(no subject)
Jan. 21st, 2019 07:03 pmAlliance 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 ... ( Kinda spoilerish but only for the first 20 pages and one thing in FINITY'S END )
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?
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?
Read all the Cherryh: Tripoint
Dec. 29th, 2018 12:00 pmSo 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) ( Under the cut )
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) ( Under the cut )
Read all the Cherryh: Rimrunners
Aug. 2nd, 2018 05:46 pmSo 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.
( Major book spoilers continue under the cut )
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.
( Major book spoilers continue under the cut )
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.
Read all the Cherryh: Port Eternity
Jun. 2nd, 2018 12:46 pmThis was apparently one of her earliest Alliance-Union books in terms of publication dates (published in 1982) but I'm glad I read it after reading enough of the other books in the 'verse to get a strong sense of how much people fear jump-space and how profoundly important it is for humans traveling through jump to drug themselves so they don't remember it. This is a book about what happens when you don't, and what actually IS between, and why ships or individuals getting lost in the between is a thing that happens sometimes.
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It's got a lot of great high-concept stuff going on: the trapped and haunted spaceship for all your Something Is Outside The Ship creepiness, the ship full of slaves forced to play-act a doomed Arthurian romance for the amusement of their mistress who end up somewhere their play-acting can become real, the clone-people whose entire lives are templated off pre-programmed tapes inadvertently using entertainment tapes to template themselves into more complex emotional lives. The general idea of azi developing more complex emotions and being, essentially, forced to become more human when they're stuck somewhere that their programming doesn't apply was the main thing I wanted (and didn't get, to my satisfaction) from the first section of Forty Thousand in Gehenna. And since we spend the entire book inside the head of an azi narrator, there is a lot of background thinky stuff about what are emotions, really, and what counts as "real" emotions. Are Elaine's (and the others') feelings of love and loyalty any less real because they were programmed to feel them? Are naturally born humans any less programmed? And so forth.
There's also the deeply creepy worldbuilding detail that Elaine, and others like her, are "terminated" at age 40 because her line of azi are designed to be ornamental, and once they stop being pretty, they're killed; the only way to avoid this is to find a way to be "clever" or otherwise useful. Elaine is clearly terrified of this fate while trying to convince herself that she's not because she has no right to her own life, she's only an azi. This seemed particularly relevant because we'd just been talking in the Chanur discussion about the way the Chanur books upend our own society's screwed-up relationship with male vs. female aging, where males in hani society are considered useless once they're past their reproductive prime. It was clearly something on Cherryh's mind at the time, because this book deals with the same issue in a different way: in Union, people like Elaine are meant to be looked at, their sole function is to be beautiful, and once they're no longer young and lovely, they're killed. (It's not specifically a female issue in this book, because that's also the intended fate of her fellow azi Lancelot, who is also around mainly for ornamental purposes. But it's pretty obviously a related statement on youth and attractiveness.)
(Randomly, the back-cover blurb describes the azi as "androids", apparently missing the point that they're genetically human, they're just clone-people. But in retrospect I guess the book doesn't really go into the details of Union, so if you're not already familiar with the universe, it's not that obvious what, exactly, the azi are, just that they're driven by programming more than ordinary emotions.)
... The main problem I had with the book, though, is that it's a bunch of very passive and in some cases unlikeable people stuck on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere, with no one but each other to interact with. The first half of the book in particular was extremely heavy on descriptions of people sleeping and entertaining themselves with the 24th-century equivalent of movies. I liked Elaine as a protagonist but I just wished there had been more ... well ... happening, which is an ironic comment given that the book was about a bunch of people trapped in a situation of DOOM and possibly under attack, but somehow the book's narrative style managed to leech out a lot of the suspense.
I also have zero emotional connection to the Arthurian mythos, which the entire book is built around, so that was probably also an issue. If you're more into the idea of Camelot In Space than I am, you might enjoy this book better.
