Conspirator by CJ Cherryh

This is the first book of the fourth trilogy of the Foreigner Series, book 10 in the series. Okay, we’ve wrapped up the coup, right? Bren and Tabini can get back to governing the atevi, right? No way. Due to a housing shortage, Bren ends up having to go to his estate on the coast. In just arriving, light shows conspiracies everywhere, and they all point back to the Marid, the Southern Reach of the atevi world.

The cell phone plague now preoccupied humans on the island of Mospheira, a plague making them walk into traffic while in conversation that preempted their awareness of their surroundings; a compulsion that suddenly rendered them incapable of ignoring a phone call in the presence of actual people they should be dealing with.

The opening of this book meanders: Bren to the estate with Barb and Toby, then Cajeiri arrives, then Ilisidi, then Tabini, then he leaves, then new bodyguards arrive from Tabini, and then, finally, we get to the start of the story. The directionless opening only interests when Bren’s arrival allows things to go wrong immediately, small things like a neighboring estate owing his estate some money, and these mushroom into very big things that threaten civil war—not because Bren cares about a couple thousand moneys that much, he doesn't have that much of an ego, but because these small symptoms are emblematic of a much larger root cause. And once the reader realizes that these small wrongs lead to major fractures, the book works brilliantly.

Now he had to ask himself which language he was thinking in. Now he routinely limited his human impulses and curtailed his human instincts, shaping himself into something else . . . A good talent, up to a point. He didn’t know if he’d passed that point. Maybe he’d passed it somewhere in that voyage, when they’d all gone out to get a human station removed from where it had no right to be. . . .

That’s not to say that specific scenes in the early portions of the book are bad—Cajeiri almost drowning is one of those scenes I look back on as one of the best in the whole series so far. But by being disjointed, the confusion I feel wondering what’s going to be important and what’s not—Cajeiri almost drowning ends up mostly unimportant, who gives the info to help rescue him ends up most important—helps color the whole opening poorly.

Aijiborn: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect. If he lived to grow up.

I am a Cherryh fan. I know she often starts slowly, establishing the characters and situation, then putting new info into the mix to stir everything up suddenly for a breakneck finish that leaves the reader to figure out some of the plot and actions. I like this tactic and think, to some extent, that Neuromancer also pulls this off very well. (I don’t necessarily feel compelled to write like this, though I like reading it.) But in this one book it seems more like Cherryh casts around looking for a plot, looking for a story. And I think this because so few of these early scenes change characters fundamentally: the scenes themselves seem mostly forgotten in a series where almost every scene ends up being important later.

People could get killed over bad information. Information and the misconstruction of information was, history told him, exactly the sort of thing that had led humans and atevi to war—bad information coming too fast, too easy interaction, too many people who thought they understood each other.

The ending, where the Edi and Gan tribes start to ally with Ilisidi and Bren, kind of comes as a surprise. The book is about uncovering the conspiracy of Baiji, and Cherryh throws in some false leads—those unrevisited scenes I discuss above. And that the conspiracy uncovers two potential allies as well interests me, but could have used more foreshadowing. If I knew more about the Edi and Gan before they showed up, it would have been easier to feel more importance to their arrival.

“Mountain air is chill. It stimulates the wit, young man. Choler only ruins one’s digestion.” It was good advice. He had been in Great-grandmother’s mountains. He had been in the snow. He understood. And like nand’ Bren’s rock, paper, scissors—he had seen how wit beat choler, every time.

So that’s the book: a setup for what becomes a great story arc. But the opening is rough around the edges. It didn’t deter me from reading more, but I could see somebody not liking this book more than the other books in the series. The most interesting part for the series as a whole would certainly be that we finally get a glimpse of a stupid atevi, Baiji, and how that brain works, the flipside of the way the culture is setup, the bad potential to the good we've seen so far.

He just didn’t have the vision of the future he’d used to have. It was all dark up ahead, and he couldn’t see.

+++

Bren took his former seat, trying to find in himself what he had used to feel, some sense of sympathy for a dead enemy, regret for the waste. It was there, but it was scant at the moment.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

My introduction to this novel, novella, short story with a gland problem, came earlier this year. I read it three times this year, for reasons. This book more aligns with mood pieces and stream-of-consciousness, and less with plot and a thematic focus. If you need known in your reading, read another book. If you enjoy or find interest in post-modern books exploring reality, meaning, and culture, then this could be your book. I find this easy to say. I find it much harder to state what I think about this book. It brought up lots of thoughts.

