A little while ago, I received an ARC of Alliance Rising, C.J. Cherryh’s collaboration with her spouse Jane Fancher, set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union continuity—the universe of Cherryh’s acclaimed Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988). While I tried to read Downbelow Station years ago, before I understood the rhythms of Cherryh’s work, Alliance Rising is the first work in this particular setting that I’ve ever finished. It spurred me to find a couple more—the omnibuses Alliance Space and The Deep Beyond, available in ebook form—to see just how representative Alliance Rising is of the works in this setting.
Alliance Rising is set in a time of change. Slow-moving change, but change that will prove drastic nonetheless. It may be, in internal chronology terms, the Alliance-Union continuity’s earliest novel, and though this is a collaboration between Cherryh and Fancher, it showcases a concern—common to Cherryh’s other novels—with organisations and bureaucracies, with systems and societies, and how such wider contexts shape the people (ambitious or content, well-meaning or malicious) who operate within them. And with, at times, the minutia of meetings. Cherryh and Fancher deploy an anthropological eye, and it’s almost a surprise when this measured, stately novel concludes in shooting.
Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck, originally published in 1982 and republished in the Alliance Space omnibus, is somewhat less stately. A down-on-his-luck smuggler with his own ship and a traumatic past meets and grows obsessed with the scion of a powerful merchanter family—a well-trained ship’s bridge officer who has no chance of ever rising to first in her position, because there are so many other well-trained cohorts ahead of her. She sees in the smuggler a chance to be real bridge crew, with real authority. They end up using each other out of ambition and desperation, but nonetheless forge a real emotional connection—complicated by power struggles both aboard ship and in the world outside, which is just beginning to recover from a war. Merchanter’s Luck alternates between leisurely in pace and practically frenetic, and I find the relationship between the two main characters to be a deeply unhealthy one. But the novel itself is an interesting, engaging piece of work.
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Alliance Rising
Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) was also republished in the Alliance Space omnibus. It’s a very different book to Merchanter’s Luck. Forty Thousand in Gehenna is a multi-generational novel of a colony that failed and then succeeded in ways its founders never envisaged. They build new forms of society in competition and later in collaboration with the native life forms: This is a very anthropological novel (in its latter stages, one of the major characters is an actual anthropologist) but one whose defining through-line is difficult to follow. It might be an examination of society’s various ways of confronting the alien, or it might be a series of questions that have no firm answer, because they’re questions about human nature and what it means to be human—or not. It’s an interesting novel, but it doesn’t ever really come together as more than the sum of its parts. (Tastes have clearly changed since the 1980s, since it was nominated for a Locus Award in 1984.)
I don’t know how eager I am to read more works in the Alliance-Union continuity, but I suspect that at least I’ll be looking out for the sequel to Alliance Rising. It ends on a solid cliffhanger, after all. After some violence and upheaval.
What have you guys been reading lately?
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
Never been able to get past 50 pages in a Cherryh novel. Recently I reread Michael Swanwick’ Bones of the Earth and Andy Duncan’s Agent of Utopia. Both wonderful books. Up next Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman or Rosewater by Tade Thompson.
I finished all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books recently and have been on a kick with Richard Morgan. I’m reading the Steel Remains right now, but I’m finding it a bit slow after the first 125 pages or so.
I read the first three books in CJ’s Chanur Saga a few years ago and found them pretty easy to get into. Haven’t read any of her other books though. I liked the alien perspective. There is a human character but he doesn’t get a POV at all, which I found really neat.
Two characters in a deeply unhealthy relationship is … not uncharacteristic of Cherryh’s work. Ditto a third person POV that’s so tight it’s almost claustrophobic, and deeply damaged protagonists. But I love them all the same. I think Downbelow Station was the first of hers that I read, back in high school on the basis of a glowing review in Dragon Magazine, and I was well and truly hooked.
40,000 in Gehenna was one that took some getting used to — I enjoyed it, but it didn’t really start to click as a whole until after I’d read it several times. Part of what makes it so challenging, I think, is that it’s not just a story about humans meeting aliens — it’s a story about azi (basically, mass-produced vat-grown, tape-taught serfs, not regarded as fully human by their creators) meeting aliens.
