Book Review: Pegasus in Flight

(Now, for an older sci-fi classic I'd not read before)

Pegasus in Flight by Anne McCaffrey is the first in a series about Talents. Talents are humans who have extraordinary powers like telekinesis, telepathy, precognition & etc.

Overall it was okay. Semi-predictable and the characters are kinda all cardboard cut-outs but, meh, it's okay as a quickie nothing-else-to-read book.

The characterization of women is a bit disturbing. There are a lot of female characters, a lack isn't the problem, and there is a variety represented as well: all kinds of occupations and backgrounds and demographics. That's not the problem, either. The problem is that all of the female characters (except for Tirla, I'll get to her in a moment) are portrayed at one point or another (some more often than others) as hysterical emotional beings that must be comforted or silenced by the men. The men never have moments of doubt or weakness, if they make a mistake they jump in to action. The women are the ones who swoon, wail, gasp and need comforting and physical support during frequent periods of emotional distress.

Even more disturbing, if the emotional distress of females is inconvenient to the males in the scene, the male Talents simply silence them with handy mental blocks or push them out of the room with their mental powers. The only times when Talent's abilities are used to bully or control people directly on a face-to-face basis, it is by the men, and it is always directed at women. Once, Peter, a young talent who is 14, uses his ability to physically remove a male from the room but this is the only time an ability is used to bully a male to this extent. Of course, Peter's motivation for doing so is to protect a woman (a woman who should, one expects, have been able to take care of the problem on her own if written by a different author).

Tirla doesn't fall prey to the emotional swoony-ness. She gets to keep her active, tomboy-ish behaviors the entire book. Well, sorta. As soon as she meets the other Talents she becomes more girly. Buying clothes at an unstoppable speed, dressing up in "inappropriate" clothing. It's just like Lyra; apparently, girl children are allowed to take on whatever gender role that pleases them, but as soon as they even get anywhere near puberty then, bam! Must conform to societal rules about what Girls Should Do.

One of the stranger bits in the book is the interaction between Rhyssa and David. Rhyssa is highly Talented, David has no Talent. An underlying subplot is their developing mutual affection and the slight stigma of a Talented marrying an unTalented. Of course, they talk a lot but it's all business. Their feelings towards each other are hinted at a bit but they don't have many personal scenes together to talk about this. Rhyssa is often bemoaning the fact that unTalented relationships are "unsuccessful" because the unTalented cannot read each other's minds. Indeed, she can't read David's and she laments that being unable to read his mind is stifling her ability to truly connect to him. I was flabbergasted. um… you don't need to be able to read minds to have a successful relationship! Maybe she should, you know, use this talking thing and then she could learn how he thinks without telepathy!

Even stranger, in their first moment alone together when they actually admit their feelings for each other, David asks her to marry him right on the spot (and she says yes). Wow. I mean, love at first sight and all, and this is a pulp novel. But, what? You've not even had one close one-on-one interaction with each other but already you know you want to marry each other? Also, whatever happened to being worried that you didn't know well enough what he was thinking? Wouldn't you want to, you know, talk first?! I'm not even going to get in to the weirdness in the epilogue in which David and everyone else except Rhyssa knows that she's pregnant before she does.

Also, the Sascha/Tirla love thing. Ew. Ew ew ew. Pedophilia = BAD. Anne McCaffrey tried to slip in some convenient little mention in the epilogue that he got a precognitive flash of he and Tirla getting married and having children. But, still, eeeeww! I don't care how you dress it up with precog messages of Twoo Wuv: a grown man (in his 30s?) lusting/loving after a twelve-year-old. That just squicked me out like crazy. ugh! How is it that the female characters in the book could be motherly towards Peter without falling in love but the only love and affection a male adult can have towards a female child cannot be just paternal, it has to be lust/love? Why couldn't Sascha just be the really awesome father/uncle figure that Tirla never had? Why did he have to fall in love/lust with her? What the hell?

Also, what did any of this have to do with a Pegasus anyways? I guess somewhere in there I completely missed the connection.

Anyhow, I'm definitely not reading the others in the series. And I'm pretty close to giving up on Anne McCaffrey altogether. Ho hum, life goes on, on to other books.