First and foremost: this writing is spectacular. Pynchon’s ability to list goes over the top in all the right ways—right now I can’t think of a better lister, but some poets probably slip my mind. Let me just quote two lists here, out of this book:

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.

These fantastic lists come hot and heavy throughout the book. It’s often a sentence, then four paragraphs of exposition of that sentence, then another sentence, rinse and repeat. I mean, if I talk about who this writing reminds me of, it’s Vonnegut, Eco, and Nabokov. And that’s some heady space to be in for my personal pantheon of great writers.

Another thing the writing does well is showing instead of telling — Pynchon never says she’s pretty, but every man around her wants her.

(But the flipside of the writing is me: I am personally sick of books like this. This writing is what every writing program I’ve experienced or heard of tries to train students to ape. And by this stage of my life and this type of writing, I’m a bit sick of it. I know this one is foundational and this is one of the pioneers and this is part of the reason everybody wants to write like this, but now, 53 years later, it’s been done, and I find it more groundbreaking when somebody tells me something really well. That’s just me today though, and I’ll try to put myself in the mindset of this being groundbreaking because I believe it was.)

The storytelling seems based on detective fiction. In one sense this shows the lady in red doing her own investigation. In another sense, this could be more of a hero’s journey because she changes more than the typical private eye does. On another hand this clearly shows a woman whose men run her life, changing to a woman who runs her own life. Yet one other probably valid interpretation shows a series of absurd scenes with little tying them together except an investigation into a conspiracy or secret society. But this varied book full of examples where meaning fails could also be an extended metaphor of a life. She starts off alone and bored and dependent on others—if there isn’t a better description of a baby, I don’t know. Baby can’t communicate or understand, can’t entertain or sustain itself. Then the teenage years of a hot car, a band, and a fling with an older man land her in the most happening place ever, LA. Then the dark underbelly of LA rears its head in the crazies, and she has a choice: either continue to ignore what probably ain’t true, or investigate it for truth. (That seems to be mostly what drives her, truth-seeking, and where she ends up shows Pynchon questioning whether that should drive her.) Then the sunset of life as the connections surrounding her slowly fall away: her lover leaves her for a younger woman, her husband loses his mind, and everybody around her disappears or dies. It’s like she’s going through a whole life in this book, birth to death. And this god-like figure, this ex-lover, the book stops just before she learns whether he is still alive or is actually dead.

This storyline allows Pynchon plenty of space to talk about California culture in the 60s, America during the McCarthy era of the Cold War, death and the choices people make that lead to it, the weight of personal connections in the free-love era, conspiracies and secrecy, etc—more themes than Pynchon can really deal with in the space the book takes up. If there is a central theme, I’d be guessing to try and come up with it. Maybe it’s a question of what we spend our lives focused on and how those things arrive through accident, coincidence, and effort. In other words, Obsession. Every character in here is a study in obsession. Stamp collecting, kinky London stuff, the death of inventing, entropy of communication, having been a child actor, etc.

But the quarter of me with reservations starts to notice that this book may be too open-ended for me to want to reread it again and again. The writing astounds me, and the humor helps ease my way through the book, but it could also be exemplified by the obscure references of the title, it may be a touch clever for clever’s sake—in that way I’m like the director, pissed off at every grad student trying to wring too much meaning out of every little phrase. “Shall I project a world?” Pynchon questions. Ugh, I answer. Too much, bro. My personal experience with writing programs bores at somebody else trying every tactic ever used in writing, and coming up with a bit of an unfocused mess.

“You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here.”

So, I’m torn. On the one hand I love this book. This is near the heights of the genre of writing I call “Literary”, especially in this post-modern era that questions the natures of truth and futility. Well worth the read. On the other hand, while I’m glad I read it a few times—re-reads certainly helped me appreciate the quality of the writing and the potential central metaphor of a life lived—I’m more glad I don’t have to read it again. I like the unknown in writing, I really do. But there may be just a little too much unknown here for what the authors seems like he was trying to do. Or maybe it’s too short to delve into the themes effectively. Or maybe that’s just me being too stupid to put this book on the top shelf, next to Vonnegut and Eco and Nabokov. It’s just too easy to pull any random quote out of this book and argue that it’s all about that quote, like the last one:

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
“Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

I do want to mention that this seems in a similar vein to Kafka, Borges, Eco, Joseph Heller, DFW, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and others like that.

