Read all the Cherryh: Forty Thousand in Gehenna

[sholio]

Well, that sure was a 1970s/80s sci-fi novel ...

I was reading this one simultaneously with Finity's End, but ended up switching over to the other one because I was enjoying it a lot more. This book is very bleak in places, even more so than you'd expect for the premise (a colony on an unexplored world loses touch with the homeworld; the book then follows multiple generations who grow up and die and change, as well as the very alien aliens they share the planet with) -- therefore, due to the generation-saga nature of it, just when you get to know one set of characters, they die, while most of what they used to know is lost. Also, you know how a lot of sci-fi is fundamentally "problem solving" in nature? This book is basically the opposite of that -- the entire plot hinges around the characters being absolutely terrible at solving problems. (Although in very human ways.) I was also generally baffled by the overall incuriousness of the colonists and the people who eventually reestablish contact; you have a whole entire PLANET you know nothing about and you just kind of ... sit there, not looking at it? (This generally seems to be a thing in the Alliance-Union 'verse re: planets, which I'm becoming aware of from reading a bunch of these books back to back. People, not just as individuals but as a society, are oddly incurious about them.)

ALIEN PLANETS, PEOPLE ...!

All of that being said, I got a lot more engaged with the book in the last third, when it follows the same group of characters long enough to get attached, and has some interesting points to make about civilization vs. barbarism. Which are spoilery.

I particularly liked the point that cultures are effectively a "word" (or more like a paragraph) written on the world's surface, about what it means to be human; each culture is a unique book about the world, a unique interpretation of what the world is. Of course, in Gehenna, with aliens who literally write the nature of the world around them constantly, it's literal as well as metaphorical, with the war between Cloud and Styx conceptualized as, essentially, two groups with very different ideas of what it means to be human trying to rewrite the world in the pattern of their essential truth.

On a less esoteric level, I enjoyed the dueling anthropologists' views of Gehenna, told in the form of increasingly combative reports and memos back home, and was amused by the meta-narrative point of the sexist anthropologist who has consistently tried to smear his female colleague as too emotional and too involved (while literally "going native" himself) eventually getting stabbed in the back, literally, with spears.

The book in general is not at all subtle, in the end, about whether we're supposed to be sympathizing with the matrilineal, relatively civilized Cloud people or the brutal, sexist Styx-ers. Still, I found it interesting that "civilization", as a concept, is conceptualized not in terms of technology, but generally the way of relating to the world; it's not that the Cloud group is more advanced, it's that they have rules. Their methods of succession are still violent and cruel by our standards, but they don't live in a constant scrabble for power like the Styx group does, and they're content with what they have; they don't kill to expand. That is, the Styxers aren't "barbarians" because they wear leather and hunt with spears and ride dinosaurs; the other side does that too. They're barbarians because they murder and assault sentient creatures, and treat women as prizes rather than people.

Also intriguing is that the "good guys" (inasmuch as there were good guys) do win, but by adopting and improving upon the brutality of the opposition.

Like many of her novels, it was a book that was cynical about institutions, but basically optimistic about people, in the end. Elia makes friends with McGee; McGee helps the Cloud side win the war, and tentatively finds them a way to move forward without being in conflict with the people from the stars; and in the end, many years later, we see the Gehennese, both human and caliban, begin to move outward onto the galactic stage.

I also liked that, as with many of her books, powerful, mature women take center stage and drive much of the plot in the last part of the book. McGee is evidently at least middle aged, and while Elia is younger, she is a mother of four and a powerful leader of her people. Gensey and Jin (one from an "advanced" culture -- Alliance -- and one from the barbaric Styxers) both disregard them for no other reason than because they are women ... and, consequently, lose.

Comments

[yhlee]

Wow, I remember liking this one a lot back in college (my taste in fiction runs grimdarker than yours, I think) but had managed to forget almost all the details; and I think the gender stuff completely went over my head.

[sholio]

I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more at a different time in my life, tbh -- I remember really loving exactly this kind of generational/change-over-time stuff a lot at one point, but I don't think it's something I'm quite as into anymore. With this book, too, I ran into the problem of wanting more of what I wasn't getting (exploration of the world, especially) and being slightly frustrated, in the early part of the book, with the way she was doing the cultural change over time thing; it wasn't quite hitting the beats I wanted it to hit.

