1. This 1980, early Cherryh novel exhibits moments of brilliance alongside boilerplate science fiction standards. For instance, the world Cherryh builds is rigorous and fascinating. It’s far-future in the Alliance and the eponymous region of the galaxy is composed of a number of stars and planets. The planets contain humans called betas, who are normal to us today; azi, third class human clones; and also the aristocratic Kontrin humans—essentially immortal as one has never died of natural causes and they live for more than seven hundred years. There are many different families and splinter-families of the assassination-oriented Kontrin. The beta humans' culture is supported by the spending of the aristocrats, and subject to Kontrin whims. The betas are split up into cultures by worlds and stations. The azi serve both of the other human classes as well as the aliens, hive creatures called Majat who have their own class system: the central mother brain, warriors, drones, workers, and azi. The Majat are split into four factions, or hives. This complex culture is fascinating throughout. Part of what makes the book’s world seem believable is that these complexities are not thrown away—Cherryh uses them in order to drive the plot and affect the characters. Keep this in mind: introducing complexity is useless and distracting unless that complexity feels necessary to the story. It’s like designing a board game: cut out all the rules possible, focusing on the decisions that make the game fun. Cherryh does this well here: almost every part of the worldbuilding is used in the story and is important.
2. But the story, nature of the aliens, and characters come off as fairly standard science fiction fare.
—The novel’s adventurous revenge story has enough violence to put up a high body-count, but in the end it’s just another adventure story. She uses the action hooks to hang introspective and interesting moments off of, but I can’t decide whether it wants to be action or discussion. The first half tries to be discussion, but essentially just sets up the world in order to get to the lengthy second half which is almost entirely action. But, like most adventure novels, it starts with a bang, goes into the setup, then ends with a lengthy sequence of bangs.
—The aliens come off like so many other hive-mind aliens: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joseph Haldeman’s The Forever War, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, to name a few of many. I don’t believe these hive aliens are unique enough to stand out from the crowd. The hive competition is interesting, but not enough to carry the novel. The Majat don’t feel as alien as the Calibans in Forty Thousand in Gehenna—Majat feel like azi or slaves the way that Raen uses them.
—The characters are also fairly commonplace. Raen, the main character, is bent on revenge, but it’s not tearing her apart—she’s sure of herself and her goals and her growing perception. She is not as wrinkled as the eponymous Count of Monte Cristo. The psychology almost gets interesting, but doesn’t quite reach enough depth—preferring instead the action of the story to the applicability of psychological discussion.
3. There are three characters that do shine: Pol, Moth, and Jim. Pol is a jokester, an activist—the disillusioned adult poking holes in the fabric of cultural reality to expose hypocrisy and idiocy. But he doesn’t get enough time on-screen to really shine. Moth is “entropy personified” as Raen calls her at one point. But she knows more than the other characters and her inaction is her choice to let others act to bring about her ends. Jim is initially an azi—more slave-like here than in other novels—but he gets pushed off balance by Raen, who attempts to convert him from his tape-training to more general uses. He ends up taking entertainment as deep-tape, allowing her Kontrin entertainment to modify his basic personality. He almost dies from it, but he comes out of it more Kontrin than azi. These three characters all get enough discussion to make them interesting, but more space should have been spent on them to make the whole novel more interesting. Jim is not explained enough, Pol doesn’t get to act often enough, and Moth resisting the conspirators could be fleshed out better.
—The most interesting thing in the novel is the Raen-Pol relationship: enmity, admiration, and understanding fill their fascinating encounters. Raen is doing what Pol wishes he could, but can’t tell him because he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Still, they are wary of each other—their secrecy keeps them from understanding the other fully and working together closely. But once Pol realizes, or is forced into a position of vulnerability in front of Raen’s enemies, he helps her and eventually pulls off the coup de grace that allows Raen’s plan to succeed.
4. Cherryh’s fantastic, distinctive, closely focused, third-person voice is coming into its own here. There are flashes of surprise that show why she writes this way. Where did Pol’s gun come from? I don’t need to know, but he suddenly has one and uses it perfectly for Raen's plans. My surprise at him standing and shooting matches Jim’s at that moment. What’s so tacky about the house’s entrance? Rather than spending pages explaining the interior design of the culture to show the reader why it’s tacky, Raen just judges it tacky and moves on, allowing that judgment—and the judgment of the bedroom as superb—to question her pre-conceived notions of the normal humans. In other words, Cherryh tells rather than shows in this case, but still allows the telling to change the characters. Cherryh is exploring her chosen voice here, not yet comfortable, but also not throwing it away without its flashes of brilliance.
5. The theme here is that man is more alien than aliens. Variety and believed-familiarity breeds blind-spots that take Raen by surprise. Like the bedroom/foyer dichotomy, like Moth, like Pol, like Jim, like the farm-family, like the azi, she is consistently surprised by those around her and only through accepting accurate reality is she able to succeed. The aliens are little more than a plot device here, but Raen’s growing realization of reality is the real focus of the novel.
6. Many have noted that there are continuity errors with dates given, the azi, and Alliance-azi relations. But these don’t matter to me. Cherryh, early in her career, was still thinking through these things and wasn’t going to explain everything in her first try. It could be some alternate Alliance-Union universe—it could be something weirder—but it’s a story and she did her best. She changed her mind later, and I’m more than okay with that: I support a writer changing their mind.
7. In all, this is a fine book. It’s really slow to start out as the world-building requires so much to allow the complexity. But it pays off with the second half—an exciting adventure through that world she just built, taking it apart piece by piece and changing it massively. This novel hints at what Cherryh would go on to write—deep, psychological character studies in rigorously complex cultures with plenty of political conspiracy—but isn’t quite there yet. I enjoyed the adventure of it all, and contemplating the conclusions of the culture she created, but I wanted more insight into the characters and more screen time for the most interesting ones. I'm not convinced the end is what needed to happen, but it's believable.
No comments:
Post a Comment