all the citizens of the Hub. Telzey has to learn a lot of psychic self-defense on the fly against her own in addition to everything else on her plate.
This is a collection of the short novellas that Schmidt wrote at various points in his career for magazines, and as such they had to be combined to make a novel hefty enough for publishing by today's standards. I rather enjoyed this format, as Telzey's character can be explored in chunks of chronological development rather than skimmed as one would through the plot of a larger novel. It works well on the level of light entertainment and gave me more natural reading breaks than the standard Chapter format.
I was also appreciative of the slightly retro flavor of stories that were written mostly during the `60s and `70s. Now and then an anachronism caught me off guard, such as a reference to a rotary dial-up communication system. But in many ways Schmidt was so ahead of his time, with the subtly feminist flavor of his themes and main characters, that I can gloss over those tiny lapses without skipping a beat. Mostly, I just have fun exploring this speculative future through Telzey.
Gosh I enjoyed getting back into the Hub universe; now I want more. Happily there are more Telzey stories out there, and soon I will be reacquainting myself with all of them and some others I had never met. It's good to live in the age of Internet bookstores!
-Andrea, aka Merribelle
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Top reviews from other countries
elicutz
I have not found yet a book by Schmitz that I did not love: )
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 18, 2015
RAY HUGHES
Purchase one for yourself and one for your daughter
Reviewed in Australia on October 14, 2021Claire Barnes
I would definately recommend this
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 5, 2013