It was still enjoyable, though! I think it's one of those cases where it sounded more like my thing on paper than it actually ended up being what I wanted at this point in time, but I still liked a lot of it.

[yhlee]

I think I also retrospectively liked it because Gehenna comes up as sort of a side thing in Cyteen and Cyteen is tied with The Faded Sun for my favorite Cherryh, so there is that. ^_^ Not rational, but there you go!

[sholio]

That also makes sense! :) (I have read Cyteen a long time ago, but I haven't gotten to it on the reread yet.)

The interconnectedness of Alliance-Union is really fun. I'm reading them in no particular order, and really enjoying seeing various events, politics, characters, planets, and places referenced from one book to another, from different points of view.

[yhlee]

Yes! It was confusing at first, because the book that's really famous is Downbelow Station (which was not for me and which I never intend to reread, despite a few characters who interested me), and at first I was all BUT WHERE DO I START. But once I got several books into the universe, the interconnectedness became really fun. =D

[sholio]

Oh god, Downbelow Station. >_> It's really a shame that it's one of her most famous books and the one that a lot of people probably use as a jumping-on point for Alliance-Union, because it's among my least favorite of her books - I bounced off it multiple times, and eventually trapped myself on a long train ride with nothing but that book to read and gave myself permission to skim anything I wasn't enjoying (which was a lot of the first 2/3 of the book). I ended up liking it at the end, and it supplies a lot of useful information about the universe, and I can even see why it won a Hugo (it's definitely "not for me" more than "objectively bad"). But I really, really would not recommend that one as a jumping-on point for anyone, and I suspect it is the one a lot of people start with because it's not only the really famous one (other than Cyteen), but a lot of series lists have it as the "first."

(No offense to anyone who loved it; it really is a "not for me" thing rather than an "objectively bad" thing! And I enjoyed a lot of it once I was already invested in the universe. It wasn't a good one for introducing me to the universe, though ...)

[rachelmanija]

I have repeatedly failed to read Downbelow Station, and had it been my first Cherryh it probably would have been my last. My actual first was either The Paladin (an easy entry, though not very typical) or Cyteen, which I adored once I'd determinedly plowed through its multiple unnecessary prologues.

Orson Scott Card once said that a writer should consider cutting off their fingers before writing a prologue, and I have to agree with him. I can only think of about three books ever, in any genre, where I think the prologue not only improved the book, but was actually necessary (and necessary as a prologue rather than the first chapter.)

(They are Duma Key by Stephen King, Affinity by Sarah Waters, Agyar by Steven Brust and probably other books by him too, Tigana by Guy Gabriel Kay, and... that's it. Possibly also My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale, but the problem there is that the prologue is so much better than the entire rest of the book that it ruins the rest of the book. And the first three are more brief narrative intros/interstial material than prologues per se, so maybe just Tigana.)

There was a period in the 80s where editors often required fantasy writers to write prologues, so all urban fantasy novels opened with very very magic stuff happening that didn't come into the plot until fifty pages later, and all epic fantasies opened with an explanation of how the Dark Lord got trapped under a rock. Without exception, all those books would have been improved by cutting the prologue.

[sholio]

Hahahaaa yes. Let's start out with an infodump of 1000 years of fantasyland history compressed into three pages, that's definitely going to make people keep reading ...

I really hated the prologues that were basically half of an interesting chapter that was going to happen around the midpoint of the book, which you then got to wade through again in realtime after already having read it once. I think the only time that has ever worked for me is when whatever appeared to be happening in the prologue was not what was actually happening in the book, so you got a nice flip of expectation when it got to that point.

I did like the prologue in Fly By Night (Frances Hardinge) because it's funny and cute and gives you useful backstory on the heroine. I'm not sure if it was strictly necessary, however.

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, the prologues I like are mostly the ones which are intriguing but you don't understand their significance until later in the book - like, they turn out to be chronologically the last thing that happens or something like that, and they become much more meaningful when re-read after you finish the book. There's something very satisfying about having to turn back to the beginning once you've ended the book, especially if it's a book you liked.