I already have Alliance Rising preordered, and foresee a major Alliance/Union reread in early 2019.
Currently, I’m just about to finish up rereading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars books (for about the millionth time), and next up will be K.V. Johansen’s Blackdog, which has been on my TBR list for entirely too long now.
Jo Walton has a post on this very site about exploitative relationships as a theme in Cherryh’s work. I recommend it heartily.
one of the covers shown on this post is for Cuckoo’s Egg, one of my favorites, with a twist at the end that upends the world.
cherryh books usually demand that the reader make an effort to keep up, but I’ve been glad to do so since I picked up the first Morgaine novel in college.
i’m reading Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, only a year after everyone else, and loving it.
I can see from a distance that Cherryh’s work is beautifully written and her characters are memorable, but I’ve bounced hard off of most of her books. Part of it is my low tolerance for the viewpoints of horrible human beings, but part of it is something in her style–? I don’t know exactly. Just something I can’t grok. I flip through a Cherryh book, read a random scene, want to know more about these people (the ones who aren’t committing atrocities), turn back to the beginning, and then can’t finish. But I urge anybody who hasn’t read Cherryh to give any two, or more, of her series a try.
FWIW, the Chanur series is the one I collected and reread until the paperbacks fell apart.
I quite enjoyed Cyteen when I first read it, and I re-read it every few years. It’s probably Cherryh’s best work, and it asks lots of the most difficult questions… such as, what does it mean to be human? and, what creates a person/personality? A lot of it takes place inside the heads of the characters, and it takes at least 100 pages before it really gets going. It’s not for the faint of heart.
I’m currently reading Downbelow Station. And a few months ago I re-read the Chanur novels. Guess I really like the Alliance/Union setting.
My dad was a huge Cherryh fan, but reading Downbelow Station was enough for me. For some reason, her stories didn’t connect with me.
I look forward to the new book. I find much of Cherryh’s sci fi work wonderful. She writes about brilliantly obsessive people that see themselves as vital to huge events. I read her occasionally until Cyteen. Cyteen was all absorbing, despite how oddly unmodern some of the tech and economic aspects seem now. Then I went back and read most of her others— very uneven in some ways but all very intent on psychology of characters who take work seriously. These are not books about romance or power per se.
Cherryh’s best sustained series is probably the foreigner set, which continues ever onward. It has gotten a bit slow. But the early books were riveting. And she has now connected it to the alliance/union world, if I read correctly.
I cannot read her fantasies, but that may just be me.
Interesting that so many people bounce off Cherryh. Her 80s and 90s work is among my favorites, particularly the Union-Alliance stories which really feel like they have some of the scope and complex viewpoints that characterize history. I was particularly impressed at how Union, the hive-like slave society held off by a last-minute team-up between the plucky merchanters, Pell’s hereditary ruling clan, and the morally ambiguous don’t-call-her-a-pirate Signy Mallory, gained dimension and even sympathy when viewed through the lens of Cyteen. And then seeing things change again from the Sol System-based viewpoint of Heavy Time and Hellburner.
(I like her Chanur and Morgaine stories too, but got into both via their respective loose connections with the Union-Alliance milieu.)
I’ve missed that world since Cherryh started spending most of her time on the Foreigner series (which I did bounce off). I’ll be interested to see if revisiting it so far down the line is successful. (Authors change a lot in that amount of time, and the results of other writers going back to the worlds they built decades earlier has been mixed.) I’ll certainly pick it up when it comes out.
I’m the opposite of many who commented I’m much less fond of the older works than her newer ones Admittedly even I’ve not kept up with the last few Foreigner books but the first six or so, as someone said above, are riveting The stuff she does with language and how it intersects with culture is fabulous. Fancher’s work gets discussed way less than Cherryh’s but she wrote a fantasy series decades ago that I adored, Dance of the Rings. Her involvement in this new one makes me want to read it badly. I think they’d do great stuff together
I think that Ms. Cherryh’s Faded Sun books (Kesrith, Shon’jir, Kutath, 1978-1979) make a good introduction to her science fiction. They have the cultural immersion aspect that is so predominant in her work, tied to a “chase across the galaxy” plot worthy of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (itself an inspiration for Star Wars). They are set in the Alliance-Union universe, but written before most of the central Alliance-Union books and so they may read a bit differently.