But there was still a lot about it that I liked, particularly the vivid and creepy descriptions of in-between space and the survival aspects of trying to adjust to the idea that they might be trapped for the rest of their lives with no one to depend on but each other. I ended up wishing some of the ideas that were developed in this book had been developed in about three times the space (it's a short book, more novella-sized than full novel sized) so that we'd had more of an opportunity to get to know the characters better and to really deal with the ins and outs of azi psychology that this book merely brushes across. Which, come to think of it, is probably why she wrote Cyteen later on. This book strikes me as an early attempt to feel around the edges of some of the issues of identity and self that Cyteen addressed head on.
(... or at least I assume it does. I did read Cyteen a very long time ago, but I don't really remember anything about it now except "clones". It's one of the ones I'll be getting to soon-ish; it's in the pile!)
Also, giving me more fuel for my theory that Cherryh's id is pretty much my own, this is another book that revolves around a little group of found-family-ish types who are all up in each other's space all the time. As well as everyone living together on the ship, the azi prefer sleeping in a big cuddle-pile because they're more comfortable with other azi around them. It also comes thiiiiiiis close to a canonical threesome or possibly foursome, but then veers around it at the last minute; awwww. (You can headcanon it in very easily, though.)
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It's got a lot of great high-concept stuff going on: the trapped and haunted spaceship for all your Something Is Outside The Ship creepiness, the ship full of slaves forced to play-act a doomed Arthurian romance for the amusement of their mistress who end up somewhere their play-acting can become real, the clone-people whose entire lives are templated off pre-programmed tapes inadvertently using entertainment tapes to template themselves into more complex emotional lives. The general idea of azi developing more complex emotions and being, essentially, forced to become more human when they're stuck somewhere that their programming doesn't apply was the main thing I wanted (and didn't get, to my satisfaction) from the first section of Forty Thousand in Gehenna. And since we spend the entire book inside the head of an azi narrator, there is a lot of background thinky stuff about what are emotions, really, and what counts as "real" emotions. Are Elaine's (and the others') feelings of love and loyalty any less real because they were programmed to feel them? Are naturally born humans any less programmed? And so forth.
There's also the deeply creepy worldbuilding detail that Elaine, and others like her, are "terminated" at age 40 because her line of azi are designed to be ornamental, and once they stop being pretty, they're killed; the only way to avoid this is to find a way to be "clever" or otherwise useful. Elaine is clearly terrified of this fate while trying to convince herself that she's not because she has no right to her own life, she's only an azi. This seemed particularly relevant because we'd just been talking in the Chanur discussion about the way the Chanur books upend our own society's screwed-up relationship with male vs. female aging, where males in hani society are considered useless once they're past their reproductive prime. It was clearly something on Cherryh's mind at the time, because this book deals with the same issue in a different way: in Union, people like Elaine are meant to be looked at, their sole function is to be beautiful, and once they're no longer young and lovely, they're killed. (It's not specifically a female issue in this book, because that's also the intended fate of her fellow azi Lancelot, who is also around mainly for ornamental purposes. But it's pretty obviously a related statement on youth and attractiveness.)
(Randomly, the back-cover blurb describes the azi as "androids", apparently missing the point that they're genetically human, they're just clone-people. But in retrospect I guess the book doesn't really go into the details of Union, so if you're not already familiar with the universe, it's not that obvious what, exactly, the azi are, just that they're driven by programming more than ordinary emotions.)
... The main problem I had with the book, though, is that it's a bunch of very passive and in some cases unlikeable people stuck on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere, with no one but each other to interact with. The first half of the book in particular was extremely heavy on descriptions of people sleeping and entertaining themselves with the 24th-century equivalent of movies. I liked Elaine as a protagonist but I just wished there had been more ... well ... happening, which is an ironic comment given that the book was about a bunch of people trapped in a situation of DOOM and possibly under attack, but somehow the book's narrative style managed to leech out a lot of the suspense.
I also have zero emotional connection to the Arthurian mythos, which the entire book is built around, so that was probably also an issue. If you're more into the idea of Camelot In Space than I am, you might enjoy this book better.