Oh, and I like the prologue to A Secret History. It tells you what happens about two-thirds of the way in (a murder) but not why; it gives the whole book a feeling of inevitable tragedy, which is perfect since it's about Greek tragedy students.

[sholio]

I also just thought of Good Omens as another one where I think it's both functional and necessary as a prologue. But Pratchett books are paced in their own weird way and may not really count.

[kore]

Pratchett is pretty good with prologues -- I liked the ones in Going Postal. But that book is pretty unusual for him in that it's divided into chapters. A lot of them do start with a kind of big question and then a zeroing-in on Discworld itself (like with Lords and Ladies, where do things begin, and the story of the rocks with the love of iron, and then young Esmerelda Weatherwax encountering the Queen). But if he does those, they're typically quite short.

[yhlee]

Yeah, I agree with OSC and you here. Tigana is the only prologue I can think of that I actively approve of. (I haven't read your other examples.) I cannot think of a single other book that needed the prologue.

[rachelmanija]

Hilariously, Kay's Fionavar books have the ultimate example of the obligatory How The Dark Lord Got Under A Rock prologue. It is SO DIRE.

It begins, After the war was over, they bound him under the Mountain. (Capitalization his.) And then it runs through an endless litany of fantasy people and place names, none of which we have any reason to care about and most of which we'll never hear again in the succeeding 900-some pages. Like, here is a completely typical sentence from the FIRST PARAGRAPH (note that this is the first time any of these people or places have been named, so we have no idea who or what they are):

One went south across Saeren to Cathal, one over the mountains to Eridu, another remained with Revor and the Dalrei of the Plain. The fourth wardstone Colan carried home, Conary's son, now High King in Paras Derval.

I think at some point most fantasy fans just auto-skipped anything in italics at the beginning of a book.

[yhlee]

Oh, yeah, I remember the Fionavar books. There were bits that I liked (angst!), bits that were genuinely moving in ways that Kay got better at later in his career, and then there was the just plain crackalicious (COLORING FLOWERS IN THE SNOW). Also I'm still bitter because I loathe the cello piece that he won't shut up about in those books.

I used to read EVERYTHING. Prologues, stupid bad poems (I'm looking at you, Steven Erikson--I liked what I read of Malazan but dear sweet Shinjo, Erikson is a terrible poet). EVERYTHING. No longer! Life's too short.

[kore]

I used to read EVERYTHING. Prologues, stupid bad poems (I'm looking at you, Steven Erikson--I liked what I read of Malazan but dear sweet Shinjo, Erikson is a terrible poet). EVERYTHING. No longer! Life's too short.

I remember reading a book by Asimov that consisted entirely of terrible shaggy dog stories (one ended "Thus Ant-lantis sunk beneath the WAVES" or something like that) just because I had checked out a giant stack of his stuff because it was there. The junior high school library had a lot of Wells, so I chewed through those. I had to buy books by women, though (Cherryh, Le Guin, Sargeant) because even the library didn't have stuff by, like, Wilhelm, who was one of the most prolific and popular sf writers of the seventies. I still have the hardback of Out of the Everywhere I got in like 1983 and read nearly to pieces because it was one of the few Tiptree books I could find.

[kore]

Haha, I think Downbelow Station was the second Cherryh book I ever read (was confined to whatever used sf paperbacks I could find in small bookstores. I did buy Cyteen new, I remember, an enormous paperback). I remember very little about it, but I really liked it.

[sholio]

Ha, yeah, I think all of this is being filtered through the fact that I am now spoiled for choice on books, and have more books than I could ever read. There were books I flat-out adored as a teenager and young adult that I'd probably have never read as an adult, because I have so many more options and am so much more jaded now, and there's something kind of sad about that.

I do think it's a very well written book, just perhaps not what I was looking for at that moment in time. At a different time in my life I might have really loved it.

[kore]

Oh yeah, I remember reading A LOT of Heinlein and Asimov either because there were cheap paperbacks or the library had plenty of copies. A lot of Philip K. Dick was out of print and I remember hunting around for Le Guin, Beginning Place and her first trilogy. And now I ahem a lot of books online and can do that in about five minutes! Wild.

Not to be morbid but I'm also aware I don't have the full length of my life in front of me anymore, so I'm just not willing to spend time chewing through entire Nebula and Hugo anthologies the way I did when I was 12.

