Dreamfall

I feel like I'm coming out of dreamfall myself—a long waking dream that started when I began reading the Cat series. Book lovers know what I'm talking about: your non-reading time feels like a haze, because you're not aware of the here and now. You're still inside the novel.

While Psion was more of a coming-of-age/adventure and Catspaw more political intrigue, Dreamfall felt like a film noir, with Cat uncovering a mystery that leads him to the ghetto streets of Freaktown and eventually the corrupt and cold-blooded men that keep up the status quo. It's not as hard-bitten in style as something like The Big Sleep, though. Cat's longing for connection and forgiveness soften the tone, although he has some dark musings about human nature. show more Cat's thoughts added such texture to the story. He would often think with the delicacy of poetry, but switch to say something incredibly hard-as-nails out loud. Those reversals were so delightfully surprising.

There was an overall feeling of isolation in this book. The isolation of your own biology, of a community kept at arm's length. The isolation we impose upon ourselves. Of how another being, whether human or alien, is ultimately unknowable. That sense of being blocked in wasn't obvious, but kept the events tied together nicely.

Dreamfall is the third—and sadly, last—book in this series, and it feels more like an Empire Strikes Back than a Return of the Jedi; that soft minor chord before the music swells to a magnificent crescendo. There were many things left open-ended: Miya's new tech skills; Cat's mysterious tattoo; whether he'll ever fully get his telepathy back; when/if he'll return to Refuge; and the implication that Cat may be something more than either Human or Hydran. It's ripe for a triumphant final installment in the series. I'll just have to hope that Joan Vinge recovers her health and finds the right spark that will set her hand to writing it.

Still, this book works well as a stand-alone, although readers will have a greater emotional connection if they read the series from the beginning. I hope those who pick it up have their own dreamfall. show less

To pay tribute to childhood memories, I ordered a copy of Dreamfall to read after I would finally finish Catspaw. The world building is superb. I give it and the wordsmithing two stars. However, during the book, the lead hero experiences a chicken soup of trauma while never really standing up, himself. While he possesses the ability to be a great hero, he continually scrapes the bottom as others abuse him. This book would be more truthfully labeled as a psychological dystopian novel featuring abuse.

I once worked with a storyteller, briefly, who would share tales of a hero who was heroic because they would, on occasion, look back at their attacker before going back to the abusive stage. This feels like that. It's some folks' jam and show more should be more properly labeled.

This is not a hopeful novel; it's about the futility of existence.

Content warnings: Assault (sexual, physical), abuse (sexual, physical, emotional), dystopian show less

A big disappointment. I enjoyed Psion and Catspaw, but the word that kept coming to mind for all 440+ pages of Dreamfall was "overwrought". The sales pitch for fans of the character Cat are (1) he goes to a planet where Hydrans still have a community (2) he meets the love of his life. But the Hydran / humanity set up is just a retread of the Native American story (or Avatar if you wish) and the love story amps up the cliche "one person in the universe" to ridiculous extremes. Cat spends the entire book bitterly complaining. As in Catspaw, he is caught between rival groups. Ironically, in Catspaw, he was actually an agent of change, intelligently crafting a way out of an impossible situation. In Dreamfall, he's just a pawn with a few show more handy genetic traits. Where Catspaw had a rich noir backdrop of combines in conflict on Earth, with a variety of interesting characters, Dreamfall has an misty-eyed alien planet where semi-sentient clouds shed solidified thoughts that are then mined, like bat guano, by the nasty humans.

Not recommended, especially for fans of the first two books. show less

A good book with a bummer ending. Not surprising, I suppose, since the theme of this novel is the near impossibility of surviving as an outsider in a world governed by the corporate state.

Cat's a sweet character who somehow manages to be a bridge between peoples, but also manages to find himself alone & disregarded.

This is a book filled with longing - for community, for change, for love, for companionship, for a way to be whole. Vinge writes interesting characters & the plot here is nicely character driven, although she doesn't really do anything with the cloud whales and their dreamfall - odd to set up such a cool premise & then just sort of leave it there.

This is the third book of a trilogy and I think I like the second one, Catspaw, show more best. The characters, landscape, & ideas are more diverse - alien, but not alien all at once. show less

This book wasn't quite as good as the first two, but it is still an very excellent sci-fi book, and the story is unique enough to not feel like some boring rehash as some sequels are. Cat goes to his mother's home planet and learns a lot there. Joan D. Vinge writes the story with a masterful pen as she describes the struggles between the Hydrans and Tau, a greedy corporation.

I am, apparently, hopeless at avoiding part threes in a series. Fortunately this stood well enough alone. As a story, it hangs together well, although the ending works better in a series than a stand-alone.

On the downside, I'm struggling to think of any way in which the book was not problematic. First off, I should mention trigger warnings for sexual assault.

Second, explicitly comparing the aliens' plight to that of Native Americans and then portraying the aliens as a peaceful, spiritual people with mystical powers makes my head hurt; even though it's not quite that simple, the only aliens we see are rebels or collaborators or druggies. And to top it all off, the author has wiped out all actual Native Americans in her world except for show more one guy with a medicine bag who knows hardly anything about his heritage and only exists to occasionally encourage the protagonist.

Then the only women in the story are: a love interest; a mother, who gets killed; a wise grandmother, ditto; another love interest, who has to reject her sister for the hero; and said sister, who is mad. Oh, there are a couple of other spear carriers, but I can't even remember who. There are certainly no positive inter-female relationships.

Having one of the major antagonists be an antagonist because she is mad also made me sigh.

And then there was simply the gigantic gaping plot hole: apparently the aliens are so peaceful because if they kill someone they die themselves. Thus they have been easily oppressed. And it has never occurred to a single one of them that they could minimise their losses if one of them used a bomb or something to take out a whole bunch of the enemy. show less

I'm sure I read at least Catspaw much earlier, but 20 years is a long time to remember a series. Not that you needed the previous books to enjoy this, but there were a number of references to his history.
At one point I would have indiscriminately sucked up anything that mentioned psychic powers, but I'm older & tireder now. Cat's bitterness is honest, Miya's idealism is sweet. Big business has octopus tentacles over all our lives (yes, I mean real world). No fairy tale endings.
Not a book that bears too much close examination about the reality of how people interact, how many chances a person gets in life.