Books like To Ride Pegasus

I just finished reading To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, for about the 20th time. It never gets old to me, and I know this won’t be the last time I read it. Yes, I’m one of those people who can read a book or watch a movie over, and over, and over. Part of the reason is that if it’s a great book I tend to read it way too fast and I miss things, so I read it again later to pick up all the things I missed. This time through Pegasus I tried to focus on exactly why I love it so much. It might be the writing. The characters, even the minor ones, are so three dimensional that I feel like I know them. They are my neighbors and my friends. The world she sketches is vibrant and to me a logical extension of our own. It’s us, on steroids. Or psychic Talent, as it were. Mind you, when she wrote it 1997 seemed like far enough into the future to make all the futuristic things logical. Have we become what she envisioned? No. But we still might, maybe 100 years from now. It might be the story. It’s an epic plot line, by which I mean it spans several lives and years rather than focusing on one small moment in time. The story is an overview of how Talent came to be, and how it got organized. I think even those who don’t normally read Sci-Fi will appreciate the politics of a minority group trying to make their place in the world. At the base of it, the plot is about people trying to navigate through a society that doesn’t always accept them. A pretty universal theme, I’d say.Somehow I think it’s more than the story, the characters and the great writing (which is enough to keep me in just about any book). This story has a little something extra. A spark. It holds a fascination for me that I find in most of McCaffrey’s books, and that few others duplicate. It’s like she weaves pixie dust into every line. In this particular story, it’s the idea that we humans might evolve our latent parapsychic talents. The idea that telepathy might be something we eventually happen upon and grow into has always fascinated me. We’ve all had those moments…that freaky moment when you know the phone is about to ring with bad news, and then it does. The odd sensation of deja ‘vu when you just know you’ve seen this or been there before, even though there’s no possible way you could have. Or even that feeling when you let go of the ball and just know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is going into the net and you will win the game. Whatever the moment was, you probably just brushed it off as intuition. But what if it’s more than that? What if…That’s why this book fascinates me so much. McCaffrey takes that question, the what if, and draws it out in a way that captivates me and makes me want to walk right into the story and live there. If you’ve never read her books, do yourself a favor and pick one up. The most famous are the Pern series, but I’ve read them all and you can’t go wrong with any of them. If you like hard core SF, try the Ship Who Sang. If you like a bit of fantasy with your SF, try the Pern series. If you love dreaming about how our world might grow into something different, try To Ride Pegasus, and then the rest of the Talent series, especially The Rowan. What the heck, try them all!