Mindtouch (Dreamhealers 1)
Mindtouch (Dreamhealers 1)
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Seersana University is worlds-renowned for its xenopsychology program, producing the Alliance’s finest therapists, psychiatric nurses and alien researchers. When Jahir, one of the rare and reclusive Eldritch espers, arrives on campus, he’s unprepared for the challenges of a vast and multicultural society… but fortunately, second-year student Vasiht’h is willing to take him under his wing. Will the two win past their troubles and doubts and see the potential for a once-in-a-lifetime partnership?
Genre (setting): space opera (Pelted)
Tags: found family, space opera, pastoral, low conflict, friendship, elves (space)
Rating: PG for emotional situations
Excerpt from Chapter 1
According to the research Jahir had done through the Well feed, Seersana’s university had preceded even Karaka’A’s prestigious institute as the first in the Alliance, just as this solar system’s two worlds had been the first settlement for the Pelted fleeing Earth. Its renowned medical colleges had been the product of necessity, for the first generations of the Pelted had been forced to re-engineer themselves to remove the flaws humanity had bequeathed them. As the Pelted encountered the first aliens, the medical curricula grew to encompass them. Seersana’s xenopsychology school was also the oldest in the Alliance, another reason Jahir had selected it.
Now that he was here, its unalloyed beauty offered an additional lagniappe. Ancient trees guarded the campus’s walkways, nodding over the broad lawns that separated the buildings. Tiny fountains nestled in secluded copses, their commemorative plaques written in Universal rhyme, Seersan glyphs, or, as one might expect of the race that carekept the Exodus records, both and a multitude of other languages besides. Jahir traced the engravings with his fingers. His own tongue was never one of those other languages, of course. His people would never have allowed it.
Every place he walked, he saw great effort employed in the preservation of the existing flora. The path leading from the School of Healing-Assist to the Rhone Medical Library wended through what could only be called a small forest, where a series of metal arches prevented the trees from draping their leaves onto the shoulders of passersby.
It was a disappointment to reach the edge of the medical campus and discover an empty lot, so finding a centaur wrapped up in a rope and surrounded by six squealing girls was a decided improvement. Jahir stopped on the edge to stare.
The creature tangled in the ropes had four legs and two arms in the configuration of a centaur. He also had a tail and two smooth wings attached lengthwise to his lower back. His black and white pelt suggested a permanent formal suit, with white stripes down his black back, a white chest and white toes. His face was some amalgam of animal and human, with a short muzzle and floppy black bangs over brown eyes. Instead of ears, he had feathers arranged in sprays, like the back of a woman’s hat. Jahir had never seen anything like him.
The Eldritch walked forward before he could think better of the plan. “Pardon me. May I assist?”
The centauroid glanced at him; all the little girls glanced at him. In the silence, Jahir was suddenly the center of attention.
“What is that?” one of the girls asked.
Another said, “It’s a human in white paint!”
“No, no,” the centauroid said, laughing. He had a pleasant voice, a warm tenor with a furry timbre. “That’s an Eldritch, kara.”
“Those are the ones that never leave their world, right?” another asked.
“I guess not,” the centauroid said with a grin.
“You sure he’s not a painted human?” the first girl asked again. “Or maybe he’s like one of those animals that’s born without skin color?”
The centauroid laughed. “I’m certain. If he were human he wouldn’t be so elongated. He’s an Eldritch, sure as I’m fuzzy.”
“So that means he has secret powers!” This from a human girl with ragged pigtails of dull brown hair and eyes bright as a sparrow’s. “He can read people’s minds, and he has a treasure trove of gold, and he has a dragon protecting his ancient palace, and he’s probably a prince!”
“A lord anyway,” Jahir said, laughing. “But a very, very minor one. Tell me, gentles, what are you doing to yonder man?”
“We’re teaching him to jump rope,” she said.
“Trying, anyway,” another said.
“And he’s not a man,” said the third. “He’s a Glaseah.”
“He’s doing okay for someone with so many legs,” one of the girls untangling him said. She had small limp ears, naked and set on a bald head. Jahir wondered what strange aesthetic had prompted the coif.
“And wings.”
“And arms!”
“I see,” Jahir said.
“Ladies, a little more help, please?” the Glaseah said, for the discussion had distracted them. “I can’t reach some of those tangles, you know.”
“Oh! Sorry!” The human and two of the others went back to picking the rope from around the centauroid’s tail. Jahir watched, fascinated. He had never heard of jump rope, but he couldn’t fathom how they’d managed to tangle the Glaseah up so completely.
“What are you looking at?” another girl asked, the shortest of the six. “You asked if you could help, so come help!”
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This book was what I needed then - and what I needed now.
Very engaging story. Loveable characters and amazing world-building. I had trouble putting it down. It’s a good thing I was able to pick up the sequel immediately after because Mindtouch and Mindline are so sequential they may as well be one book in two volumes!
ETA: This book has become a comfort read that I return to often.
I should have written this review soon after finishing the book; unfortunately, the next 16 novels (the remaining four of Dreamhealers, Girl on Fire and all of Princes' Game and Earthrise) got in the way. Hogarth's writing is easy to pick up and pathologically difficult to put down; this is sometimes balanced in the series with heavier content, but most of the Dreamhealers novels are cosy enough that this doesn't really happen.