As a long-time Cherryh fan, all I need to see is her name on the cover, and I’m in. Her forte is world building, which she does extremely well. Do try the Chanur series. Very engaging characters. Lately, I’ve been reading K.J.Charles and Gail Carriger, but I’m looking forward to Cherryh’s new Alliance novel.
BTW, Jane Fancher has a great series available as e-book from their Closed Circle website. I’d like to see more work by Jane. You only have to read her “Ground Ties” series to know what a good writer she is also.
I like Cuckoo’s Egg as a one-book introduction to Cherryh, although the Chanur books work too. I really like the respect she gives the reader, especially when immersing you in an alien POV.
I used to read Cherryh all the time but sort of burnt out on the “Foreigner” series after about the fourth book…I’m looking forward to Alliance Rising.
@13
”respect for the reader” – that’s a great insight.
one of my particular favorites is The Paladin, but i’ve always had a soft spot for books about teachers being taught.
I’m a big fan of Foreigner. The first book is really hard to follow, as you are in the tight first person narrative of the highly confused main character dealing with culturally and politically confusing circumstances. I recommend holding on and working through the hard stuff. Things begin to make more sense by the end of the book, grow in depth and strength in the second book, and then become a fully amazing and immersive work of art focused on a series of interlocking three book cycles covering different challenges based by the main character and his cast of supporting players. Really really well done but Cherryh does not spoon feed the reader in any way, shape or form.
Ditto re Chanur as well, for virtually the same reasons.
I like, but don’t love, the Alliance-Union books except that I was completely blown away by Cyteen, which fully earned all of its many awards.
Msb no. 15: Ha! I love that book but I had forgotten that it was Cherryh’s! All he wanted was to become the grumpy old man of the mountains, but noooooo, he had to get dragged back into all of that.
It took me a few tries (back in the 80s) to figure out how to read a Cherryh novel. I eventually settled on the metaphor that reading her books was like an exothermic reaction with a very high activation energy. If I plodded through the long, slow, confusing build-up, eventually I’d (usually) get to a point when the book grabbed me by the throat and pulled me along and I wasn’t sorry I’d stuck with it. But there are books where I never managed to get to that point.
I’ll concur with several other comments, that I think the Chanur arc is among the more reader-friendly of the Alliance/Union set (and the first of them can stand alone with a comfortable ending point). One thing I’ve always loved about Cherryh’s writing is how she can make the “human” characters more alien than the non-human ones.
@13 — It’s been a while since I read them, but I’m pretty sure the “alien POV” thing also applies to the nonhumans in her fantasies — The Dreamstone, e.g., or Faerie in Shadow.
I also want to give nods to Serpent’s Reach (the other half of that Deep Beyond omnibus) and a couple of very early ones, Hunter of Worlds and Brothers of Earth.
Merchanter’s Luck is a great, fast read. I started and finished it on a LA to Baltimore flight.
I haven’t read much of Cherryh’s SF, but she’s definitely in the running for the number 1 spot on my Favorite Thieves’ World authors list.
I also bounced hard off of Downbelow Station the first time I tried to read it; it took the Chanur books and Merchanter’s Luck to get me interested in reading Cherryh. She’s done some of my favorite SF works – the Chanur trilogy, Cyteen – but she’s also done several very dense books that I liked more as an achievement than as something I enjoyed reading.
Her shorter work (Merchanter’s, Pride of Chanur, 40,000 in Gehenna to a lesser extent) was much easier for me to get into. Cyteen is brilliant, but requires you to slog through quite a lot of fairly unpleasant Stuff Happening before you settle into events with characters you can like (and see likable sides to characters you didn’t). Downbelow I was eventually able to slog through, and acknowledge as a great example of both worldbuilding and covering an epic sea-change in the universe… but I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed it.
One of my dreams is an Expanse-style adaptation of Downbelow Station.
Wow, I’m surprised at so many having trouble “getting into” the stories by Cherryh. I loved them as I read them. Cyteen and Downbelow Station trapped me immediately. Now, the whole idea of clones and the morality of what is going on in the society is uncomfortable for sure, but stories kept me reading.
