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Read all the Cherryh: Rimrunners
So Cherryh continues to be obviously into the general theme of broken people finding a family and a home. I think Rimrunners might be the first book of hers exploring the theme that didn't quite work for me, because the situation is so profoundly fucked up that by the end I wasn't convinced that things were actually going to be better (much).
This is also an incredibly dark book. Cherryh's books are always somewhat dark, or at least deal with the darker side of human nature (though they're far too optimistic about people to be grimdark, usually) but this one ... I really enjoyed it and it kept me reading all the way through in part because I had no idea what was going to happen next (and Bet is a great protagonist) but good lord it's dark. In the first couple of chapters, the protagonist is homeless and living in a rest room, literally starving to death, and straight-up kills two different guys who try to rape her (one of whom actually does rape her). You'd think there would be nowhere down from there, but then her life gets WORSE. On the other hand, Cherryh has a general tendency to take incredibly fucked-up male characters and pair them with women who totally have their shit together, so it's a refreshing change, in a way, to have a female character who is an absolute mess - paired with a guy who is even more of a mess, but it wouldn't be a Cherryh book without a dude who is ostracized, crazy, and has people trying to kill him. (Also, one of the reasons why I liked Bet is because, despite being a total mess, she is a competent mess -- in general, she's doing the best she can in an incredibly awful situation that she got into through, mostly, no fault of her own.)
Another thing I like about Cherryh is that she tends to write from the principle that there are good and bad people on both sides of every conflict, and this book turns the tables on the rest of Alliance-Union - here we're asked to sympathize with someone on the side that's been, up to this point, set up as the obvious bad guys of the Alliance-Union-Fleet conflict (the space pirates who are going around killing merchanters), while the "good guy" (Alliance) side turn out to have their own share of savage killers and total dicks.
It's the latter part that made me not so sure about the ending. Cherryh did a really good job of setting up the Loki - an Alliance spy ship - as an terrifyingly claustrophobic place, run like a dictatorship by a murderous bastard of a first officer who has spies in every department, arranges suspicious accidents for anyone who crosses him, and refuses to let anyone leave -- once you're on the Loki, the only way out is to die. In the middle of all of this, the core group of protagonists manage to carve out a little sanctuary held together by interpersonal loyalty. Like many of Cherryh's books, it's about people trying to be good while caught up in a brutal, uncaring system, and about the clash between different viewpoints and different ways of living (in this case, Fleet ship-culture and its air of casual sex and camaraderie vs. the very different merchanter culture NG comes from).
It was fascinating to get the Fleet point of view and be reminded that most of Mazian's people were either press-ganged onto his ships or signed up in the belief they were actually doing something good and became pirates later. Also, "spook" ships like the Loki are a totally new bit of Alliance-Union lore that I haven't seen in other books in the series. And I felt that this was one of the better put-together of Cherryh's books. The plotting -- the way it goes out into space and then loops back to the same space station at the end -- is really solid.
But I was not at all sold on the ending. I did like Fitch (the evil first officer) and Bet ending up accidentally having to work together against the pirates. But he's still the same guy he was for the other 90% of the book. This is still the same ship where people are driven crazy or murdered if they cross the officers. I'm just not really seeing everyone choosing to stay on the same ship where they were terrorized and tortured by the people who are still in charge as a positive outcome, really. The book does a pretty good job of setting up (as many of Cherryh's books do) the way that the characters just don't really think about things the way Earth people do, so it's possible that for the spacer mindset, with their loyalty to ship above all, it does make sense. But it still seems like ... eh. I don't know. I just felt like the hell they went through to get to the place where they eventually end up was too much hell for me to believe it was really a good thing that they were still in the same hell. They don't even have any more leverage than they had before, and nobody up top has changed. It was just kind of a weird ending IMHO.