But there was still a lot about it that I liked, particularly the vivid and creepy descriptions of in-between space and the survival aspects of trying to adjust to the idea that they might be trapped for the rest of their lives with no one to depend on but each other. I ended up wishing some of the ideas that were developed in this book had been developed in about three times the space (it's a short book, more novella-sized than full novel sized) so that we'd had more of an opportunity to get to know the characters better and to really deal with the ins and outs of azi psychology that this book merely brushes across. Which, come to think of it, is probably why she wrote Cyteen later on. This book strikes me as an early attempt to feel around the edges of some of the issues of identity and self that Cyteen addressed head on.
(... or at least I assume it does. I did read Cyteen a very long time ago, but I don't really remember anything about it now except "clones". It's one of the ones I'll be getting to soon-ish; it's in the pile!)
Also, giving me more fuel for my theory that Cherryh's id is pretty much my own, this is another book that revolves around a little group of found-family-ish types who are all up in each other's space all the time. As well as everyone living together on the ship, the azi prefer sleeping in a big cuddle-pile because they're more comfortable with other azi around them. It also comes thiiiiiiis close to a canonical threesome or possibly foursome, but then veers around it at the last minute; awwww. (You can headcanon it in very easily, though.)
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.
( Spoilers )
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.
( Spoilers )
Read all the Cherryh: Finity's End
May. 23rd, 2018 09:18 amAnother new read for me, and oh man, I really loved this one! Especially all the slice-of-life-on-a-spaceship details of life on board a merchanter ship. I mean, basically this is a boarding school novel IN SPACE, with extra bonus family feels, and of the Alliance-Union books I've read so far, this is the first to really go into details of worldbuildy stuff like how the ships are set up, how they trade, how jump really works (e.g. what's going on when they talk about the weird side effects of dumping velocity when they come out of a jump), and so forth from a ground-level, characters'-eye perspective. A side effect of the tight third-person POV she tends to use -- her characters generally don't explain things to the reader that they already know, and this is the first of the merchanter books I've read that's told largely from the POV of a character who isn't used to the ships, so we get to see how it's all set up as he learns about it. It also really expands the Alliance part of the universe, since we get to see so many of the space stations and get a feeling for them as unique places, along with all the changes that have happened since the war -- in a similar way to how we got to see the in-depth functioning of prewar life in Jupiter's asteroid belt in Heavy Time.
I think everything else I have to say about this book is spoilery, so it'll go under the cut ...
( Spoilers )
I think everything else I have to say about this book is spoilery, so it'll go under the cut ...
( Spoilers )
I really enjoyed these! For one thing, these are probably the most Alaska-esque books that I have ever read in SFF, considerably more so than a lot of books which are supposed to be set on ice worlds or frontier planets. I mean, I don't think these books are actually supposed to be evocative of Alaska, but they really, really are. They just felt accurate - not just the physical details of the weather and terrain and frontier lifestyle (although that, too), but the psychology of it: the way people deal with scarcity and isolation and knowing that every time you go out the front door, something might try to kill you. (Though we don't have to deal with swarming packs of psychic predators, thankfully. We just get thousand-pound killing machines that can run as fast as a horse, i.e. bears. One of the weirdest things to me about hiking in Illinois was having to train myself out of constantly being alert and paranoid and searching the trees for dangerous predators, because there just WEREN'T any.)
So yeah. Alaska. I think it took me awhile to get through the second book in part because the claustrophobic air of snowed-in isolation was a little too evocative of real life and we just got DONE with winter, dammit. I have generally been impressed with Cherryh's ability to psychologically inhabit her characters - it's one of the things she does very well, getting inside the nitty-gritty details of what it would feel like to live your whole life on a space station or to be part of an alien lion-person clan. But it takes it to a whole new level when she's doing it with a kind of lifestyle that I've experienced and I'm pretty sure she hasn't (she's from Oklahoma, ffs!) and really nails that too.