As a result they have cost me at least two evenings of sleep. (I begrudge them nothing. Jahir and Vasiht'h are exemplary company, and they will grow on you as surely as the lioyasea on Rose Point - though that is another novel!)
An extremely poor summary of Mindtouch's plot is "space elf and centaur meet-cute at space-college in space". This is not in any particular inaccurate, but it also completely misses the point of the novel - in some respects that the plot itself, construed purely as a series of events through which the characters must navigate, is not the most important part of the novel.
While this is an intentionally uncharitable and reductive reading - and worth returning to when it comes time to explore the later novels - Mindtouch does have the distinction of depicting the characters in the most stable circumstances we will ever see, and thus is (almost) entirely driven by their intrinsic motivations.
This means that Mindtouch is, uniquely even among Hogarth novels, almost entirely about *people*, their ways of sense-making about the world and their place in it (and sometimes, their struggle towards that end). Not that Hogarth fails to replicate this later - Hogarth's own curiosity about other people is so nakedly effervescent fully half her protagonists foam with it - but from even as early as Mindline the characters have more pressing matters to attend than themselves and each other. In this, Mindtouch has a licence to focus on its central platonic romance in a way its sequels don't quite.
More precisely, Mindtouch is about philoxenia - literally 'stranger-loving'. This etymology is worth dwelling upon: it comes from 'philoxenos', from philos ('love') and 'xenos' ('stranger'). 'Xenos' can also refer to a recipient of hospitality, i.e. a guest, and 'philoxenia' is thus also translated as 'hospitality'. It is in this reading that the Greek Bible renders Hebrews 13:2 thus:
τῆς *φιλοξενίας* μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθε· διὰ ταύτης γὰρ ἔλαθόν τινες ξενίσαντες ἀγγέλους.
"Do not neglect hospitality, for by it some have entertained angels."
If Mindtouch has a moral, it is perhaps precisely this. There are after all no true villains in Mindtouch - only closed perspectives and prejudices. Vasiht’h, itinerant homemaker and would-be therapist, helps Jahir, an alien of striking beauty and nobility, find his feet among the Alliance. In turn, Jahir’s attention is almost wholly beset with a fascination with finding what is good and common between himself and people unlike him, and how what makes them unique does so.
I chose to quote scripture in part because the novel explores comparative religion, such as Vasiht'h's belief in Aksivaht'h and her tenets. Faith - whether expressed as actual religion, or merely the commitment to particular values and convictions - is an important component of personal identity both as a unifying and distinguishing factor in the Alliance: the races of the Alliance mostly have their own religions, but also a common set of values upon which the Alliance is founded. This is easily a subject which can be rendered either overbearing or esoteric, but Hogarth does neither - through the magic of the characters simply being sincerely curious, earnest and unjudging. In this too, is philoxenia - the virtue of treating others with dignity and respect, even as they are unlike you, except that you may trust they will hold you in similar esteem.
The astute reader - or perhaps one who has read past the end of Dreamhealers - will note I am emphasizing idealism and goodwill. 17 novels in hindsight, Mindtouch remains singularly precious, not merely because it was first, but because it alone captures a kind of circumstantial innocence that is inevitably lost as the characters grow up into their mature, consequential roles later in the setting - not a loss, precisely, but a particular and sweet sorrow. Mindtouch is the one novel where it is most obvious that the experience of reading it for the first time can only be had once, and thereafter only fondly remembered. It is about a simpler time; about where people come from and how they reason about where they might be going - before the universe throws life at them, ready or not.
But that is another novel!
(It’s Mindline. Really, Mindtouch and Mindline are one book; if you read Mindtouch alone the ending feels rushed, but it clearly makes sense if you see them as a duology with a single plot structure running from the start of one to the end of the other. I hear Hogarth does bundles.)
I understand the brief here is to put something down that's not in the blurb, so that prospective readers will have a little more detail to go off - so here goes.
I'm in my thirties. I have a wife and child, I've moved around the world for both personal and professional reasons, and I've seen a thing or two in my day. I'm - old. Not OLD old, but old enough to have had my fill of 'may you live in interesting times' and to want to seek adventure in places other than my own bad decisions.
In this context, Mindtouch is a balm for the soul.
At its most fundamental, Mindtouch is a kind book that allows you to live through the mistakes of others. It shows you a world - an unfamiliar world - and leads you through the lives of people just entering adulthood, literal or metaphorical, gently introducing you to their goals, worldviews, and pitfalls.
I found this book in my mid-twenties, and I wish I'd found it in my teens. Jahir and Vasiht'h are the proxies for myself I'd wish I had ten years before I did. They're unsure in the future but confident in themselves; they have and make support networks to sustain them in ways I wish many undergrad students could do; they have moral and ethical frameworks that have been carefully assembled with a great deal of discernment, and which compete with the best of my experience in scifi and fantasy for quiet guides to a good life.
I write this being now some twenty books into the Peltedverse experience, and I am comfortable saying: if you don't know who you are, or where you're going, or quite what to make of things - or if you do, and you're confident and comfortable and would like to revisit those earlier times of gentler uncertainty-
Mindtouch, and Dreamhealers in general, is worth your time.
I really enjoyed getting to know these characters and seeing this vision of the future. I have almost finished this series now and am looking forward to exploring the rest of the Peltedverse. The cover helped me visualize the main characters in my head and I wish there were more illustrations.