Anne McCaffrey's Talent Series

Alright, I admit it, I'm an Anne McCaffrey fan. I like her easy-going writing style that is very similar to some of the older serial style stories. I like the way she develops her characters and the multi-generational aspect of most of her stories. She is the only author who I'm comfortable saying, "If she wrote it, I want to read it." High praise indeed.

I was initially introduced to her stories by the Science Fiction Book Club. They sent me the Dragonriders of Pern, an anthology of three Pern books, but before I cancelled way back when, they also sent me a book called Damia's Children. To be honest this was a rather inauspicious beginning to what would develop into one of the most enjoyable parts of my life, which was reading these books.

I will get into this more in a later post, but I am really an Astronomy nut. However, I tend to divide Astronomy into two distinct parts, one dealing with stars and one dealing with planets. Planets are what I like. When planetology for lack of a better term plays a big part a story, I'm liable to be hooked. This is something that McCaffrey does better than just about anyone else I know. Actually when I try to think of a comparison, I usually end up thinking about another of McCaffrey's works like: Nimisha's Ship, the Catteni trilogy, or the Doona trilogy (which I'm still working on). The reason that I bring this up is that the Talent series deals with the beginnings of humanities expansion into space.

The first book that was written was The Rowan, but I think it's better to go back to the Pegasus trilogy when humanity is trying to expand off an overcrowded Earth and make their first journey to another planet. Peter Reidinger is an extremely well developed character that is extremely relatable. Actually all of the characters are really relatable, and realistic to boot. Peter helps assist with the first expedition to Altair.

The real genius of this series is how the story keeps building on itself. I also like the alien encounters are handled in this series, both with the Mrdini and the Hivers. The friendly Mrdini and the rival Hivers are both expanding too, but humanity has an advantage, Psionics.

Psionics are how humanity has managed to colonize other planets, specifically telekinetically throwing cargoes and ships almost instantaneously across the void. Telekinesis, telepathy, empathy and many other psionic gifts are lumped together as talents, and the people who have these gifts are known as Talents.

There are 8 books in the series, one of which is a collection of short stories. They should be available just about anywhere.

I would be remiss if I didn't state that