kirkusreviews.com
A woman struggles for survival and her sense of self in this hallucinatory
novella.
Bee and her companion/lover, Chela, are imprisoned in a cave
system on the distant world of Colel-Cab, spending their days in a challenging
and miserable struggle to reach each supply drop before the local bug
population destroys the goods they need to survive. The chip used to inhibit
Bee and Chela’s telepathy has also apparently damaged Bee’s memory, and she
remembers nothing about the crime she supposedly committed and little about her
life before her imprisonment. Then Bee makes contact with someone outside the
prison, bringing back memories of Bee’s beloved wife, Jasmine, inspiring the
hope for escape, and casting doubt on both Chela’s identity and her true
motivations. A person lost in a mental or virtual construct is a sci-fi plot
element so common as to be pedestrian, and the worldbuilding is the merest
sketch. All we know is that this is a near future where telepaths exist and are
despised. This could be a small piece of a greater whole—the first few chapters
of a novel of the great telepathic rebellion—but by itself, this story doesn’t
add up to very much. The focus is on Bee’s journey of self-discovery as well as
the relationship between Bee and Jasmine, but we don’t learn enough about Bee
or Jasmine to get more than mildly invested in them. We know they’re in love,
because the characters tell us they are. One is presumably meant to find some
poetry or profundity in Bee’s mental landscape, but it’s not terribly
substantial or even that interesting. At most, there’s a decent exploration of
whether infidelity is possible when one spouse has amnesia and can’t even
remember the wife she swore fidelity to.
Not enough there, there.
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