Plus, this series is about wilderness scouts who are telepathically bonded to carnivorous psychic horses. In a lot of ways these books, the first one especially, feel as if they were written exactly for me, at least in terms of the worldbuilding. I didn't find myself bonding as closely with the characters as I normally do in Cherryh books, for whatever reason. The worldbuilding, though. Gah. I could just wallow in it. I brought up the possibility to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija that I actually read these books, or parts of them, when I was a kid, because some of the worlds I came up with and wrote about as a kid were eerily similar to this, but then I looked up the publication dates and the first one was published in 1995, when I was in college, so I couldn't have. Apparently it's just convergent evolution between my own childhood creative urges and the Alaska-esque worldbuilding + telepathic horses, which I was also thoroughly into as a kid and used to write and draw about a lot, as one does when one is a horse-crazy 9-year-old living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. (Though I still find it slightly eerie that, apparently, I managed to independently come up with something in the mid-80s that was damn similar to this book, small enclaves of humanity living in a wilderness that can only be navigated by guides in telepathic partnership with native horselike creatures. Mine were called wilderhorses - "wilder" is pronounced like "builder" - and night-riders were the people who rode them, and Cherryh's are nighthorses ...!)
Anyway, these books take place on a forested, mountainous planet that has been partially colonized by humans who have lost contact with their world of origin. Their technology is roughly mid-1900s - they have electricity, internal combustion engines, metal and petroleum refining, telephones, etc. They are restricted primarily to a scattering of smallish, walled towns because this planet's wilderness is extremely difficult to penetrate. Basically, it's psychic.
Everything native to the planet is telepathic - something like CS Friedman's Coldfire books, but aggressively so, using their natural psychic abilities to tempt, confuse, and distract their prey; the general aggregate of the telepathic sendings of the planet's wildlife exists as a sort of collective psychic background noise called the ambient. Humans, having no natural telepathy of their own, have no defenses against it. Hence their partnership with nighthorses, local apex predators who are intelligent enough to be interested and curious about humans anyway, and sought out humans on their own to find out more about them. They're not quite human-level intellects, more like on the level of a very smart dog. Being around humans makes them smarter, or at least more capable of long-range planning, whereas being around them enables humans to participate in the ambient - picking up and receiving the thoughts of anyone around them (human or otherwise). You can imagine how popular that is in a city-type living situation. Consequently, the nighthorse riders are a separate class, absolutely necessary for safe travel through the wilderness, but distrusted by suspicious townsfolk and kept outside the walls of the planets small, pallisaded towns. The plot of the first book concerns a nighthorse gone rogue, capable of driving everyone and everything around it insane, and the hunters sent to stop it, as winter closes on the mountains. The second book picks up from where the first one left off and deals with the following winter in the mountains.
I tore through the first book like wildfire, but found the second slower going, in part because it ended up focusing mainly on characters from the first book who weren't my favorites (I didn't dislike them at all, and they definitely grew on me; they just weren't the ones I really wanted to be reading more about), as well as - as mentioned above - the author's ability to depict claustrophobic, snowed-in isolation a little too well. But yeah, fun books, really liked 'em, probably picking up at least the first book for myself (they were borrowed), and there's a lovely found-family vibe by the end. Recommend. :D And God, I'm glad bears aren't telepathic.
Feel free to mention spoilers in the comments!
So yeah. Alaska. I think it took me awhile to get through the second book in part because the claustrophobic air of snowed-in isolation was a little too evocative of real life and we just got DONE with winter, dammit. I have generally been impressed with Cherryh's ability to psychologically inhabit her characters - it's one of the things she does very well, getting inside the nitty-gritty details of what it would feel like to live your whole life on a space station or to be part of an alien lion-person clan. But it takes it to a whole new level when she's doing it with a kind of lifestyle that I've experienced and I'm pretty sure she hasn't (she's from Oklahoma, ffs!) and really nails that too.
