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Read all the Cherryh: Merchanter's Luck
I got slightly more votes on Downbelow Station, but I feel like I need to write about Heavy Time/Hellburner first, before I can properly discuss it (because a lot of what I have to say about Downbelow Station relates to my pre-existing love of those books), and that's going to take awhile because I have a LOT to say about those.
So I'll talk about Merchanter's Luck right now, since it's a fairly short, simple book that I read for the first time a few weeks ago (and absolutely LOVED - despite being a relatively less-known standalone of hers, I think it insta-jumped into my favorites of hers on a single read).
This book belongs to the Merchanter/Company Wars branch of Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe. (Most of which are standalones; they can be read in any order.) Interesting little fact I stumbled across the other day: this book was apparently also the entire reason why Downbelow Station was written. She came up with this one first, but needed to work out the political/social backstory for it, and she did that by writing Downbelow Station ... which ended up being much better known. But this was the first book she wrote dealing with the merchanters.
The merchanters, in Alliance-Union, are matrilineal clans of traders whose lives are centered around the ship on which they live and work. In the grand tradition of "introduce the world and then break it", the female protagonist of Merchanter's Luck is someone who does not fit in her closely knit family and their matriarchal-utopian world. Allison is fiercely ambitious, but she is stuck as a junior member of the crew/family, and unlikely to ever achieve the status she craves. So she's on the lookout for a ship of her own.
Enter Sandor, the captain of his own ship, looking for a crew.
What fascinated me about this book is how the back cover blurb suggests a fairly standard romance, and in fact I went into it in part to find out how Cherryh would write a "boy meets girl" story, but it turns out not to be that at all. Or, I should say, it kind of starts out as that -- Sandor and Allison meet and flirt; she's on the prowl for male company, and Sandor's on the prowl for someone to help him run his ship (and also fascinated by her). And then everything goes Pure Cherryh and veers off in a different direction entirely. (A direction that my id liked very much.)
Sandor is a con artist, using an assumed name, lying about his ship's name and port -- because his entire merchanter clan was wiped out by pirates when he was a child, leaving him running the ship all alone and desperately trying to hide various facts about his past in order to get jobs. (Technically, two of his older relatives survived, both of whom then proceeded to die in ways that made him even more traumatized.) Allison signs on with his ship, takes a few selected cousins with her, and embarks on a cargo run that turns out to be way more complicated than anyone was expecting, partly because the military gets involved, and partly because Sandor is, in the grand tradition of Cherryh heroes, an enormous PTSD-ridden emotional mess ... who is trying to conceal from his new crew how much of a mess he actually is. As Sandor -- poor, lonely, broken Sandor -- tries desperately to convince everyone that he's Just Fine and it's Perfectly Normal that most of the ship consists of sealed rooms full of his dead family's personal effects, or that he has clearly been sleeping in a blanket nest on the bridge, Allison's cousins come to the conclusion that he's hiding something much more dire, such as that he's a serial killer planning to murder them out in the lonely spaceways. So they mutiny, as you do, and try to lock up Sandor and take over the ship.
Then real space pirates show up and they all have to cooperate in a desperate struggle to survive. It's awesome.
... And not really at all what I expected from the first third of the book. The Boy Meets Girl aspect of the plot basically just drops out about halfway through, and from there on out it's all Found Family in Space. Which I am 100% on board with, by the way, and this is sort of a general trend that I'm noticing in Cherryh's books. While her characters often have sex and/or romance, the sexual aspect of their relationships usually tends to take a backseat to the partnership/trust aspect. The most important people in your life aren't the one(s) you're having sex with; they're the ones who have your back against the dark. Even if sometimes those are, in fact, the same people.
If I could pick one trope as my absolute favorite out of all tropes, I think it's probably the one where a bunch of people who start out at each other's throats end up becoming each other's family, and this book hit those buttons hard (though it takes awhile to start getting there -- most of the really idgasmic character development is compressed into about the last three or four chapters. As with a number of her books, I could really have done with a few chapters of aftermath.)
But yeah, I had no idea going into it that I was going to love this book so hard. That loyalty-against-the-odds thing that a lot of Cherryh's books have, is definitely a thing here - I love the casual way Sandor unconsciously thinks of Allison's crew as "his", even when they all barely know or like each other yet. Sandor breaks my heart in all the best ways, the lonely boy looking for someone to latch onto; his damage is extensive yet plausible, and he's functional, he's just fucked up. And Allison is great, tough and canny but inexperienced, so if Sandor's arc is all about learning to trust people again, Allison's is a growing-up story, starting out as the sheltered younger daughter of a huge family, and eventually learning to stand on her own two feet. I also really enjoyed her cynical, suspicious cousin Curran, who takes an instant dislike to Sandor on the basis of "probably a serial killer and is also sleeping with my cousin." (If you guessed how their relationship arc goes based purely on my id, you would probably be right. The more Cherryh I read, the more I boggle at how what she wants out of a book seems to be exactly what I want out of a book, and in 25 years of reading her books, I never noticed this is as much of a pattern as it is.) The other two cousins that Allison dragged along with her, Deirdre and Neill, never really emerge as individuals; there's just not room for it. I would happily read another entire book about these characters. Or failing that, there's always fanfic. At the rate things are going, I'm going to end up with an all-Cherryh list of requests in this year's Yuletide ...
