Psyche: The Journey

The story is set in a future solar system. The Earth government levies heavy taxes on its colonies on Venus and Mars. Unable to bear the burden, the two colonial governments join forces to form the Venus–Mars Alliance (VMA) and resist Earth's rule by force of arms. Earth, for its part, reorganizes itself as the Neo-Terran Union (NTU) and suppresses the rebellion with advanced technology and superior military strength. The VMA has abundant resources but lacks technology and equipment; the NTU is technologically powerful but resource-poor. From this opposition, full-scale conflict between the two camps unfolds.

The narrator is a young man from Venus. Having just failed his university entrance exams and broken up with his girlfriend, he is conscripted within two months and rides in a swaying armored personnel carrier into a military base in the Santanas Basin, becoming the most ordinary of recruits in this war. Through his first-person perspective, the novel chronicles his passage from an unprepared civilian to a frontline soldier, depicting the fear of the battlefield, the casualties among his comrades, the conflict between orders and humanity, and how his extraordinary psychic abilities stir both the course of battle and his inner world.

Unlike war fiction that pursues wish-fulfillment thrills, this book focuses on "how a person faces what happens." Beneath the shellfire, individual fates are swept along by the times, and neither side is simply black or white. With meticulous battlefield detail and extensive inner monologue, the author turns this interstellar expedition into a long march of the mind.