Plus, this series is about wilderness scouts who are telepathically bonded to carnivorous psychic horses. In a lot of ways these books, the first one especially, feel as if they were written exactly for me, at least in terms of the worldbuilding. I didn't find myself bonding as closely with the characters as I normally do in Cherryh books, for whatever reason. The worldbuilding, though. Gah. I could just wallow in it. I brought up the possibility to
rachelmanija that I actually read these books, or parts of them, when I was a kid, because some of the worlds I came up with and wrote about as a kid were eerily similar to this, but then I looked up the publication dates and the first one was published in 1995, when I was in college, so I couldn't have. Apparently it's just convergent evolution between my own childhood creative urges and the Alaska-esque worldbuilding + telepathic horses, which I was also thoroughly into as a kid and used to write and draw about a lot, as one does when one is a horse-crazy 9-year-old living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. (Though I still find it slightly eerie that, apparently, I managed to independently come up with something in the mid-80s that was damn similar to this book, small enclaves of humanity living in a wilderness that can only be navigated by guides in telepathic partnership with native horselike creatures. Mine were called wilderhorses - "wilder" is pronounced like "builder" - and night-riders were the people who rode them, and Cherryh's are nighthorses ...!)Anyway, these books take place on a forested, mountainous planet that has been partially colonized by humans who have lost contact with their world of origin. Their technology is roughly mid-1900s - they have electricity, internal combustion engines, metal and petroleum refining, telephones, etc. They are restricted primarily to a scattering of smallish, walled towns because this planet's wilderness is extremely difficult to penetrate. Basically, it's psychic.
Everything native to the planet is telepathic - something like CS Friedman's Coldfire books, but aggressively so, using their natural psychic abilities to tempt, confuse, and distract their prey; the general aggregate of the telepathic sendings of the planet's wildlife exists as a sort of collective psychic background noise called the ambient. Humans, having no natural telepathy of their own, have no defenses against it. Hence their partnership with nighthorses, local apex predators who are intelligent enough to be interested and curious about humans anyway, and sought out humans on their own to find out more about them. They're not quite human-level intellects, more like on the level of a very smart dog. Being around humans makes them smarter, or at least more capable of long-range planning, whereas being around them enables humans to participate in the ambient - picking up and receiving the thoughts of anyone around them (human or otherwise). You can imagine how popular that is in a city-type living situation. Consequently, the nighthorse riders are a separate class, absolutely necessary for safe travel through the wilderness, but distrusted by suspicious townsfolk and kept outside the walls of the planets small, pallisaded towns. The plot of the first book concerns a nighthorse gone rogue, capable of driving everyone and everything around it insane, and the hunters sent to stop it, as winter closes on the mountains. The second book picks up from where the first one left off and deals with the following winter in the mountains.
I tore through the first book like wildfire, but found the second slower going, in part because it ended up focusing mainly on characters from the first book who weren't my favorites (I didn't dislike them at all, and they definitely grew on me; they just weren't the ones I really wanted to be reading more about), as well as - as mentioned above - the author's ability to depict claustrophobic, snowed-in isolation a little too well. But yeah, fun books, really liked 'em, probably picking up at least the first book for myself (they were borrowed), and there's a lovely found-family vibe by the end. Recommend. :D And God, I'm glad bears aren't telepathic.
Feel free to mention spoilers in the comments!
Read all the Cherryh: Merchanter's Luck
May. 18th, 2018 12:34 amI 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.)
( Spoilers under the cut )
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.)
( Spoilers under the cut )
Misc things
May. 13th, 2018 12:09 amI decided to buy myself a new Kindle Paperwhite to replace my ancient Kindle with the side buttons. It arrived in the mail today, so I've been setting it up and so far my thoughts are decidedly "hmmm." I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually, but I'm definitely not going to toss the old one anytime soon. I expect it'll be nice to have one that's backlit for reading in bed, though!
I had enough fun writing up my thoughts on The Pride of Chanur that I think I might just forget the "book club" idea for the time being, and simply make more posts on the Cherryh books I've read lately. Which one(s) are y'all most interested in hearing about?