Deliverer by CJ Cherryh

This book closes the third trilogy of the Foreigner series, the trilogy about the coup against Tabini. Days after the end of the last book, an Eastern lord working with the still-alive pretender kidnaps Tabini’s heir, Cajeiri. Bren and his friends head east to try and recover the eight-year-old boy. While there, Cherryh fleshes out the East to a depth she hasn’t before. In the opening book of the whole series, Ilisidi kidnaps Bren to the East, but Bren doesn’t yet understand what he should, and what he knows now. So, in this book, the readers finally come to grips with the East as a culture and political force, as well as some of the characters who exist out there. This showing that Cherryh does helps add complexity to the whole series. She often recasts past events in the light of future information, and here this whole book does that. But even within this book, the early dinner with the Eastern lords in the western capital is consistently shifting in the characters’ understandings as new information comes to light. Nothing is forgotten or unimportant.

It had been five days since the shooting stopped. They had had time to do a bit of mopping-up, some of it bloody, and they had done a bit of repair—and now messages flowed. Air service resumed, though it was sporadic. The trains ran.

But the most surprising aspect is that she adds a second voice. The whole series has been solely from Bren’s point of view up until now, when Cajeiri gets a voice as well. This addition helps solidify the focus of this third trilogy on the heir. This tactic fits this book into Cherryh’s ouvre more directly—she usually has multiple points of view that the reader follows. The immediate impetus for this appears to be Cajeiri’s kidnapping—it’s hard to discuss the kidnapped with Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative when Bren is elsewhere. So, Cajeiri gets a voice, and he’s an eight year old boy. A remarkable boy, sure, whose important life experiences outweigh most adults, but he’s still eight and chafing under adult control.

Well, he supposed he had had adventures enough for one year at least, riding on mecheiti and buses and trains and being shot at—he had shot a man himself, because he had to, to save their lives, but he had no wish to remember that part, which was not glorious, or an adventure, or anything but terrible. He thought it ought to have changed him—but it was mostly just not there in his thinking.

In terms of the counter-revolution, this book shows the pretender shuffling his plans for the opportunity of getting control of Cajeiri. In other words, the last gasp of the pretender. And this last gasp intrigues me in that it shows something Bren’s perspective doesn’t: the pretender still thinks he has a chance. I don’t think he’s stupid, due to the success of his earlier coup, so somebody is out there supporting him. Somebody is on his side. And Bren and Ilisidi rush into a rescue attempt without knowing who, because the rescue attempt is something they can do.

At very least, it was a plan, and it was something to do, rather than sit in the bed and be scared. And when he got out, oh, some people were going to be in trouble.

The theme here is doing what you can when you can. The pretender has an allied lord kidnap Cajeiri, Cajeiri escapes, Bren kills the pretender, Ilisidi tries to patch up relations with her cousin, and all are simply doing the best of limited options available to them. The kidnapping forces events to happen, pushes the characters to reactions. But Cajeiri could’ve just as easily submitted instead of attempting escape based on the Count of Monte Cristo. Ilisidi could’ve asked somebody else to attempt rescue. Bren could’ve held his fire at the end. The pretender could’ve surrendered. But no, these characters have motivations and priorities that drive them to these actions. It’s an important warning to examine where habits and priorities could drive anybody.

He hated most of all being shunted aside and told he was a child. Most of all—loneliness, after being in the center of things, was entirely unjust, and such injustice—hurt. Hurt made him sulk. And sulking only worried the servants and brought them to hover around him.

So, that first part. Beyond being Cherryh’s usual contemplative context-setting, this introduces a kid unhappy with what his life is offering him at the moment. And the whole thing seems a bit too overlong before the kidnapping happens. The last book was a split narrative—in the house, convoy to the capital, and retaking power being three distinct portions. The book before that was split between on the space ship, and then the counter-revolution. But this book starts out without much tension—too much telling and not enough showing of tension. Then Cajeiri gets kidnapped and the tension explodes, but I wish there was some other opening here, something to get the tension going right off the bat, or earlier. I wondered why, after Tabini took power, this trilogy was still progressing. Well, because the pretender needed to die, but he’s hardly discussed throughout. Anyways, I liked the book, but some minor dissatisfaction exists. The lander seems like it could be interpreted as a deus ex machina, but it's been so heavily discussed that I didn't take it that way.