So I'll talk about Merchanter's Luck right now, since it's a fairly short, simple book that I read for the first time a few weeks ago (and absolutely LOVED - despite being a relatively less-known standalone of hers, I think it insta-jumped into my favorites of hers on a single read).
This book belongs to the Merchanter/Company Wars branch of Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe. (Most of which are standalones; they can be read in any order.) Interesting little fact I stumbled across the other day: this book was apparently also the entire reason why Downbelow Station was written. She came up with this one first, but needed to work out the political/social backstory for it, and she did that by writing Downbelow Station ... which ended up being much better known. But this was the first book she wrote dealing with the merchanters.
The merchanters, in Alliance-Union, are matrilineal clans of traders whose lives are centered around the ship on which they live and work. In the grand tradition of "introduce the world and then break it", the female protagonist of Merchanter's Luck is someone who does not fit in her closely knit family and their matriarchal-utopian world. Allison is fiercely ambitious, but she is stuck as a junior member of the crew/family, and unlikely to ever achieve the status she craves. So she's on the lookout for a ship of her own.
Enter Sandor, the captain of his own ship, looking for a crew.
What fascinated me about this book is how the back cover blurb suggests a fairly standard romance, and in fact I went into it in part to find out how Cherryh would write a "boy meets girl" story, but it turns out not to be that at all. Or, I should say, it kind of starts out as that -- Sandor and Allison meet and flirt; she's on the prowl for male company, and Sandor's on the prowl for someone to help him run his ship (and also fascinated by her). And then everything goes Pure Cherryh and veers off in a different direction entirely. (A direction that my id liked very much.)
Sandor is a con artist, using an assumed name, lying about his ship's name and port -- because his entire merchanter clan was wiped out by pirates when he was a child, leaving him running the ship all alone and desperately trying to hide various facts about his past in order to get jobs. (Technically, two of his older relatives survived, both of whom then proceeded to die in ways that made him even more traumatized.) Allison signs on with his ship, takes a few selected cousins with her, and embarks on a cargo run that turns out to be way more complicated than anyone was expecting, partly because the military gets involved, and partly because Sandor is, in the grand tradition of Cherryh heroes, an enormous PTSD-ridden emotional mess ... who is trying to conceal from his new crew how much of a mess he actually is. As Sandor -- poor, lonely, broken Sandor -- tries desperately to convince everyone that he's Just Fine and it's Perfectly Normal that most of the ship consists of sealed rooms full of his dead family's personal effects, or that he has clearly been sleeping in a blanket nest on the bridge, Allison's cousins come to the conclusion that he's hiding something much more dire, such as that he's a serial killer planning to murder them out in the lonely spaceways. So they mutiny, as you do, and try to lock up Sandor and take over the ship.
Then real space pirates show up and they all have to cooperate in a desperate struggle to survive. It's awesome.
... And not really at all what I expected from the first third of the book. The Boy Meets Girl aspect of the plot basically just drops out about halfway through, and from there on out it's all Found Family in Space. Which I am 100% on board with, by the way, and this is sort of a general trend that I'm noticing in Cherryh's books. While her characters often have sex and/or romance, the sexual aspect of their relationships usually tends to take a backseat to the partnership/trust aspect. The most important people in your life aren't the one(s) you're having sex with; they're the ones who have your back against the dark. Even if sometimes those are, in fact, the same people.
If I could pick one trope as my absolute favorite out of all tropes, I think it's probably the one where a bunch of people who start out at each other's throats end up becoming each other's family, and this book hit those buttons hard (though it takes awhile to start getting there -- most of the really idgasmic character development is compressed into about the last three or four chapters. As with a number of her books, I could really have done with a few chapters of aftermath.)