[sholio]

I liked Heinlein, and read basically All The Heinlein in college. I still think he was fabulous for ideas and variety.

Honestly, as delightful as it is to be spoiled for choice nowadays, I'm really glad that I was able to have the experience as a teen/20-something of reading a lot of books with no idea what anyone else thought about them, which is basically impossible for kids now. I'm sure there are other compensations, but it was hugely important for me to be able to simply read whatever I got my hands on, without having too much knowledge of what anyone else thought about it or whether I was "supposed" to be enjoying it. (Well, beyond knowing that SFF was not considered Good Literature by school standards. But I was resigned to that and not especially worried about it.)

But yeah, for me it's not so much awareness of mortality as the limited amount of time in the day. I'm no longer willing to give quite as much of my life over to reading books I'm not particularly enjoying. I have to say, though, that this Cherryh reading binge of the last month has been kind of amazing. I haven't read like this in years.

[kore]

Reading binges are SO FUN. They were how I used to spend most of my time, although when I write more, I read less, which is kind of weird. It's like the same kind of mental process is getting used, only putting words out instead of taking them in. And when I write I'm reading mainly for research, which feels very different.

[rachelmanija]

Is this the one with the lizard or maybe insect aliens who live underground? If so, I've read it and literally all I remember about it is that and that every time I started to get invested in a storyline, the book jumped ahead a hundred years.

[sholio]

Haha, yep, that's the one!

I think the general nature of this book (the cultural overview/historical moving through time aspect) would've worked much better for me at a different point in my life. I DO love fake/future historical stuff. I remember really liking this kind of fake-history-overview at one point, and on paper it sounded like something I would like. But for what I'm currently wanting (which is to sink into a set of characters and have all the feels about them) I found it really hard to get into because of the timejumps. It's definitely not an objective problem with the book; it's more that the book was a bad fit for me. I liked the last third best, when we stuck with one set of characters for awhile.

[kore]

I actually loved the timejump stuff. I had read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang really early on, so I think I was already used to the idea of different generational stories.

[sholio]

It made me think a little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I really liked as a teenager (while also being completely creeped out by it) and had a similar element of things changing and generations flowing through time.

[kore]

OH YES, that book was great. And obviously so influential, one of the big early sixties classics, like Dune and Four for Tomorrow and other stuff.

And it was so chancy what you heard about -- I saw Man Who Fell to Earth, and found out Walter Tevis had written that and tried to get the 1963 paperback FOR YEARS. (His _first_ novel was The Hustler. Not bad, Walter.) You could find Mockingbird, but not Earth.

[sholio]

I'm still not over the curtain crisping and burning in the nuclear bomb flash in the last act of Leibowitz, or the talking second head on the prophet woman's shoulder. NIGHTMARE FUEL AAAAUGH.

But yeah, it was interesting to live in an era when what you found out about was completely random, just purely a matter of what was in the library and used bookstores and whatever you heard about. I never read Asimov at all - I still think I've only read one or two of his books, or Clarke's. And clearly, even though I read and enjoyed several of her books, I never got to the point where I was actively tracking down Cherryh's books the way I am right now. I've only read a tiny fraction of them.

[kore]

Yeah, I remember I had two big guides -- the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, edited by Clute I think, which I read in the library, and Billion Year Spree -- later Trillion Year Spree. I took great umbrage with Brian Aldiss because he was snotty about Le Guin, BUT he also wrote about Ice and thus introduced me to Anna Kavan (and I read all _her_ work the Santa Fe Public Library had, which was oddly most of it). And there was almost no critical work on SF that I could find, so Le Guin's Language of the Night was another huge guide for me. And awards anthologies, although the quality varied wildly in those.

Butyeah, I remember coming randomly upon stories like The Girl Who Was Plugged In and The Evening and the Morning and the Night and similar stuff just cold, and it was like WHAM. Mind blown wide open. I had a subscription to Omni for a long time! My mother hated it and thought I was wasting my money. "Hey, this Burning Chrome story is pretty cool."

[yhlee]

Omni! You take me right back. I never had a subscription, but a guy at my HS a year ahead of me gave me ALL his back issues when he graduated, so I spent a happy summer reading my way through them.