Pretender by CJ Cherryh

The second of the counter-revolution trilogy within the larger Foreigner series. The setup at the end of the last book⁠—getting everybody into one place except the pretender to the throne⁠—explodes here. Battles take place in the house they’re all stuffed into, enemy Assassin’s Guild shows up in the house, and then everybody gets on busses, planes, and trains and heads into the capital to try and take back power. Followed, for the first time in this series, a sort of epilogue. I mean, the fighting stops about two chapters before the book ends⁠—I expect Cherryh to end her books right after the central conflict is resolved. Her typical tactic is to start somewhere where the tension isn't immediately apparent yet, build out the characters and context for the first third of the book which increases the tension drastically, then an explosion of action for two thirds of the book, and end about ten pages before the reader fully grasps what's going on, leaving the book to further unravel in the reader's mind—which works because of the rationality driving the characters. But here she pauses and shows some of the fallout, the start of knitting the world back together after the coup and counter-revolution. This pacing works for me. Instead of sitting and contemplating potential fallout⁠—like in the last trilogy how they rescue the Reunion stationers, then the next book starts with them about to drop out of lightspeed into atevi space, and readers must fill in the year-long gap. Here we get a sense of what happens in that gap, and it shines. Instead of ending on a bang, Cherryh lets us down slowly. I hope this tactic is something she’ll use again in the future. It’s great to see an author experimenting with her story-telling tactics this late in her career.

Ilisidi snapped, the head of the cane tucked against her chest. "Damned fools! Two years of managing for themselves and they develop their own channels, excluding all higher authority! Delusions. Delusions of competency. This will not be acceptable."

Political priorities rule this book, as clans come and go and discuss other clans. There’s complexity and foreshadowing throughout. But, as a reader who doesn’t exist in this world, it would be easy for an author to lose me here. Yet Cherryh doesn’t forget her readers. She knows that her readers don’t need to get lost in the details, but that her characters do. So she communicates enough to show and tell Bren getting lost in the details, but not enough to stress the reader’s patience. It’s a fine line and she walks it well.

"There is word of other foreigners, unknown to us—" A small murmur that quickly faded as he continued, "—but there will always be foreigners. The universe is very large. The more we know, as a world, the more authority we have."

The theme of this book simply shows change, and all that changes because of change. Everything is interconnected⁠—hence the complex loyalties of the clans discussed. And as technology has come and changed the world, in ways Bren and Tabini had planned for, it has done far more. Unexpected change happens around every atevi and how they react to the changing technology. In other words, everything that we learned through the last seven books has changed⁠—including how the main characters react to that change. Tabini and Bren react, plan, and act, worried about timing and collateral damage throughout. It seems Cherryh concludes that change just is, not that it’s good or bad. But how one reacts to that change does start to show positives and negatives, and it’s the important aspect.

They all had changed. The world had changed. And changed again.

One thing Cherryh dwells on echoes me learning about Beowulf in college. In Beowulf the old sword is better because it has lasted, proving that it was made well. In our day and age, the new phone is better because it has the latest and greatest. This story shows and tries to explain a culture going through that change. Atevi culture is big on traditions and hierarchy. Within this general preference, the traditionalists hold much influence. The old man whose house they occupy spent top dollar for security, automobiles, etc, and expects them to last as heirlooms like his other collections, yet the new comes in and outperforms the old. His secure phones endanger everybody instead of protecting, act more like megaphones. This story helps illuminate a lot of the industrial revolution underpinnings of the whole series.

No, no, no, their lord would say: he bought quality to defend his house and his province. Quality items once purchased ought to be good for decades if not the next generation—Lord Tatiseigi had no understanding at all of how radically the advent of electronics and computers had changed that basic precept of atevi economy. Quality things lasted for generations, did they not? One bought the most expensive and it was clearly going to last for decades.

And throughout all this change, where do you find the wise thing to do? What still matters? Timing, information, people, capabilities, understanding shortcomings, and keeping your head. These questions and answers face Bren and company throughout the novel, and it keeps a fascinating pace of information and action.

