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Read all the Cherryh: Tripoint
So I haven't done one of these lately; I stopped for awhile and read other things (you kinda have to; Cherryh's books are heavy). I bounced off Tripoint this spring after I'd already read a ton of Alliance-Union books, because it's dark even by the standards of that universe and I think I kinda hit a wall.
I really loved it on the second try, though. It's still extremely dark; it actually reminded me a lot of Rimrunners in various ways. But it's got that "people finding each other and pulling together in a dark place" aspect that Cherryh's books almost always have. It's also very tense; I found this one of the more engaging of her books, actually, once I got past the bleakness of the general premise and the early chapters, because the tension of the characters' uncertain and dangerous situation pulled me along.
This book is basically one enormous trigger rating for rape and various kinds of abuse. The plot itself hinges around a rape, and the victim's attempts to seek revenge (justice not really being an option; each ship is its own law) while being stonewalled by her relatives because her efforts to bring down another ship's captain are putting all of them at risk. There's also an explicitly described female-on-male rape scene and a whole variety of other kinds of intra-family, intra-society emotional and physical abuse.
One thing I really love about Cherryh's Merchanter books is that she doesn't portray the closed, insular society of the matriarchal merchanter families as a good thing - it's not a bad thing either, it just is, but she's really good at depicting the way that extremely small, closed societies with no outside oversight actually are, and I think of all the merchanter novels I've read, this might be the one that is the most unflinching about just how awful and cruel a merchanter ship can be for someone who doesn't fit in. The close-knit merchanter families have each other's backs right up until they don't, and I think these books (and this one in particular) are painfully believable in how twisted and complex life can get when your family is and will forever be your entire world, and if you lose your place in a merchanter family, there is nowhere else to go. At least nowhere else worth being.
I have occasionally been thinking, reading the Alliance-Union books, about what a claustrophobic place Cherryh's space future is. I really love that she depicts a universe without a central government not as a wide-open frontier, but as a bunch of microcosmic dictatorships, the size of a space station or a ship, where your options are actually incredibly limited depending on where you're born. You can't even easily travel between space stations, since there basically is nothing like passenger spaceflight in Alliance-Union. If you're born on a space station, you'll most likely never be anywhere else but that one space station for your entire life, unless you manage to hire onto a non-merchanter ship (which based on Rimrunners and Tripoint appear to be universally dysfunctional and horrible), or get impressed into the remnants of the Fleet, in which case you'll probably have a short and even more horrible life; if you're born on a merchanter ship, you'll probably spend your life mostly in deep space following a preset trade pattern between three or four space stations, with your life tangled up in the lives of a hundred cousins and opportunities for sex/romance limited to a couple weeks on a space station every year or so.
It's a fascinating universe and a plausible one, and one that I love to read about, but it's also one that makes Earth feel so wide open and full of possibilities and free, which is really something you don't get much from the exploring-the-cosmos brand of sci-fi.
I am curious, for anyone else who knows Cherryh's timeline/mythos better than I do, about (major worldbuilding spoiler for the end of Tripoint) the planet that the Mazziani have found and appear to be settling. Which planet is that? Does it appear elsewhere in the Alliance-Union books, or has she never developed that any further? Given the extreme lack of habitable planets in Alliance-Union space, I am very curious about this!
I really loved it on the second try, though. It's still extremely dark; it actually reminded me a lot of Rimrunners in various ways. But it's got that "people finding each other and pulling together in a dark place" aspect that Cherryh's books almost always have. It's also very tense; I found this one of the more engaging of her books, actually, once I got past the bleakness of the general premise and the early chapters, because the tension of the characters' uncertain and dangerous situation pulled me along.
This book is basically one enormous trigger rating for rape and various kinds of abuse. The plot itself hinges around a rape, and the victim's attempts to seek revenge (justice not really being an option; each ship is its own law) while being stonewalled by her relatives because her efforts to bring down another ship's captain are putting all of them at risk. There's also an explicitly described female-on-male rape scene and a whole variety of other kinds of intra-family, intra-society emotional and physical abuse.
One thing I really love about Cherryh's Merchanter books is that she doesn't portray the closed, insular society of the matriarchal merchanter families as a good thing - it's not a bad thing either, it just is, but she's really good at depicting the way that extremely small, closed societies with no outside oversight actually are, and I think of all the merchanter novels I've read, this might be the one that is the most unflinching about just how awful and cruel a merchanter ship can be for someone who doesn't fit in. The close-knit merchanter families have each other's backs right up until they don't, and I think these books (and this one in particular) are painfully believable in how twisted and complex life can get when your family is and will forever be your entire world, and if you lose your place in a merchanter family, there is nowhere else to go. At least nowhere else worth being.
