Demigoddess of the Mind
James H. Schmitz's heroine
Telzey Amberdon
  

"Novice" — Analog, June 1962
The Universe Against Her
The Best of James H. Schmitz
Telzey Amberdon

"Undercurrents" — Analog, May & June 1964
The Universe Against Her
Telzey Amberdon (slightly abridged by editor)
  

"Resident Witch" — Analog, May 1970
The Telzey Toy
TnT: Telzey & Trigger

  

[ This essay presumes that the reader is familiar with Janes H. Schmitz's superb Telzey Amberdon science fiction series: including at a minimum the three stories analyzed below, in this sequence: "Novice", "Undercurrents", & "Resident Witch". Warning: major plot spoilers. ]

BACKGROUND & THESIS:
DEMIGODDESS OF THE MIND

James H. Schmitz wrote thirteen stories in his powerful and subtle Telzey Amberdon series, published in Analog Science Fiction from 1962 through 1972. These are a subset of his larger Federation of the Hub series.

Some time after writing the Hub novel A Tale of Two Clocks, Schmitz realized that his galactic background, the Federation of the Hub, had grown to have a life of its own in his creative mind, diverse and sprawling but consistent: a "self-maintaining science fiction universe" in his words. He developed several excellent new stories for the Federation of the Hub series — including "Lion Loose" and the first Telzey story, "Novice" — but other ideas wouldn't fit. In an article he once wrote for me, Schmitz says:

I gave up at last, found backgrounds more suitable for my plots and wrote them up that way. One genuine Hub story, "Undercurrents," a lengthy sequel to "Novice," was begun in this period. It was staged on Orado, planetary seat of the Federation's Overgovernment, produced a great deal of additional information about the Hub's internal organization and other matters, and was incidentally an extraordinarily difficult story to write.

James H. Schmitz
The Federation of the Hub:
Self-Maintaining Science Fiction Universe
Science Fiction Review (Franson/Sandin)
    Number 41, November 1965

And we are extraordinarily well rewarded with the results. Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon series is a masterpiece; or if you will, the longest sequence within a larger masterpiece, his Federation of the Hub series.
  

Demigoddess: a being of ancient religion, denatured into modern mythology, and sometimes fictionalized in modern fantasy. Why do I maintain that in his young heroine Telzey Amberdon, Schmitz has created a demigoddess in science fiction?

That is, a person possessing near-Olympian aspects which could belong to some new-found demigoddess of ancient Greece, but whose abilities are presented reasonably, even matter-of-factly. Telzey is not born of a union of god or goddess with a mortal, as Hercules or Helen. Telzey is a natural person whose exotic development is described as extraordinary but out of real physical and mental materials; not supernatural. An exotic but natural mind. Read on.
  

I stress that it is worth taking your time to read (and re-read) Schmitz slowly, thoughtfully, and with your analytical antennae well tuned. In other words, close reading. It's easy to breeze along with these fine adventures and miss the lusciously deep texture.

"Novice" is an introduction, not an overture. (I make a similar point about Fritz Leiber's "The Snow Women" which opens the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series.)
  

I lay out the overview for my Telzey as demigoddess thesis in the three following analyses, which like the stories really must be read sequentially. For those with serious interest in the human potential, Telzey's ascent is quite a ride.

1. "Novice"
2. "Undercurrents"
3. "Resident Witch"

<==>     " N O V I C E "     <==>

Telzey began a surreptitious study of the flowering bushes about her.

Three minutes later, off to her right, where the ground was banked beneath a six-foot step in the garden's terraces, Tick-Tock's outline suddenly caught her eye. Flat on her belly, head lifted above her paws, quite motionless, TT seemed like a transparent wraith stretched out along the terrace, barely discernible even when stared at directly. It was a convincing illusion; but what seemed to be rocks, plant leaves, and sun-splotched earth seen through the wraith-outline was simply the camouflage pattern TT had printed for the moment on her hide.