[kore]

LOL I remember when they had like shiny silver pages printed with RED ink, and a UFO watch section. My mother didn't like me to buy it so I would stand in the magazine section and read it while she bought the rest of the groceries. But I bought a few precious copies I really wanted with some of my allowance anyway (Zelazny's Permafrost, Octavia Butler stories, something I've never been able to find again about parasailing in the desert). Omni Online was great as well, until they finally killed that off too.

[chomiji]

>> the talking second head on the prophet woman's shoulder. NIGHTMARE FUEL AAAAUGH. <<

In which case I would seriously steer you away from the manga series Blade of the Immortal.

[sholio]

haha, I love Blade of the Immortal! (Though I'm awfully behind on it; I have up to something like Vol. 20, and no idea how far beyond that it's progressed.) But yeah, it's seriously dark.

[chomiji]

You're two-thirds of the way through.   XD   It ran to 31 volumes.

At least it actually finished. So many of my favorite manga — Saiyuki, Black Lagoon, Shirow Miwa's DOGS — are stalled because the mangaka are having RL issues.

[sholio]

Oh wow, I didn't know it was actually done! I'll have to get caught up.

I vaguely remember the Saiyuki manga-ka had some kind of horrible health issue, didn't she? Like she lost part of her face, and everyone thought for awhile she was going to die? Anyway, it's been aaaaages since I went back to check if there was any more of that ...

[viridian5]

Doctors removed a tumor on her right upper jawbone and fitted her with artificial prosthetics to reconstruct the area where her bones were removed.

There are still health issues but she finished Saiyuki Reload and has gotten into the next series, Saiyuki Reload Blast. Chapters come out irregularly but some interesting story things are going on.

[yhlee]

I read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang this past year and really thought the generational aspect was handled well--it's such an excellent book on the craft level; Wilhelm's use of motif and theme is stunning. It's a pity that I came to it late because now I'm old enough that the gender aspects made me want to throw the book against the room! *sob*

[kore]

Wilhelm's excellent, yeah. It really wigged me out when she went on much later to become much more famous for mystery novel series. I read a couple of them but they didn't knock me out the way her SF did.

I remember David? and Mark? were pretty much jerks, but I loved the section from Molly's? POV. Especially the long description of going up the river and how she drew it all. Been a v long time since I read it, tho.

[yhlee]

That was the thing, yeah! I adored Molly, that was my favorite part of the whole entire book, and then she KILLED HERSELF TRAGICALLY. Meanwhile David and Mark were totally jerks, and then at the end Mark KIDNAPS WOMEN TO START HIS OWN HAREM COLONY OF NON-CLONES. I may have screamed in frustration.

I didn't imprint on Wilhelm but I did imprint on Barbara Hambly's fantasy and was sad that she left for mystery and then discovered that the Benjamin January books were SO GOOD. I'm way behind, though. I think I heard the reason in both cases was that the pay was better in mystery than sf/f, which if it's the case who can blame them...

[kore]

Yeah, Mark was pretty awful, but I remember liking Barry?. I think Wilhelm's book has the problem a lot of male-dominated stories do, the focus is on the asshole guys and not necessarily their asshole actions, if that makes sense (probably doesn't. It was the same kind of problem I had with the IW movie). Her later mysteries have a female attorney as lead, and a husband-and-wife team, but I don't think she ever went on to write sf from women's POVs like Le Guin did. For my money Wilhelm was technically the best writer in the whole New Wave period, with Tiptree and Le Guin v close seconds.

Hah, I didn't read Hambly at all til the January mysteries, and tried some of her sff after that but just didn't click with it. I have to get back to that series, I wimped out at the "he has to go undercover as a slave on a plantation" one.

[yhlee]

Yes, Wilhelm was so good at technique. Absolutely stunning. Like, as much as Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang made me rage, I could not fault the writing technique.

I think some of Hambly's sf/f had more conventional elements that didn't always serve her well. In January her character work and understanding of history really got a chance to shine. I did read the "undercover as a plantation slave" one but man, it was kind of brutal.

[kore]

Yeah, I love Benjamin and of course don't want to see him tortured like that, and both undercover as a SLAVE and return to prison are hard DNWs for me. Her writing in the BJ books is absolutely beautiful tho.

[yhlee]

Yeah, I hear you.