I have occasionally been thinking, reading the Alliance-Union books, about what a claustrophobic place Cherryh's space future is. I really love that she depicts a universe without a central government not as a wide-open frontier, but as a bunch of microcosmic dictatorships, the size of a space station or a ship, where your options are actually incredibly limited depending on where you're born. You can't even easily travel between space stations, since there basically is nothing like passenger spaceflight in Alliance-Union. If you're born on a space station, you'll most likely never be anywhere else but that one space station for your entire life, unless you manage to hire onto a non-merchanter ship (which based on Rimrunners and Tripoint appear to be universally dysfunctional and horrible), or get impressed into the remnants of the Fleet, in which case you'll probably have a short and even more horrible life; if you're born on a merchanter ship, you'll probably spend your life mostly in deep space following a preset trade pattern between three or four space stations, with your life tangled up in the lives of a hundred cousins and opportunities for sex/romance limited to a couple weeks on a space station every year or so.
It's a fascinating universe and a plausible one, and one that I love to read about, but it's also one that makes Earth feel so wide open and full of possibilities and free, which is really something you don't get much from the exploring-the-cosmos brand of sci-fi.
I am curious, for anyone else who knows Cherryh's timeline/mythos better than I do, about (major worldbuilding spoiler for the end of Tripoint) the planet that the Mazziani have found and appear to be settling. Which planet is that? Does it appear elsewhere in the Alliance-Union books, or has she never developed that any further? Given the extreme lack of habitable planets in Alliance-Union space, I am very curious about this!
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I read it again within the last few years and could hardly bear it!
About planets... I do remember reading in the Ariane Emory books about the experiment that became Gehenna... that gave me a shiver at the time.
ETA: Oh, and I loved Rimrunners. It's one of my absolute favorites of hers. Comfort reading for me now.
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I really liked Tripoint, but the sheer trapped-ness of the characters and their lack of good options did get to me at times.
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I don't think that planet has come up again yet; IIRC, after the Warner books is when she went back to DAW to start the Foreigner series, and since then the only Union-Alliance books have been Regenesis and the forthcoming Alliance Rising. And I don't think it was ever mentioned in the earlier books--it was one of the things that struck me as kind of jarring, along with the treatment of jump.
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Which one, Austin or Capella? Or both?
In both cases it was the sort of thing that made me think "I bet a lot of readers are going to bounce off this really hard" (for valid reasons!) but I didn't, I think because by this point I've gotten used to the fact that Cherryh's characters basically never get higher-level satisfaction or justice, and one of her general themes that carries through a lot of her books is that of personal vendettas taking a backseat to the necessity of working together with people who've wronged you when there are larger goals at stake. I think I might've reacted differently if I hadn't come to this after having already read Rimrunners, because I remember bouncing off it sliiiightly harder in Rimrunners since that was the first time I had hit this particular implementation of this theme, in that case, Bet having to team up with the guy who'd been brutally abusive to her to the point of near-murder, and eventually achieving a truce kind of situation that involved taking his orders because there was just nowhere else to go. This felt similar to me, and by this point I'm starting to like it, because it is unusual in this genre (which is usually about a more cathartic sort of happy ending). Cherryh's protagonists never really get that; instead they have to kind of, I guess, learn to work around their vendettas and hurts and completely legitimate grievances for the greater good. It felt more grown up to me, I guess, for lack of a better way to put it, than an ending that had involved catharsis via violence or the like -- all the more so because I as a reader had to confront my own prejudices about how things "should" have gone for Austin and Capella vs. how they actually did go.
The one thing I didn't particularly like was Marie being sidelined by the plot for the last half of the book after having been a major character in the first half, but that's another Cherryh-ism, having the plot just randomly go randomly skidding off on a complete tangent rather than sticking to a linear, cohesive series of events. I like it a lot now that I've gotten used to it - there's a sort of, idk, naturalistic element to it that also works with her stream-of-consciousness writing style - but I also think it's what made me bounce off the Foreigner books, because they really do that. At that time I hadn't read enough of her books to figure out that it's sort of a thing she does, though.
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I was thinking about Austin, but probably I should have been thinking of both. It's less about not getting justice than Austin in general not seeming to be treated (by book or characters) as a danger. The characters--and as far as I can tell, the book--treat his rape of Marie as a one-off thing, which I found implausible. (The rapes in Rimrunners were more plausibly things I could see people participating in in a particular social context when they had not committed sexual assault before.)
I thought that Marie wasn't treated fairly by the book, but it's possible I was mistaking Tom's perspective for the narrative's. Cherryh's plots do skitter off a lot, but the characters who get an initial focus usually retain it better.
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Cherryh's worlds pretty much always feel incredibly claustrophobic to me, literally or emotionally or both. Even the Morgaine Chronicles, which have the biggest world and characters with access to so much of it, are about closing doors.
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But yeah, she really likes focusing in on small groups of characters rather than big-picture stuff, and she's really good at evoking the closed-in feeling of small insular societies, families, and other groups with limited opportunities and not many places to go. It's very unusual. The more of her books I read and the more of a feeling for her work that I get, the more I'm impressed by how strikingly unique it is.
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(Also, hi!! How are you? :D)
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(Hi!! I am SO busy these days. I'm living in WA state with my parents right now and I'm back in school. This year I'm taking calculus and chemistry, and working at Home Depot and the college as a math tutor. It's very... busy and overwhelming, but I've been doing really well. Today is the last day of winter break. How about you?)
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OOH YES.
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