Jo-lac is a working woman plying her trade as a small-time cargo hauler on the fringes of space. She's got herself a ship, a badass and sometimes sassy AI as her navigator, and a literal friendly mutant to act as co-pilot, bodyguard, and occasional living sex toy. After getting screwed out of a job, Jo is forced to take the shittiest contract imaginable (and the bane of all video game players) - an escort mission. The live cargo arrives in the form of Lewis, a broken man who Jo soon discovers is a sinister military experiment gone awry. Now the powers-that-be want Lewis and anyone he's come in contact with dead, sending Jo and her crew permanently on the run. It's Steve McQueen in The Getaway... in space!
I always try to do at least some level of basic research into the books I review here, but unfortunately for Prisoner of Dreams I couldn't find too much information on author Karen Ripley. Beyond the generic blurb at the back of the book which tries to present the author as a kooky animal lover writing her first novel, all I could really gather is that Ripley was a pen name for Mary Urhausen, a Wisconsin-based writer who sadly passed away in 2018. Her writing career for Ballantine/Del Rey is also fairly brief, running from only 1989 until 1994 and producing five novels in the process. There's hardly any talk of her books in sci-fi forums online today and there were scant few contemporaneous reviews of her novels that I could dig up from the early 90's either. A true enigma we have here.
It's a shame that Karen Ripley isn't more of a known commodity for sci-fi readers, because Prisoner of Dreams is a decent freshman offering if you like your space travel adventures more on the grime and rust colored side. One could argue a novel like Prisoner of Dreams was doing the 'working class stiffs in a quasi-space western setting' long before hacks like Joss Whedon popularized it with stuff like Firefly. The author is also reverent to genre luminaries such as Robert Heinlein (to the point of naming an entire planet after him in her setting) and opts for a more Battletech approach to the far future where humanity conquers space... and finds out they're really all alone in this vast universe. There's a certain kind of existential dread channeled up by the no aliens thing that I always find interesting to explore. In short, there's more than a few things for genre fans to sink their teeth into here.
That said, there were certain moments in Prisoner of Dreams where I got the sense that Ripley was a bit of a leftie, albeit mercifully a milquetoast one with nothing more offensive than some generic 60's hippie politics. A couple of instances of cringe feminist rhetoric shows up, although these are tempered by doses of realism. For instance, in the author's version of the far future, there is a genuine equality between men and women when it comes to lines of work, but it was only brought about because large swathes of the best men died fighting in a series of cataclysmic wars. This novel was written in the late 80's in a time of relative cultural decency, so the reader is spared any hint of trans agenda like a lot of modern science-fiction from the big publishing houses want to ram down your throats nowadays. The author's world is also set in something of a dystopia, with nebulous civilian and military authorities running almost everything and a caste system where the genetically defected are sterilized at a young age to ensure the gene pool becomes strong again.
The main character initially starts out as a tough, salt-of-the-earth kind of tomboy who rails against the planetary authorities trying to stifle out most of her paychecks, but towards the latter half of the novel Jo loses much of her agency and becomes a bit of a wallflower in certain scenes as the inevitable love affair with Lewis begins to play out. However, I found myself accepting of this character arc simply because it was written as a somewhat believable take on the potential chaotic reactions in the human mind while someone is in the process of falling in love. Jo even reflects on her inability to make rational decisions because of how hard she has fallen for Lewis right up until the novel's denouement, when she has enough cognizance to break free of the romantic reverie for long enough to make a smart choice.
(Silly aside: I would like to point out that the used paperback copy of Prisoner of Dreams I was reading was clearly owned by a female reader before me, because the chapter where Jo and Lewis finally get it on was visibly dog-eared with a tiny little heart drawn in with colored biro at the start of the chapter. A favorite section to revisit for the previous reader, huh?)
However, I think my absolute favorite part of the novel is the author's super hi-tech gee whiz prediction for an absolutely groundbreaking piece of future technology only possible hundreds of years from now in the far reaches of outer space is... essentially a bluetooth headset. You see, Jo is also a music lover and in troubled times during space travel when there's little else to do but wait until the ship arrives at the spaceport, Jo likes to pop in one of these newfangled earpiece/computer chips and listen to music that nobody else around her can hear! Reading it now, it's so quaint how the author goes into obsessive detail describing what was only a fantasy in the era it was written and realizing you can now go to virtually any department store and buy at least a generic set of wireless earbuds for relatively cheap. I will say that I related to Jo somewhat in that she has a lot of disdain for current music, listens to a lot of the classics, and appears to be a metalhead. Based, if true.
Despite a few mild cringes and the hints of a Hallmark romance story, I had a good time with Prisoner of Dreams and feel as if it has been unfairly consigned to the dustbin of history. If you run across a copy at your local used bookstore, give it a shot.
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