Whenever I read of someone having an issue with “getting into a story” I immediately think of Dhalgren. That was a rough read for me.
I’ve been following the Foreigner series since the very first book – now there’s a series with a long story arc. I love it: my fear is that Cherryh will run out of ideas and still have to keep writing it – nothing worse than a long series you love going bad in the last few publisher-mandated novels. Hasn’t happened yet.
I wouldn’t say the Alliance/Union universe has a story-arc – too evidently it doesn’t except by retcon – but most of the novels in it are ones I really enjoy. I find it odd that 40,000 in Gehenna and Merchanter’s Luck have been paired together (I’d have paired Merchanter’s Luck and Rimrunners), but then 4iG is a novel I only finished reading because it is backstory to Cyteen. All the bits of 4iG are interesting, but they don’t in my view gel as one complete novel. Downbelow Station is a bit the same way – there’s too many individual stories and while a story arc does become clear – birth of the Alliance – we only know that matters because of other Alliance/Union novels.
I don’t get along with Cherryh’s fantasy novels at all, generally, though I keep thinking I should try harder: she’s such a good writer, but I like her science-fiction so much more.
I also love the Faded Sun trilogy, and Cuckoo’s Egg, and the Gene Wars novels, and Serpent’s Reach. I think Cherryh’s said basically all of her SF novels take place in the same galaxy as Alliance/Union, which means in principle that we could see a novel in which Ariane Emory III is dealing with atevi or with the hives of the Reach: and I would love to read that.
I assume that 4iG was paired with Merchanter’s Luck just because those were both published by DAW. Unfortunately, there’s a big swathe of Cherryh’s A/U novels (including Cyteen!) that’s currently unavailable in eBook format, presumably because of the standard licensing/rights issues.
(Although for those who are interested, Heavy Time and Hellburner, and a few others (mostly standalone fantasy), are available electronically directly from Cherryh’s website.)
CJ is simply brilliant. I doubt that she will ever run dry on ideas, either. Talk with her for even a few moments and you’ll see. She is great at world-building, to be sure… but is also adept at telling a compelling story. I, personally, love her fantasy novels – they are what caught me in the first place (specifically, the Morgaine series, which is really cross-over Fantasy, in my book).
She is a particularly skilled researcher and can speak on just about any subject. She has an avid love of science, as well, and keeps track of just about every little thing going on in a number of scientific fields.
Jane is also brilliant, and amazingly creative. While I haven’t read any of her writing, I know her artwork from way back. She is also very well versed in so many areas. Jane and CJ complement each other well.
Get them together, and they shine, and their world is a very wonderful place to be. They are FUN people, yet as down-to-Earth as can be. Both are easily approachable and have awesome senses of humor.
So… it doesn’t surprise me that there is such a range of response here. CJ’s writing is very intellectual… yet not condescending. She expects her readers to be able to follow the science (whichever one is at hand), and doesn’t dumb anything down. You *rise* to read her books. Things aren’t always straightforward… but they all do stick to the logic that she establishes.
Yeh… I’m a fan of CJ (and of Jane)… the person. Even if she didn’t write… she’d be awesome!
I think I started reading C.J. Cherryh in the mid to late ‘80s with the Chanur books and the later books in the Alliance-Union series, like “Rimrunner”, “Heavy Time”, and “Hellburner”. The first can be a tough read for some, but collectively they hooked me on the universe.
jcarnall @@@@@ 24:
I think Cherryh’s said basically all of her SF novels take place in the same galaxy as Alliance/Union
I have the strong impression that the Foreigner books, at least, seem to take place in a different universe. For example, the way FTL travel works is rather different: time spent in jump seems to last for a few days or (at most) weeks in the Alliance/Union setting, and humans usually need drugs to avoid going crazy during that time. (And alien FTL travel — e.g., by the Hani in the Chanur stories — seems to be the same, so it’s presumably not just a bizarre characteristic of one type of human technology.) But in the Foreigner setting, everyone stays awake and active during FTL travel, which seems to take a number of months.
Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, has separate articles for “Alliance/Union universe“, “Foreigner universe“, “The Gene Wars universe” (Hammerfall and Forge of Heaven), and “Finisterre universe” (Rider at the Gate and Cloud’s Rider). So I think there are several separate settings, though Alliance/Union has the overwhelming majority. (Hestia may be another outlier.)
