Cuckoo's Egg by CJ Cherryh

A unique alien child raised by a warrior and judge learns about his past, the culture that surrounds him, and himself. A childhood spent training mentally and physically prepares him for a future he doesn’t know until the end of the book. He doesn’t grasp the true importance or nature of his difference with the people around him. He struggles with his lack of knowledge, mistakes, and strict upbringing. Yet there is tenderness and a deep humanity in the middle of all of the political maneuvering, conspiratorial violence, and eventual war. His context dawns on the reader as it does on him. The obvious needs stated here: this is a book about a humanoid race called the Shonunin, who resemble cats in their violence, appearance, and mannerisms.

When I lost the most of my hand, I thought I would never play. I recovered that. Other things I lost. You gain no virtue from loss you never know.

Again, Cherryh holds her cards close to her chest for much of the novel. But here it doesn’t annoy me because the coming-of-age story that takes over for much of the novel engages me better than the rudderlessness of Voyager in Night. And a big part of that engagement arises from Thorn’s unusual childhood. It’s part master-pupil, part father-son, part teacher-student. As Cherryh establishes and explores these aspects of Thorn’s upbringing, hints and clues drop about the context. Dunn’s reticence doesn’t pull down the novel like the aliens’ reticence did in Voyager in Night. Cherryh strikes a useful balance between the known and the unknown that keeps the reader engaged. She does this through Thorn’s thoughts. He’s a curious, intelligent child trained to think critically, and his reactions and observations speak volumes at what’s happening behind the scenes of this novel. From that early hint of Dunn’s political power, “I’d remind you that you promised me anything [Ellud],” to the suddenness of the civil war and reveal of Dunn’s long-prepared plans, the reader knows some context exists that will shift the entire narrative from a coming-of-age story, and is just as curious as Thorn about it. Yet she drops enough hints in Thorn’s thoughts and Dunn’s enigmatic ways to keep the appetite whetted.

There's always something left to lose. When you think there's nothing more you're a fool, Thorn; there's something till you're dead. And after that⁠—gods know.

And even that civil war reveal shows Cherryh’s power as a writer⁠—it takes another span of pages for the questions to be answered, even while she actively fleshes out the context. Instead of revealing the answers and then putting the context into focus, Cherryh uses the context to help Thorn come to grips with the answers before the answers arrive. This shows Dunn’s character, the complexities of the context, and Thorn’s nature, helping the reader come to grips with the importance of the answer before receiving it, instead of just giving them the answer and then trying to make it important after the fact. Brilliant storytelling again from Cherryh.

"Exactly. Wants to play politics. On the issue the whole thing's gone sour." Ellud made a helpless motion. "Duun, hard as it is to think anyone could be shortsighted enough⁠—"
"I don't find it hard at all. I have a very fine appreciation of venality. And stupidity. Tomorrow doesn't come and a stone cast up doesn't come down."

This novel shows how Cherryh tells a story without doing an intro-info-dump. On page one an alien baby is dumped on Dunn’s doorstep. The only context we get is that Dunn could be called four things, and then the coming-of-age story takes over. I hate intro-info-dumps, and Cherryh is prone to them. But she begins this story without one, and it helps me care about the characters before being asked to care about the names of places and aspects of the context. This novel helps show how starting in media res instead of in explanation is always a strong tactic.

A world that had just reached out into space⁠—and all of a sudden⁠—discoveries that shatter it. Energies that, gods help us⁠—we're still unraveling, technologies with potentials we're not ready to cope with, with all that means.

This book engages with mystery in a way that I appreciate. Sure, Thorn is a baby and we see him growing up, so he sort of acts like the cliché amnesiac. But instead of having a character explain everything to Thorn⁠—really explaining everything to the reader⁠—Cherryh lets the reader ride along as Thorn figures things out from hints and clues dropped by Dunn and by Thorn’s own experiences. This method of exposition mixes showing and telling in a way that works much better than Jason Bourne’s amnesia.

Developing her characters, Cherryh takes the same approach. She both shows and tells the reader about Thorn and Dunn, while Thorn, the focus of the novel and this period of Dunn’s life, is allowed interior monologue throughout the book. Because he is such a curious, intelligent character, her tightly-focused third person narrative isn’t as important to the story⁠—she is really explaining a lot more in this story than she usually does. But as much as I adore Cherryh’s typical voice, the lessening of it here doesn’t lessen the power of the novel. Rather, she choses to use some telling to explain a complex society of competing guilds, classes, and corporations. And the fact that Thorn is being taught helps the reader understand why so much information is coming at them.

"There are three kinds of people I've found: those who think the universe is good, those who believe it's corrupt, and those who don't want to think about it any more than they can help. I prefer the first two. The last can be hired by anybody."

The themes of this novel explore nature-nurture, authority-hierarchy, destiny-desire, change, and exclusion of potentials. Instead of being anything he wants to be, Thorn is created, cloned, in order to serve a specific purpose for his culture. But how much of him is defined by his duty? This changes throughout the novel as his understanding of his duty and who he serves changes. He grows up serving Dunn, then serving the wider culture of the Hatani guild, then serving the whole culture as ambassador to an alien species. Yet how much of Thorn’s alienness is in the clone, and how much of the Shonunin is there? This is a question Cherryh explores from the start, and she clearly communicates that nurture can superseed nature, but not entirely. As he changes from within, the context also acts upon him to change him from without. He takes one step, and the context moves in to shove him a couple of more steps. This applicable theme shines throughout the novel.

"Change is your world. Flux and shift."

The science fiction theme here shows a first-contact situation, one that has gone wrong. Humans discovered this star system, but their scout ship was destroyed by the natives, who managed to clone a member of their expedition as an ambassador to attempt to rectify their earlier reckless aggressiveness. It’s interesting to read a first-contact gone wrong story, and something I relate to in my professional and personal lives. Cherryh’s voice often leaves much to the reader’s mind to puzzle out, and that’s one of the reasons that I read her books. Cherryh here manages to show the cascading effects of a bad first impression, partly through what’s shown and told in the novel, but also through the reader’s mind working on hints she drops about the even wider context of these Shonunin in their place in the galaxy.

We know a lot more now-what the cost of a ship like that is when you have to develop each part and joint as a new technology; the social cost of changes. It's made us rich. It's made us capable of blowing ourselves to hell.

Why the sudden shift to civil war once Thorn is shown some human porn? Well, I don’t think it’s the porn or any others of the tapes he was shown. But rather, I think the realization that he has started to understand led Dunn to the conclusion that the time for explanation has come⁠—and the moves of their enemies certainly helped push the timeline forwards. This I understand, taking a step and not realizing the full effects of it and being surprised by some of the consequences.

I hope that I’ve said enough to show the deep humanity of this alien first-contact tale, where only one character is a human, and even that mostly physically. Thorn is the experiment, the scientific oddity, the alien, but the story is told from his perspective. His human nature is sketchy at best, being raised as a Shonunin. Yet by flipping even this cliché on its head, Cherryh communicates more about humanity than the tired old cliché of a captured alien typically does. The pacing might be a little slow in Thorn’s upbringing, but I never tired or grew bored reading, so I hesitate to mention this most minor of niggles. Really, this is a great novel, and I hope she writes a sequel at some point.