But yeah, I had no idea going into it that I was going to love this book so hard. That loyalty-against-the-odds thing that a lot of Cherryh's books have, is definitely a thing here - I love the casual way Sandor unconsciously thinks of Allison's crew as "his", even when they all barely know or like each other yet. Sandor breaks my heart in all the best ways, the lonely boy looking for someone to latch onto; his damage is extensive yet plausible, and he's functional, he's just fucked up. And Allison is great, tough and canny but inexperienced, so if Sandor's arc is all about learning to trust people again, Allison's is a growing-up story, starting out as the sheltered younger daughter of a huge family, and eventually learning to stand on her own two feet. I also really enjoyed her cynical, suspicious cousin Curran, who takes an instant dislike to Sandor on the basis of "probably a serial killer and is also sleeping with my cousin." (If you guessed how their relationship arc goes based purely on my id, you would probably be right. The more Cherryh I read, the more I boggle at how what she wants out of a book seems to be exactly what I want out of a book, and in 25 years of reading her books, I never noticed this is as much of a pattern as it is.) The other two cousins that Allison dragged along with her, Deirdre and Neill, never really emerge as individuals; there's just not room for it. I would happily read another entire book about these characters. Or failing that, there's always fanfic. At the rate things are going, I'm going to end up with an all-Cherryh list of requests in this year's Yuletide ...
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... but yeah, I think this one would be a much better introduction to her work, or at least a better test case to find out if you're just going to bounce off her style (she's got a very distinctive way of imparting information to the reader that drives some people bonkers) or if the problem is entirely that Downbelow Station is kind of a depressing hot mess. Narrative-kink-wise, I think this one would be right up your alley.
The only problem is that I've realized that I'm not sure what the availability of this book on Amazon etc. is like. The one I've got is a beat-up paperback copy I found in a used bookstore. A lot of her early books are kind of hard to get.
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Very late comment that may still be relevant!
A lot of her earlier stuff is in print and eprint in omnibus editions under different names: Alliance Space is Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna; The Deep Beyond is Cuckoo's Egg and Serpent's Reach; and Alternate Realities is a bunch of things are may be not quite in line with the final later continuity: Port Eternity, Wave Without a Shore, and Voyager in the Night.
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You should read Walton's writeup on this one too. :-)
Allison and Sandor really do a very normal Boy Meet girl ... and then it all goes weird, but not sexually.
I kind of like that Deidre and Neill aren't very vivid. Not everyone is vivid (I'm sure not), and it's pretty clear that in a mob the size of the Reilly clan, there are a lot of people who are just plugging along, vastly overshadowed by their more forceful, large-living siblings and cousins.
I really love the shopping scene after Sandor accepts the Dublin Again offer and his new crew take him to outfit Lucy.
I hadn't thought of the chronology of the books' publication dates. So this is SPOILER Mallory's first appearance?
Also Nand'Sidjei/Herself has news: DAW is talking about a 5-book contract, presumably for Alliance-Union, since that is what she has coming out soon (but not soon enough!), and she was already talking about a sequel to that.
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AAAaaaaaAAAAAA! Oh, that's thrilling! I knew about Alliance Rising, and I was looking forward to it, but also with a certain amount of not-quite-sure-how-to-feel because I know it's set extremely early in the series, so there's next to no chance of cameos from her various other characters in the 'verse. But ... 5 books?! Dare I hope I might get my dreamed-of Hellburner sequel?! Or if not that (because a whole book is really too much to hope for, and anyway it might kill someone and that would be AWFUL) then perhaps a cameo in a new book; I'd be over the moon for that. :D
You should read Walton's writeup on this one
Just did! :D That's a fascinating suggestion that the book is basically a Gothic, except with a more active heroine. I hadn't even thought of Sandor's ship as being effectively haunted, but it kinda is, isn't it?
Reading her review also reminded me how much I love how ambitious Allison is, how she knows exactly what she wants and goes for it full tilt. Even now, that's a relatively rare trait in female protagonists.
I hadn't thought of the chronology of the books' publication dates. So this is SPOILER Mallory's first appearance?
I am ... unsure. I think it's something of a chicken-and-egg situation -- that she was working on the books simultaneously, or planned Merchanter's Luck and then wrote Downbelow Station and then actually wrote Merchanter's Luck, or something like that. So it's hard to say whether Mallory appears in ML because she was a major protagonist in DS, or whether she's a major protagonist in DS because Cherryh already had in mind that ML was going to feature a sympathetic Fleet captain in addition to the pirates.
Allison and Sandor really do a very normal Boy Meet girl ... and then it all goes weird, but not sexually.
Yes!! You can actually imagine a more conventional sci-fi-romance version of this exact book, in which the first half is almost exactly the same, and then they fight pirates together and sail off into the sunset for their happy ending. Which is ... sort of what happens? But in a very, very sideways kind of way that's not about romance at all and is, instead, all about Ship and Family and crew bonding.
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So can I mention on my DW that you are doing this? I can do it under friends-lock (circle- lock?), if preferred.
(And I understand if you'd rather not.)
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>>>He's Bucky on a spaceship! :D>>> is also my jam :)
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And yea, I wish it was ava as an ebook. I'm running out of space for regular books... :)
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