(no subject)

[sholio]

Alliance Rising is out now (\o/). This would be considerably more squeeful, I think, if I hadn't just read most of Alliance-Union, and a number of the books for the first time ever, over the last year, so the impact of getting a new book in the series isn't as great as it would otherwise be, but still, NEW ALLIANCE-UNION, and it wasn't until a certain character shows up that I realized ... oh right, as per what we know of Alliance history from Finity's End, this book is basically going to be "Fletcher Neihart Dies Horribly, The Novel", isn't it.

Can someone more Alliance-Union-savvy help me figure out where this book takes place relative to Heavy Time/Hellburner? The timeline is not helping me a lot. When exactly did the war break out? I think it might be about 20 years earlier ... does that sound about right?

Comments

[yhlee]

I almost bought that book in Seattle but the jacket copy made it look like it required having read Cherryh books that I haven't yet read for full appreciation! I have Heavy Time and Hellburner but haven't yet gotten to them /o\ let alone Finity's End. Someday! But I'm so excited for it!

[sholio]

To be fair I'm not sure if you actually need to! Chronologically speaking, this book takes place before any of those, so it can't be too dependent on them for context, and so far it really doesn't feel like it's relying on the reader having read the other ones. On the other hand, I read them all relatively recently, so I'm not in the best position to judge. /o\

Most of the individual Alliance-Union books seem to be standalones, though, aside from the ones that directly follow on from each other (like Heavy Time and Hellburner). I think they're meant to be independent enough that they can be read in any order.

[yhlee]

Oh, that's a good point! I mean, I just sort of wandered into Alliance-Union all over the place so it's not like I couldn't continue to do that. XD

[sholio]

Pretty much. XD I think it's sort of designed so you're able to. I'm sure reading in different orders (chronological vs. publication date vs. random) is a slightly different reading experience, but I'm not sure if one is objectively better; I think the books all stand alone well enough that you can get away with reading them in almost any order.

[alchimie]

I have not read Cherryh in a long time (although reading your posts is making me want to go back and reread all the Alliance-Union books, I suspect they will look very different to me 20 years on), but that timeline is nonetheless hurting my brain because I had not realised that Ariane Emory is alive during Heavy Time/Hellburner -- I had thought they were much, much earlier!

[sholio]

Haha, yeah, the Alliance-Union timeline is really compressed compared to how it seems reading the books. There is a TON of stuff all going on at once. I would have thought the hani books were taking place a lot farther in the future than they are, too, because apparently Earth was doing all of that while Alliance-Union space was still in the early stages of dealing with the Mazziani and so forth.