"Novice"
  

  
"Novice" leads off James Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon series, introducing the heroine; Telzey is fifteen years old at this point.

"Novice", this first Telzey novelet, is quite neatly put together. It introduces Telzey as well as her saber-tooth sized feline pet, Tick-Tock (so called from its metronomic purring). Telzey is decisively a high-powered teenager, genius level, daughter of Federation Councilwoman Jessamine Amberdon. She is a law student at Orado University, currently on vacation on the wilderness-park planet, Jontarou.

The plot here revolves around her pet Tick-Tock and its wild relatives on Jontarou. Much of the action is telepathic, and under this stimulus Telzey's own latent mental powers begin to come into the open. She is in fact a xenotelepath, a rare person who can communicate with minds of other species in addition to the human.
  

These mental powers are in the realm of extra-sensory perception (ESP); or psionic, or psi powers, to use the terms that editor John W. Campbell favored in Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog Science Fiction) throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Astounding / Analog was the magazine where most of Schmitz's best work, and all the Telzey Amberdon series, were first published. Telepathy, the ability to speak mentally to another mind, is traditionally the first and chief of these mental powers.

Of course there is a downside to mental openness, especially to a novice:

"Toss the tender small-bite to me" — malevolent crimson eyes fixed on Telzey from somewhere not far away — "and let's be done here!"

Quite an introduction! But we have touched only the surface.
  

In the next Telzey story we ascend to a higher plateau of mind, where the view down into the deep currents of psychology is exhilarating — and unsettling..

<==>     " U N D E R C U R R E N T S "     <==>

She had spent several hours that day in one of Orado City's major universities to gather data for a new study assignment and, on her way out, came through a hall containing a dozen or so live habitat scenes from wildly contrasting worlds. The alien was in one of the enclosures, which was about a thousand cubic yards in size and showed an encrusted jumble of rocks lifting above the surface of an oily yellow liquid. The creature was sprawled across the rocks like a great irregular mass of translucent green jelly, with a number of variously shaped, slowly moving crimson blotches scattered through its interior. ...

She shaped a thought herself, a light, unalarming "Hello, who are you?" sort of thought, and directed it gently at the green-jelly mass on the rocks.

A slow shudder ran over the thing; and then suddenly something smashed through her with numbing force. She felt herself stagger backwards, had an instant's impression of another blow coming, and of raising her arm to ward it off. ...

"Undercurrents"
  

In James H. Schmitz's novella "Undercurrents", Telzey really starts to expand; this is her second story, which sets the deep pattern for the Telzey Amberdon series, as well as sketching the spectrum of concerns facing the Overgovernment of the Hub, and hence themes in the entire Federation of the Hub series.

We move to a new high plateau, so to speak, and the air becomes rarefied.
  

Yet it begins cozily, setting the stage for what might be a straightforward thriller. In "Undercurrents", Telzey's university roommate is a major heiress — if she lives to inherit. A murder plot is shaping up against the girl, and looks likely to succeed. Her roommate's guard dog Chomir may not be up to blocking the murderous plot. On his own level Chomir is quite a guardian: an Askanam arena hound. In the big dog's mind are some of the clues that may lead to unraveling the murder plot before it's sprung.

Chomir also appears in the later Telzey story "Goblin Night", where Schmitz describes Chomir as not simply a carnivore, but of a species developed by Man as a killer of killers. In other words, not just evolved-efficient, but planned-efficient. Editor Campbell was quite taken with this point. (See The John W. Campbell Letters.)
  

In "Undercurrents" we meet Telzey's father Gilas Amberdon, executive officer of the Bank of Rienne; and Wellan Dasinger of the Kyth Interstellar Detective Agency. Both are sharp, strong men in their different ways; and both fully supportive of Telzey.

Not only characters, but institutions in a Schmitz story are often very interesting in themselves. The Bank of Rienne really is the kind of bank that your own bank advertises it is: intelligent, helpful, proactive, conservative, and a strong guardian of its clients' interests. The Kyth Interstellar detective agency is quite capable of advising a client to declare a private war, and then providing and applying the necessary force. Telzey also encounters the Psychology Service, a rather secretive department of the Federation's Overgovernment; with which Telzey has shifting run-ins and alliances throughout the rest of the series.