One other minor thing - it was really fascinating to read another Alliance-Union book written from the viewpoint of a protagonist who uses the same set of slang and a lot of the same verbal quirks as the Hellburner characters do ... which of course is the Fleet/earth-system way of talking. The thing that it took me a few of these books to notice is that, while Cherryh has an incredibly distinctive style, she also modifies her style considerably depending on which culture in Alliance-Union she's writing about. There are parts of Rimrunners in which Bet's narrative voice sounds a lot like Ben in Hellburner -- which makes total sense, they're from basically the same subculture. But the merchanter-focused books don't sound like that.
This is also an incredibly dark book. Cherryh's books are always somewhat dark, or at least deal with the darker side of human nature (though they're far too optimistic about people to be grimdark, usually) but this one ... I really enjoyed it and it kept me reading all the way through in part because I had no idea what was going to happen next (and Bet is a great protagonist) but good lord it's dark. In the first couple of chapters, the protagonist is homeless and living in a rest room, literally starving to death, and straight-up kills two different guys who try to rape her (one of whom actually does rape her). You'd think there would be nowhere down from there, but then her life gets WORSE. On the other hand, Cherryh has a general tendency to take incredibly fucked-up male characters and pair them with women who totally have their shit together, so it's a refreshing change, in a way, to have a female character who is an absolute mess - paired with a guy who is even more of a mess, but it wouldn't be a Cherryh book without a dude who is ostracized, crazy, and has people trying to kill him. (Also, one of the reasons why I liked Bet is because, despite being a total mess, she is a competent mess -- in general, she's doing the best she can in an incredibly awful situation that she got into through, mostly, no fault of her own.)
Another thing I like about Cherryh is that she tends to write from the principle that there are good and bad people on both sides of every conflict, and this book turns the tables on the rest of Alliance-Union - here we're asked to sympathize with someone on the side that's been, up to this point, set up as the obvious bad guys of the Alliance-Union-Fleet conflict (the space pirates who are going around killing merchanters), while the "good guy" (Alliance) side turn out to have their own share of savage killers and total dicks.
It's the latter part that made me not so sure about the ending. Cherryh did a really good job of setting up the Loki - an Alliance spy ship - as an terrifyingly claustrophobic place, run like a dictatorship by a murderous bastard of a first officer who has spies in every department, arranges suspicious accidents for anyone who crosses him, and refuses to let anyone leave -- once you're on the Loki, the only way out is to die. In the middle of all of this, the core group of protagonists manage to carve out a little sanctuary held together by interpersonal loyalty. Like many of Cherryh's books, it's about people trying to be good while caught up in a brutal, uncaring system, and about the clash between different viewpoints and different ways of living (in this case, Fleet ship-culture and its air of casual sex and camaraderie vs. the very different merchanter culture NG comes from).
It was fascinating to get the Fleet point of view and be reminded that most of Mazian's people were either press-ganged onto his ships or signed up in the belief they were actually doing something good and became pirates later. Also, "spook" ships like the Loki are a totally new bit of Alliance-Union lore that I haven't seen in other books in the series. And I felt that this was one of the better put-together of Cherryh's books. The plotting -- the way it goes out into space and then loops back to the same space station at the end -- is really solid.
But I was not at all sold on the ending. I did like Fitch (the evil first officer) and Bet ending up accidentally having to work together against the pirates. But he's still the same guy he was for the other 90% of the book. This is still the same ship where people are driven crazy or murdered if they cross the officers. I'm just not really seeing everyone choosing to stay on the same ship where they were terrorized and tortured by the people who are still in charge as a positive outcome, really. The book does a pretty good job of setting up (as many of Cherryh's books do) the way that the characters just don't really think about things the way Earth people do, so it's possible that for the spacer mindset, with their loyalty to ship above all, it does make sense. But it still seems like ... eh. I don't know. I just felt like the hell they went through to get to the place where they eventually end up was too much hell for me to believe it was really a good thing that they were still in the same hell. They don't even have any more leverage than they had before, and nobody up top has changed. It was just kind of a weird ending IMHO.
