Book Summary: a clever story of the problems in communicating with aliens.

Sci Fi Categories: aliens, telepathy

Book Description: "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.

Authors Bio: James H. Schmitz (October 15, 1911 – April 18, 1981) was the author of a number of science-fiction fantasy novels and stories which continue to have a strong following decades after his death. The out-of-print works have been republished multiple times. Schmitz stories are remarkable for their bold female characters (surprising even by today's standards), for the sensible and accurate use of science and technology, and also for the author's deft handling of psionics. His writings exist as eight novels and fifty-odd stories in several collections, most of which were published between 1960 and 1974.

Narrators Rating (9 out of 10): ★★★★★★★★★☆