Shebat was 16, she was the lowest of the low, her services sold to others by her employer. She was taken off her world by Marada Seleucus Kerrion, next in line to take control of the Kerrion Consortium. This is her story, how she rose to find herself almost at the top of the family and was then dismissed back to her original world.
I found this book to be really challenging to read. There were a number of new ideas that weren’t explained until quite some time after they were first introduced and I had trouble with this. Many of the books I’ve read have the new concepts explained fairly early on and I have contemplated the idea of introducing the concept and then explaining it much, much later in the book. Now that I’ve seen it used I find I don’t like it. I do wonder if it’s possible for it to work with a different author. Some of the ideas were very similar to other books. In Dream Dancer there is a prototype space ship that totally melds with the mind and can think and reason properly, the space ship is the brains while the pilot is the brawn, just like the space ships in The Ship Who Sang series by Anne McCaffrey.
Parts of the story are a rollicking good read and I had trouble putting it down, it was just hard to understand some of the concepts. The one I’ll speak about is the concept mentioned in the title. I’m still rather confused but I think the author is saying that dreaming is a commodity and that you can go to an illegal organisation and have a person create a dream for you. You can only qualify as a Dream Dancer within one of the illegal organisations when you can demonstrate all the approved Dreams and also create one within approved parameters. Shebat becomes a Dream Dancer and is very good at it. She creates a dream that startles and worries her fellow dream dancers so they have great trouble deciding if she should pass the test. I think I’ve explained it properly, although one bit that worried me with her Dream is that I couldn’t understand why it upset her fellow Dream Dancers so much, this just wasn’t sufficiently explained and I felt it was a relatively important point as it helped to round out the explaination as why Shebat was so desirable. She was wanted by all and sundry for her talents.
Warnings:
Violence
Sex scene