One other minor thing - it was really fascinating to read another Alliance-Union book written from the viewpoint of a protagonist who uses the same set of slang and a lot of the same verbal quirks as the Hellburner characters do ... which of course is the Fleet/earth-system way of talking. The thing that it took me a few of these books to notice is that, while Cherryh has an incredibly distinctive style, she also modifies her style considerably depending on which culture in Alliance-Union she's writing about. There are parts of Rimrunners in which Bet's narrative voice sounds a lot like Ben in Hellburner -- which makes total sense, they're from basically the same subculture. But the merchanter-focused books don't sound like that.
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It has sat on the bookshelves for years with an invisible force field of 'no, not that one' which has directed my reading choices elsewhere.
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D:
this is all.
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It's been a few years since my last reread, but as far as I vaguely recall, I read it as the protags did obtain more leverage by the ending, partly because some of the officers who'd stabilized the previous dynamic got killed, and that changed te power of remaining characters in ways that weren't fully played out. And characters who'd sort of gone along with the dynamic previously and maneuvered within it to get little localized zone of safety dependent on not rocking the boat, had gotten more willing to stand up, and the top of the shipboard power structure had become less secure, more aware of the danger of mutiny, and how much easier it would be to retain their power by being just enough less awful.
But the idea I took from it was not going through hell and then triumph/closure from getting out, it was going through hell and triumph/closure from realizing empowerment and supportive community mean there's hope even if you don't get out.
Which was probably more satisfying to me at 12ish, when I couldn't really leave my own oppressive situation in my family of origin, than if I'd found the same book when 16 or 17 and trying to save myself by getting out. and I probably carried that impression unexamined through all of my subsequent rereads.
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The main thing about the ending to me was how abrupt and shortened it was, particularly after the amazing action scene with Bet and Fitch. I did get the feeling that the power structure on Loki had changed, and NG's last line was a heart-tugger. Bernstein is the person I would probably be in this story. I wonder what his history was.
I've also read a review by a person who seemed to have emotional perception issues who could not figure out why Bet was risking so much for NG. There is something a little, little bit unlikely about it, because she's no starry eyed youngster. But after several re-reads, I think that her experiences at the beginning of the book have put her where she has a fellow feeling with what NG has been through. She was of of those hard-assed, hard-hearted, rapist EC marines, and now she's been on the other side: helpless, alone. NG becomes her morality pet (per TVTropes' definition) as well as the lover who makes her feel sexy. And the stationer at the beginning and Bernstein make he see the value of people who are neither aggressors nor victims.
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Anyway, the NG + Bet stuff did make sense to me, emotionally. I don't even know how much of it was Bet looking for redemption as such, because I really think she was always that way to some extent. From what we know about her, she was close with the others on her old ship, too. She never wasn't a good person (well, morally gray, but basically decent), she was just someone who had to lock down her morality re: stationers/merchanters in order to do what she was being ordered to do without being completely broken by it, and she's hard enough and cold enough to be able to do it. And while she does come around to seeing the stationers as people because of the ones who helped her, I don't think the change in her in the course of the book is actually that huge. It's more just that her loyalty used to be with Africa (and the people on it), and she transferred that to Loki (and the people on it) and started making better moral decisions re: the stationers by the end. But I think the way she actually related to her crewmates, including NG, was probably pretty similar to how she related to her crewmates on her old ship and probably on the merchanter she hired on with as well. If that makes sense?
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I think that part of the difference between how Bet reacted to NG and how she reacted to both her old Africa comrades and the Loki people like Musa and Bernstein is that everyone but NG is both tough enough and valuable enough to the group enterprise of the ship that they aren't cast in the role of victim. Bernstein can't protect him because Bernstein's authority doesn't extend past his shop and shift. NG isn't Musa, who has decades of reputation and superior skills. So I do think that the situation with NG is different.
The part where Bet is working on the suits and then the action scenes afterward were my favorite things. But the first time I read it, I didn't understand what NG had done to stop the invaders. It took couple of rereads to figure it out.