Rimrunners by CJ Cherryh

1. And the intro-info dump returns. It’s still not the best way for Cherryh’s writing, but at least this one is short, like three pages short. There is that. Alright, I’ve complained about this way too much, or not enough, so let’s move on.

2. This novel, unlike any of the other Cherryh novels I’ve read, focuses on one character, and that character isn’t at the top of a corporate or governmental body. Bet Yeager, the main character, begins the novel homeless and starving, in the midst of criminal activity caused by desperation, sleeping in a public restroom and washed up on a dying space station where she is the victim of sexual violence twice in the novel itself. She is a spacer and, as the novel progresses, the reader slowly finds out that she used to be a Marine on the Mazianni ship Africa—a low position on board, and she was just a sergeant, mostly because of time and experience. Then she gets a job on Loki, a mechanic position. Loki is a spook ship that sits around transfer points in space to gather information, then sells it—not exactly glamorous or trusted. The point is that where other Cherryh novels tell their story from a top-down perspective, showing the heights of society struggling to guide their society—even if it is just a washed-up captain who owns his own ship as in Merchanter’s Luck—this novel is about a low-life who was left behind by her ship during the events of Downbelow Station—expendable and expended. The every-woman focus fascinates and provides a picture of Cherryh’s world that I hadn’t yet seen and it really adds to the world-building of the whole. But in the specifics of this novel, it remains admirably rigorous to its focus. The characters of other novels are sometimes talked about by these plebeians, when their decision impact Bet, but they never show up. The captain of lowly-Loki only shows up twice in the novel, reinforcing this focus of Cherryh’s.

3. And Cherryh’s writing, as always, changes to fit her characters. Here the rougher dialogue helps illuminate the characters, the topics of conversation fit their desperation and ignorance, and the methods of interaction are more cut and dry, less polite and politically correct. The colloquialisms used by her and those around her reflect general shipboard colloquialisms, rather than the specific, esoteric colloquialisms of Reseune or Pell Station. Bet makes mistakes, big ones, and is punished immediately. That’s not to say there isn’t any politics—one of the points of the novel is that politics affect every strata of a culture. But Cherryh realizes her story and changes her writing to fit that, to support that, to reflect that. She doesn’t change everything, just modifies word choices and sentence structures to fit the people she is talking about. It’s a tactic that more writers need to adopt.

4. Instead of her typical third person, she loosens things up a bit and writes in second person quite often—a few times in each chapter. This helps the reader identify with the characters because there is a similarity there: advice and wisdom are often given, to oneself or others, in the second person, and most of the second person sentences are advice or wisdom. For instance:

But past is never past, man, past is, that’s all; all you can ever get at is what is now and will be.

This example of the writing shows how her voice and her writing changes in this novel to fit the characters who people her novel. This second person voice adds to her typical voice, not replacing it. As such, it strengthens her writing.

5. The theme here is about the past and how it comes back to haunt us in unexpected ways—a similar theme to Merchanter’s Luck, sure. But Cherryh doesn’t repeat her earlier book, she uses this theme and adds to it by saying that kindness can overcome a lot of the past’s repercussions. For instance, being an ex-Africa trooper, Bet doesn’t want to take a position on a ship heading towards Pell, where ex-Mazianni are reviled and actively hunted. So she stays on at Thule and ends up having to kill a couple of people to protect herself. In other words, she makes a decision attempting to protect herself from likely repercussions for her past, and ends up still being in danger. Later, on Loki, she befriends another social outcast and worries what he will do once he learns of her Mazianni past. But on Loki her kindness protects her from the worst of the ravages of her past. Oh, she gets beat up pretty badly, but she doesn’t die, she doesn’t have to kill, she ends up fixing some situations onboard through her direct actions. And what allows her to have that influence is the kindness she has sown throughout the preceding chapters.

6. Cherryh writes political intrigue at a rigorous psychological depth. When talking about Reseune, she told the psychology and showed it. But here, with a plebeian as a main character, the psychological depth resembles pop psychology through the colloquial language used instead of scientifically specific language. She shows the psychology here, rather than telling it. This works well and allows the reader to interpret the story in terms of their own experiences and similar experiences they’ve heard from others.

7. I like this book a lot. Yeah, there are uncomfortable instances of sexual and physical violence, but those are used to build the character that the whole book is focused on. This focus on one character allows Cherryh to get to a depth in building Bet that really works. The story, being focused on her, excludes the greater political picture except in how it affects Bet directly. Even in Merchanter’s Luck, a book about a loner, the greater political picture bleeds into the story some. Here however, it all but doesn’t: this is a snapshot of the life of a normal citizen in the Alliance—well, as normal as we've seen. Bet has a past, but in this post-war situation, who doesn’t? It’s a great story and good, good book.