*I haven't actually acquired these yet, but they're definitely going to be part of the "read all the Cherryh" project. Apparently the library has them; they've got a good Cherryh selection, come to find out.
In other news, I've settled on Mar Delaney as my F/F pen name and set up a website. Now I just need, you know ... to write some books. (Details.)
Apropos of that,rachelmanija has started a project called F/F Fridays, similar to Reading Wednesdays - post about an F/F book, story, or fanfic rec on Friday. Which I'm going to try to start doing, not every week, but as the mood takes me. (I'll probably post them here and also at Mar's website, to give it some content.) Also, rachelmanija has a poll where you can vote on the next book she'll review.
I had enough fun writing up my thoughts on The Pride of Chanur that I think I might just forget the "book club" idea for the time being, and simply make more posts on the Cherryh books I've read lately. Which one(s) are y'all most interested in hearing about?
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18
The ones I've just read or reread:
The ones I'm in the process of reading or have waiting to read:
View Answers
Rider at the Gate/Cloud's Rider
3 (21.4%)
The rest of the Chanur series
3 (21.4%)
Rimrunners
3 (21.4%)
Finity's End
2 (14.3%)
Cyteen
7 (50.0%)
40,000 in Gehenna
2 (14.3%)
Faded Sun trilogy*
4 (28.6%)
*I haven't actually acquired these yet, but they're definitely going to be part of the "read all the Cherryh" project. Apparently the library has them; they've got a good Cherryh selection, come to find out.
In other news, I've settled on Mar Delaney as my F/F pen name and set up a website. Now I just need, you know ... to write some books. (Details.)
Apropos of that,
rachelmanija has started a project called F/F Fridays, similar to Reading Wednesdays - post about an F/F book, story, or fanfic rec on Friday. Which I'm going to try to start doing, not every week, but as the mood takes me. (I'll probably post them here and also at Mar's website, to give it some content.) Also, rachelmanija has a poll where you can vote on the next book she'll review.Adapted from a few separate posts I made to Tumblr on The Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh, aka a surprisingly contemporary-feeling early-1980s SF novel in which a human dude is abducted by aliens (more or less) and ends up on a ship with a bunch of lion women who have never seen a human before. No spoilers for future books, though spoilers might occur in the comments. (FYI, I'm currently reading the fourth book. I know there are a couple people on Tumblr who are reading the books for the first time, but I'm not sure if any of the interested parties on DW are new readers. To be on the safe side, include spoiler warnings in your comments if you discuss future books.)
( Spoilers and general musings for Pride of Chanur )
Have you read the book? Do you have thoughts? Come talk to me about it!
( Spoilers and general musings for Pride of Chanur )
Have you read the book? Do you have thoughts? Come talk to me about it!
Rusalka series: in conclusion
Dec. 3rd, 2015 07:11 pmI finished reading the Rusalka books and continue to be awash in FEELS for these characters.
( Brief, not too spoilery vaguespoilers about the series in general )
( Very spoilery comparison between the original ending and the new ending of the series )
( Brief, not too spoilery vaguespoilers about the series in general )
( Very spoilery comparison between the original ending and the new ending of the series )
A little more on the Rusalka series
Nov. 30th, 2015 11:56 pmAfter reading the first few chapters of my old paperback copy of Chernevog (the sequel to Rusalka) yesterday during our power outage and corresponding lack of Internet, I bought the revised/self-published version on Cherryh's website this morning, and wow, it IS different! Nothing major has changed with the plot (although she says the next book does apparently have plot changes) but there is a ton of sentence-level and scene-level reconstruction.
Most particularly, she explains things a lot better. Her books often leave a lot to the imagination, especially a lot of the character motivation and background worldbuilding stuff which is implied rather than stated, but in this edition she's gone back and cleaned up and made clear a lot of things that were subtextual in the original (often subtextual to the point of total incomprehensibility). It's a lot easier to get where she was going with some of the character stuff now. And she (and her editor; she credits Jane Fancher, her wife, with a great deal of the editing) greatly toned down the stream-of-consciousness narration of the original, editing it into something considerably more cohesive and conventional, while still retaining the flavor of the original.
