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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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And yea, I wish it was ava as an ebook. I'm running out of space for regular books... :)