I see people requesting January for Yuletide and have to give props to anyone who writes it, because this is historical fiction in hard mode!

[sholio]

I've written it! - actually the last time was last Yuletide, I think, or the one before that. And it IS hard. I think it's the most difficult style-pastiching that I've tried to do, especially since every character has their own unique voice and THEY'RE ALL REALLY HARD. (Take your pick: characters who code-switch in and out of French all the time? The one who speaks entirely in dialect? The one whose every other line is a quote from something obscure in Greek or Latin? HALP.) I don't know how she's managed to keep it up for something like 13 or 14 novels now.

[kore]

I dunno if the pay is better, but I think the mystery genre was a lot less ghettoized when they started writing series in it (early nineties for Wilhelm with the Holloway series, late nineties for Hambly).

belated thought on sholio's 40,000 in Genehhna post

[chomiji]

Maybe you're thinking of Serpent's Reach? With the giant insects called majat?

"The humans consist of Kontrin, made essentially immortal by the majat; betas, humanity leading ordinary lives but whose first generation were psychsetted azi; and azi, produced by the betas, raised and programmed on deeptape, and dead reliably at forty. The majat are hive beings, sharing mind and memories. The Kontrin feud, the majat feud, the betas try to get on with their lives and not get in the way, and the azi have no choice, ever.

"Raen is a Kontrin, born to immense wealth and power. She’s fifteen when her whole family is killed. She takes refuge with the hives, and tries to take vengeance ... ."

(From Jo Walton's review on Tor.com.)

[kore]

This was one of the first Cherryh books I ever read, and I remember loving it, altho I haven't reread it in...decades?

[chomiji]

I took the incurious nature of the colonists as a result of the azi being basically left in charge of everything. They were supposed to be the worker bees and so their whole culture ended up being very inward-focused, gardening the world rather than exploring it.

The Styx-vs.-Cloud thing was so anvil-y that I almost lost patience. Yes, the Styx guys were fucking barbarians, and Dr. Jerkface goes native because he's a would-be alpha male. I get it.

I did like the scene after the disastrous battle when McGee tries to communicate with the Calibans and the whole thing goes beautifully, wildly out of control.

[sholio]

Haha. I'm a little surprised that I'm as okay with the polemic nature of the Cloud/Styx societies as I am, because normally that kind of thing drives me bonkers, but I guess it worked for me in context -- it was OTT, but not in a way I minded, I guess.

I took the incurious nature of the colonists as a result of the azi being basically left in charge of everything. They were supposed to be the worker bees and so their whole culture ended up being very inward-focused, gardening the world rather than exploring it.

Yeah, agreed - I think it just weirded me out a little that EVERYONE was like that. It wasn't surprising with the azi (though I was hoping that they'd end up breaking out of their conditioning a little more than they did), but the non-azi colonists were like that too, and even the Alliance presence on the world didn't seem that interested in exploring most of it. There were aspects of this book where I felt like the bigger picture of the story she wanted to tell was pushing the characters around, rather than letting the characters drive the story. Normally one thing I really love about her books is that they're so character-driven (her characters want stuff, and are out to get it) but this felt like it was the other way around - she had certain points that needed making, and the characters were getting shoved around by the story to make those points.

Having said that though, I did like a lot of it, and the calibans were wonderfully alien. Actually, part of my frustration was that the world was so interesting that I wanted to see more of it!

[indywind]

I feel like the incurious colonists is one of those cases where realism doesn't make for very good storytelling.

Because many people are not very curious about the the mysteries of nature around them and are mostly focused on seeing to their daily comfort and convenience -- only a minority of a randomly-selected population are curious and exploration-minded. We just usually tell adventure stories about those ones because the result is more interesting (and because readers of scifi/fantasy/adventure we identify more with them), so selection bias makes it seem like incuriosity is weird and curiosity is more natural and common, when depending on the population it might be the opposite.

[sholio]

Ha, yeah, I completely agree with this, fwiw. It's not really that it's inaccurate so much as it's not what I want as a reader - kind of like, people being total idiots most of the time is just sort of how people are, but I want more competence from my protagonists! (Not that this was a problem with this book in particular, but in general I want to read about competent characters doing competent things, even if it's not how most people typically are.)