The story begins with a woman, Laenea, who has just had surgery which has replaced her heart with an artificial device. She hasn't done this because her heart was diseased, but because an un-augmented human can't survive being awake during FTL space flight. Until now, whe's been a crew member on starships, but everyone except the pilot is keep in anesthesia-maintained "sleep" during FTL transits. She wants to be a pilot.

Although she's feeling well, she is required to wait a month until she can pilot her first ship. So, we're told about what she begins to do with this time, especially her affair with Radu (another starship crew member she meets). Personally, the personal lives of almost-a-starship-pilot would not be my top SF priority. However, the idea has some potential.

In my way of thinking, the story then gets side-tracked. There are problems with relationships between augmented pilots and non-pilots which leads to Laenea and Radu separating. Radu goes off on the first starship he can. When the ship stops at a colony planet, he is warned by someone with something like precognition that there will be problems with his starship. But the problems on his starship ends up being that he wakes up during FTL after having something like psychic dreams. For those of you who aren't familiar with me, I don't care for mixing this kind of mumbo-jumbo with SF.

We go from there to Radu somehow being able to tolerate being awake during FTL and concluding that his dreams are telling him Laenea has gone on her first FTL flight and is lost in the FTL dimensions. We're told how FTL is accomplished by turning a right angle into the fourth spatial dimension, and better pilots can turn into the fifth and sixth dimensions. Laenea is the first pilot who has managed to enter the seventh dimension. I suppose this sounds really cool to most readers. Those with a better grasp of such things won't be as impressed with these descriptions of how each dimension at right angles to all the others provides a shorter distance to other stars. (And somehow, not only can pilots perceive these dimensiosn, but their starships have controls that give them a means to turn a right angle to all known dimensiosn as well as into a previously unknown dimension. Even if there is a fourth dimension you could fly a plane into today, the plane would only have controls for moving in 3 dimensions.) It's one thing for an SF story to have a spaceship that with no particular explanation travels from one star to another in a couple of days. When a story focuses on the details of a specific implausible method of FTL, it's harder to ignore the science issues.

It turns out, Radu can also perceive the seventh dimension. He tries to arrange to have a starship look for Laenea. The authorities are used to the fact that when starships have gone missing, they've never been seen again, so convincing them to go on this mission isn't easy. What's more, the Pilot's Guild feels threatened by the fact Radu, an un-augmented human, can do what it had been believed only augmented pilots could do.

So, most of the book is based on the premise of psychic powers assisting in dealing with bad physics. We do have character material along the way (although, perhaps, stronger earlier in the book). We do have a romantic interest. We do have a futuristic backdrop. To some degree, we get a look at a community of people who have been modified from human stock to be able to live in the ocean. We see issues with governing organizations. There are some interesting aspects.

Readers should ask themselves which of these elements works for them and which don't. On the whole, it didn't work for me.

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