So yeah, between the two, I'm finding the revised version definitely has enough changes to be worth choosing it over the unrevised one. The ebooks ARE expensive -- they're $9.95 each -- but these books are favorites and, to me, well worth buying.
I also bought the revised Rusalka just to compare, because I figure I've had more than $9.95 of enjoyment from it over the years. It's not markedly different -- she notes Rusalka was edited considerably less than the others -- but I was happy to notice that one of my favorite hugging scenes (of course I have favorite hugging scenes, who do you think I am), after ( spoiler thing happens; not too huge ) is expanded in the revised version, with a bit more character-interaction cuteness than the original had.
Oh, and also, I rediscovered![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snarkydame's lovely tag to book 2 on AO3 yesterday. Sweet OT3 hurt/comforty goodness! Recommended. :) (But generally spoilery for the series up to that point.)
Most particularly, she explains things a lot better. Her books often leave a lot to the imagination, especially a lot of the character motivation and background worldbuilding stuff which is implied rather than stated, but in this edition she's gone back and cleaned up and made clear a lot of things that were subtextual in the original (often subtextual to the point of total incomprehensibility). It's a lot easier to get where she was going with some of the character stuff now. And she (and her editor; she credits Jane Fancher, her wife, with a great deal of the editing) greatly toned down the stream-of-consciousness narration of the original, editing it into something considerably more cohesive and conventional, while still retaining the flavor of the original.
So yeah, between the two, I'm finding the revised version definitely has enough changes to be worth choosing it over the unrevised one. The ebooks ARE expensive -- they're $9.95 each -- but these books are favorites and, to me, well worth buying.
I also bought the revised Rusalka just to compare, because I figure I've had more than $9.95 of enjoyment from it over the years. It's not markedly different -- she notes Rusalka was edited considerably less than the others -- but I was happy to notice that one of my favorite hugging scenes (of course I have favorite hugging scenes, who do you think I am), after ( spoiler thing happens; not too huge ) is expanded in the revised version, with a bit more character-interaction cuteness than the original had.
Oh, and also, I rediscovered
snarkydame's lovely tag to book 2 on AO3 yesterday. Sweet OT3 hurt/comforty goodness! Recommended. :) (But generally spoilery for the series up to that point.)Rusalka, by CJ Cherryh
Nov. 29th, 2015 09:10 pmThis book is wall-to-wall h/c idfic, OMFG.
It was one of my favorite books as a teenager, reread 'til it was falling apart, but I was concerned it wouldn't hold up since I think it's been at least a decade since I last read it. I needn't have worried. DID I MENTION THE WALL TO WALL IDFIC. And it's a pretty solid book otherwise, too.
Rusalka is set in a fantasy version of medieval Russia, with deliciously believable magic -- subtle and often deniable (is it the Yard-Thing that drinks the saucers of milk left out for it, or the barnyard cat?), but omnipresent in everyday matters of luck and superstition. Sasha is a young man who has magic powers, or at least he believes so. He can make things happen just by wishing them. Literally anything. When he was a small child, he made the house burn down to stop his father's abuse, killing both his parents -- or so he and everyone else in his hometown believe. Now the whole town thinks he's bad luck, and Sasha has desperately trained himself not to want anything, or think about things, or get angry, for fear of accidentally killing someone, retreating into a life of miserable isolation. (As the other protagonist says to him later: "That's hell you live in, Sasha." And it is.)
Pyetr is the orphaned son of a murdered gambler, cultivating wealthy friends in an attempt to rise above his gutter beginnings. He doesn't believe in magic -- or in nebulous things like friendship and love for that matter. His career of inveterate rakitude comes to a sudden and bloody end when a jealous husband stabs him near-fatally on page three. His wealthy fair-weather friends abandon him and the only person in the whole town who'll help him is fellow outcast Sasha, which leads to the two of them on the run in a winter-dead wilderness full of old, wild magic.