By the end of "Undercurrents" Telzey is still an extremely bright teenager with telepathic abilities; but she is growing into a demigoddess.
  

I don't think Schmitz uses the word demigoddess anywhere to refer to Telzey, but I choose it carefully. When I first read "Undercurrents", and a little later saw Schmitz's comment which I quote above, I didn't understand why this was "an extraordinarily difficult story to write". I certainly do now. And it surely is worth his effort.

The powers of the Greek gods and goddesses at whom we marvel in the Iliad begin to take modern shape here: the power to speak to mortal men and women as though inside their heads; to listen to their thoughts, feel their private feelings; the power to shape their thoughts and desires; the power to change the very basis of character and personality for good or ill. All these are given by Schmitz a science-fictional basis in psionics, the science of the mind, thoughtfully developed and reasonably described.
  

And mistake it not, these are not just talents, even wild talents; these are powers. This is the shaping creativity of the demiurge upon the stage of life, as of gods and goddesses from Olympus directing affairs "far on the ringing plains of windy Troy". And, in a galactic version of that ancient Greek world, the Hub has plenty of contention, not embodied by a recognized Pantheon and Greek city-states, but instead from inimical alien races and weirdly divergent strains of humanity, secretive forces and characters often invisible to the man in the street.

The odd burst of psionic noise as she came through the Customs hall at the space terminal in Orado City — Telzey considered it with a sense of apprehensive discovery.

The Customs machine certainly wasn't supposed to be able to affect human minds. But it belonged to the same family as the psionic devices of the rehabilitation centers and mental therapy institutions, which did read, manipulate, and reshape human minds. The difference, supposedly, was simply that the Customs machine was designed to do other kinds of work.

But the authority which designed, constructed and maintained all psionic machines, the Federation's Psychology Service, was at present keeping the details of design and construction a carefully guarded secret.

"Undercurrents"
  

Has James Schmitz found a middle way between neurophysiology and rhetoric? A third way of modifying human behavior that doesn't fall into "the myth of psychotherapy" as Thomas Szasz calls the medical metaphor of "mental health and disease"?

I would say no; that Telzey's psionic overriding of another person's actions or behavior, is a variety of neurophysiology applied to a brain and its contents. It is action at a distance only in the sense that radio or radar waves are. Schmitz may here bridge the classic mind-body duality that was apparent to the Greeks; but I do not think that he merges mind and body. If Telzey blasts or cures someone's mind, it is presented as an action blow or repair, not a talking attack or cure. An exotic method of neurophysiology.
  

Extending Schmitz's concept of Chomir the arena dog as deliberately bred to be a killer of natural killers — since the Ice Ages at least, we can say that the creature exercising some conscious management of its own evolution, Man, has pulled ahead of all the evolved-efficient carnivores in the deadly competition. But how do we counter the natural-enemy sort of killers that humanity may encounter in the future, or indeed the rogue human-killers that our own rough nature continually turns up? Can we or should we plan for extraordinary people who are killers of killers? Is this not in fact what a true hero or heroine often is and must be, across many subtle zones of human thought and behavior?

An interesting problem of defense and self-regulation, not new to history or to our own day. A problem that will not admit of a simple, ultimate answer as long as humanity remains dynamic. This is the kind of puzzle that the Psychology Service of the Hub tries to deal with. And even that outfit may have to concede that one of the answers is Telzey Amberdon.

Psionic ability of Telzey's magnitude is great power, and not all the denizens of the Federation of the Hub use their abilities and powers with responsibility like Telzey's. The later stories tend to be darker in hue. As Telzey's powers develop, she stumbles over — or is recruited for, or thrown among — greater challenges. Some of the villains are quite unsettling, not just scary and dangerous.