Hestia — I just flipped through the opening section and while there’s nothing that definitively says it’s not A/U, I don’t see anything that explicitly feels A/U either (mention of jump vanes on the starship in the opening chapter, e.g., or name-dropping Alliance or Union, obviously).
For that matter, I don’t know if I had placed Cuckoo’s Egg in A/U when I first read it, but given that it’s now bundled with Serpent’s Reach, I guess that answers that question …
hoopmanjh @@@@@ 29:
That’s kind of funny — my memory is of thinking Cuckoo’s Egg wasn’t in the A/U setting, either (in fact, I was going to suggest that until I checked the Wikipedia articles about the different universes…)
Enjoyed it very much, but… I wish I had read something else this past week and had saved this for five years from now, when The Hinder Stars II, III, and… IV? would be out…
For reasons I do not fully understand, these days publishers seem to want to greenlight books where the office say: “and we have already written to sequels!” This then creates the problem of how to end the first book with a satisfactory plot resolution well still leaving hey bigger story open for the sequels. It is a hard problem. And, much as I enjoyed reading _Alliance Rising_, Cherryh and Fancher did not quite manage to make it work.
Mind you, it is close—If only Jen-and-Ross-Together had been given twice the screen time, 40% rather than 20% of the book, it would have been a wonderful Happy-for-Now romance In addition to all of its other excellences. And overshadowing it all is that it is all going to end very badly for a great many of the major characters: Because I do not remember hearing about them in any previous Cherryh book, we fear for the ships _Rights of Man_ and _Galway_ And we fear for the entire Monahan family. And we know that Alpha Station becomes a Mazianni military base. I have a bad feeling about Hinder Stars II, III, and… IV?
I have read all of CJ Cherryh’s works at least once since I first encountered her stuff around 1980 (the Morgaine books and Merchanter’s Luck were my first iirc) and loved each and every one of them (although Gehenna, Rusalka and Foreigner took me a few tries to get into). Sad to say, DON’T necessarily expect a sequel (although I’m itching for at least one). Tripoint, for example, SCREAMS for a sequel in its final page, but nothing has emerged. There are plenty of books in this universe to get into, though. For instance, I’ve got to re-read Downbelow now (for the 4th time or so).
PeterErwin @@@@@ 28:
jcarnall @@@@@ 24: I think Cherryh’s said basically all of her SF novels take place in the same galaxy as Alliance/Union
I have the strong impression that the Foreigner books, at least, seem to take place in a different universe.
Ms. Cherryh has said as much.
I have read Downbelow Station and I read Aliance Rising with a sense of dread because I know that’s coming. It was delicious.
I’m late to this thread but Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe is one of my favorite series of all time. I’ve read and reread most of it several times. I like the tight 3rd person POV, the open plot potential that’s confusing in the beginning, the anthropological attention to details of communication, and the sense of discovery in the characters’ inter-relationships.
Does anyone else find a lot of similarities with the plot points of Devil to the Belt (Heavy Time + Hellburner) and the opening events of McAvoy’s Expanse opus?
I also love the Faded Sun trilogy. I could not read Chanur series at all–I just couldn’t hang with anthropomorphic cats at all! I read the first few books of the Foreigner series but mainly didn’t finish because I couldn’t figure out which book I’d last read and which one to pick up next. I don’t really get into her fantasy at all or Fancher’s titles although I have not tried them all.
“my low tolerance for the viewpoints of horrible human beings”
I think most of her viewpoints are quiet decent human beings (or non-human beings), but usually caught in terrifying circumstances.
I forget if Ari I is viewpoint in the first part of Cyteen, but the book is mostly Justin and Ari II.
The Rimrunners POV is a war criminal, but not one with a lot of choice in that, and the book is her being better.
Most of the viewpoints in Downbelow are good people, other than Mallory and the traitor.
Alliance Rising was a decent read, though confusing in chronology, especially re-reading Downbelow right after; Alliance seems to have two origins now?
Maybe this was an earlier or more circumscribed version of the Alliance that got formalized at the end of DBS?