Pyetr soon attracts the attention of a rusalka, i.e. the ghost of a drowned girl, who can only survive by stealing the life energy of the living, although she doesn't want to. This is Eveshka, the third major character. Between this and the sword wound, Pyetr spends the entire book in various states of swooning, feverish collapse, in between getting attacked by monsters and railing against the fact that he DOESN'T BELIEVE IN MAGIC DAMMIT and WHY THE HELL IS THIS HAPPENING TO HIM. Meanwhile lonely Sasha attaches to him hard, and Pyetr starts to figure out how to be the hero Sasha and Eveshka think he already is.
The book is currently out of print and can be bought directly from the author as an ebook or as a used book from Amazon. There are two sequels, which I vaguely remember were somewhat disappointing, or at least less massively idficcy, but I'll be reading them next, so I guess we'll see.
ETA: There's an interesting about-the-book page on the author's website in which she talks about how, when she was writing this book in the 1980s, the Cold War was still going on and the reference materials on Russian mythology, plants, etc. that she needed to write the book were next to impossible to find. She ended up swapping sci-fi with Russian fans in return for reference books.
ETA2: Wikipedia article on the books talks more about them, with no major spoilers.
It was one of my favorite books as a teenager, reread 'til it was falling apart, but I was concerned it wouldn't hold up since I think it's been at least a decade since I last read it. I needn't have worried. DID I MENTION THE WALL TO WALL IDFIC. And it's a pretty solid book otherwise, too.
Rusalka is set in a fantasy version of medieval Russia, with deliciously believable magic -- subtle and often deniable (is it the Yard-Thing that drinks the saucers of milk left out for it, or the barnyard cat?), but omnipresent in everyday matters of luck and superstition. Sasha is a young man who has magic powers, or at least he believes so. He can make things happen just by wishing them. Literally anything. When he was a small child, he made the house burn down to stop his father's abuse, killing both his parents -- or so he and everyone else in his hometown believe. Now the whole town thinks he's bad luck, and Sasha has desperately trained himself not to want anything, or think about things, or get angry, for fear of accidentally killing someone, retreating into a life of miserable isolation. (As the other protagonist says to him later: "That's hell you live in, Sasha." And it is.)
Pyetr is the orphaned son of a murdered gambler, cultivating wealthy friends in an attempt to rise above his gutter beginnings. He doesn't believe in magic -- or in nebulous things like friendship and love for that matter. His career of inveterate rakitude comes to a sudden and bloody end when a jealous husband stabs him near-fatally on page three. His wealthy fair-weather friends abandon him and the only person in the whole town who'll help him is fellow outcast Sasha, which leads to the two of them on the run in a winter-dead wilderness full of old, wild magic.
Pyetr soon attracts the attention of a rusalka, i.e. the ghost of a drowned girl, who can only survive by stealing the life energy of the living, although she doesn't want to. This is Eveshka, the third major character. Between this and the sword wound, Pyetr spends the entire book in various states of swooning, feverish collapse, in between getting attacked by monsters and railing against the fact that he DOESN'T BELIEVE IN MAGIC DAMMIT and WHY THE HELL IS THIS HAPPENING TO HIM. Meanwhile lonely Sasha attaches to him hard, and Pyetr starts to figure out how to be the hero Sasha and Eveshka think he already is.
The book is currently out of print and can be bought directly from the author as an ebook or as a used book from Amazon. There are two sequels, which I vaguely remember were somewhat disappointing, or at least less massively idficcy, but I'll be reading them next, so I guess we'll see.
ETA: There's an interesting about-the-book page on the author's website in which she talks about how, when she was writing this book in the 1980s, the Cold War was still going on and the reference materials on Russian mythology, plants, etc. that she needed to write the book were next to impossible to find. She ended up swapping sci-fi with Russian fans in return for reference books.
ETA2: Wikipedia article on the books talks more about them, with no major spoilers.