Telzey's powers and challenges are far more subtly worked out than the wild talent of Isaac Asimov's earlier "The Mule". In a way, this is all a speculation on Lensman-like mental powers in a complex and dynamic civilization, but without Edward E. Smith's Lens as tool and touchstone. Be glad Telzey is on our side. As for the Psychology Service, their motivations are rather more complex ...

<==>     " R E S I D E N T   W I T C H "     <==>

Dasinger was the head of Kyth Interstellar, a detective agency to which she'd given some assistance during the past year, and which in turn was on occasion very useful to her. ...

"What we want," Dasinger was saying, "is a telepath, a mind-reader — the real thing. Someone absolutely dependable. Someone who will do a fast, precise job for a high fee, and won't be too fussy about the exact legality of what he's involved in or a reasonable amount of physical risk. Can you put us in contact with somebody like that? Some acquaintance?"

Telzey said hesitantly, "I don't know. It wouldn't be an acquaintance; but I may be able to find somebody like that for you."

"Resident Witch"
  

  
"Resident Witch" is a stunning story for any reader truly thoughtful about the human potential. In psychological subtlety and power Schmitz's novelet reminds me of some of Fritz Leiber's best. We skip ahead here to the eighth Telzey story, a tangled skein of minds.

What is a human personality anyway, what does it consist of, what anchors your personality to you? A cunning and nasty murder attempt is underway; although it now seems ordained, Telzey and the Kyth Interstellar detective agency are trying to prevent it:

They hadn't given up. Dasinger was speaking to the Kyth Agency by pocket transmitter within a minute after he'd entered Larien's suite with Telzey, and the agency promptly unsheathed its claws. Operators, who'd come drifting into Joca Village during the evening, showing valid passes, converged at the entry to the Selk estate, set up some lethal equipment, and informed Village Security the section was sealed.

Village Security took a long, thoughtful look at what confronted it in the gate road, and decided to wait for developments.
 

Demigoddess? I use here a word of power, and I maintain that James Schmitz is a rare exemplar of a writer understanding and characterizing what being a demigoddess might actually involve in modern terms. In "Undercurrents" we might say that Telzey has made her first visit to Olympus. It's during "Resident Witch" we must add that she earns a seat at the high table, between Psyche the breath of Spirit, and Artemis the Huntress.

Demigoddess of the mind? Is this in the human potential? Not ancient religion, not mythology, not fantasy, but science fiction — a speculative but reasonable extrapolation of known human capabilities?

Dare we think so?

Why not?
  

Let's stop with a final reflection here upon the tremendous mind and character of Telzey Amberdon.

Near the beginning of "Resident Witch", two smart and tough operatives of the Kyth Interstellar detective agency have asked Telzey for urgent advice about the murder attempt underway at that moment — but they're reluctant to accept her offer of active help:

Wergard said to Dasinger, "We can't get her involved."

"Corvin Wergard," Telzey said.

He looked back at her. "Yes."

"I'm not reading your thoughts," she said. "I don't have to. You've been told who I am, and that I'm sixteen years old. So I'm a child. A child who comes of a very good family and has been very carefully raised. Somebody really too nice to get shot tonight, if something goes wrong, by a Colmer guard or Joca Security people, or ripped up by Brisells. Right?"

Wergard studied her a long moment. "I may have had such notions," he said then. "Perhaps I've been wrong about you."

"You've definitely been wrong about me," Telzey told him. "You didn't know enough. I've been a psi, a practicing psi, for almost a year. I can go through a human life in an hour and know more about it than the man or woman who's living it. I've gone through quite a few lives, not only human ones. I do other things that I don't talk about. I don't know what it all exactly makes me now, but I'm not a child. Of course, I am sixteen years old and haven't been that very long. But it might even be that sometimes people like you and Wellan Dasinger look a little like children to me. Do you understand?"

"I'm not sure," Wergard said. "I believe I'm beginning to."

  

© 2002, 2008, 2024 Robert Wilfred Franson