We have become much wiser, since. Let us deal with the next encounter at the safe distance of our station, where we and our human residents can establish our authority, take sensible charge of negotiations, and keep human fools and atevi fools—and we each have them in numbers!—from dealing with these new foreigners, who doubtless have fools of their own.

This book is great, really delving into ideas introduced in earlier books against the backdrop of counter-revolutionary fighting, and the invasion of the capital. Some of my favorite books strike this balance: action driving the characters forward, while the author delves deeply into interesting issues and character development. If I had any minor quibble, it would be that the unexpected couple of end chapters, the sort of epilogue, started off fairly directionless due to Bren not knowing what comes next⁠—Cherryh’s tightly focused voice and Bren being overwhelmed by the situation. But within a few pages it made sense and the whole thing worked brilliantly.

"Never forget confusion and folly, which always attend change, do they not?"

Destroyer by CJ Cherryh

This book begins the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. This book surprised me, as all of these books have in different ways. After settling some things with the Kyo and Reunion Station in the last book, here Bren and friends head back towards the atevi world. Upon arrival, they find that Tabini was overthrown eight months ago. This step surprised me. I took for granted Tabini’s hold on power. Yet it makes sense that he loses power—Cherryh pulls no punches, and after six books saying that too much technology too fast will break a culture, she follows through and breaks the atevi culture. Moves like this prove Cherryh’s strengths as a storyteller.

He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

At the same time, the characters worry that Tabini might be dead—nobody takes it too seriously except Bren in his deepest funks, but the rumor does run around a bit. And though Tabini shows up in the final pages, it got me thinking about these characters and this world and focusing a bit more on the heir—I question what will happen when Tabini will die. And this refocusing on Cajeiri, the heir, turns out to be a part of what this whole sub-trilogy is about. Again, strong storytelling.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus, why humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did.

The theme here combines two thoughts into one: faulty assumptions leading to poor actions on the part of the main characters and the usurper, and that home doesn’t exist. One thing Bren mentions a few times in the series is that home to the atevi is where their staff are, their servants and family and security. He starts to feel this way too. And this poignant theme rings true—I remember returning from college and things had changed. Here Bren has had no contact with atevi for two years, and the home he left differs from the home he returns to—both because of his assumptions proving false, and because he has changed. Yet his associations remain, and even though he doesn’t understand certain things as easily as he once did, his comfort still depends on his associations or friends being near.

“Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.” Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it . . . didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

That slow start in space sets the stage for the second two thirds of the story, when the plot begins to rely upon Bren’s nascent counter-revolution. But it sets the stage in more subtle ways. Peace was kept on the ship through informing the newcomers from Reunion of the political stability and fresh-food paradise of the atevi planet and its station. Immediately upon dropping out of space, this assumption proves untrue. And Bren feels that he has failed those people by promising stability. Upon learning the revolution’s details, this feeling of personal failure colors his perception of events. The setup provides a strong foundation for this story.

“So what’s a letter between brothers more or less? Is the news out there that bad?”
“It may be good, or bad, or the usual scary mix of things. It’ll still touch off the crazies.”
“Oh, God, everything touches off the crazies. That’s why they’re crazy."

In all, this is a good, good book. But something keeps me from thinking it is great. Probably my own misunderstanding of the role Cajeiri later plays in events—he was kind of a secondary character until now, and I probably assumed he would continue to be and so I didn’t grasp immediately what Cherryh was doing with this story. But well worth reading and the following two books do a better job of putting Cajeiri at the fore.

He found a grin of his own in reply, thinking, damn, if we die, we die moving, don’t we, not sitting still and letting our lives fade out?

+++

No one had yet uttered a word about their destination, which might be here, or days off, but likely all this hurry was to meant put distance between them and the bus, and any likelihood of the opposition tracking Ilisidi and the boy.

+++

But he found something morally refreshing, being sore in very inconvenient places, sitting on a rock beside a gurgling spring.

+++

They started off, the young people planted firmly in the center of the column, with the dowager, and with him. For a while he listened to Nawari instructing the young people, advising the new arrivals what to do and what contingencies to consider if they should come under fire. And the dowager sternly advising Cajeiri that if he picked shelter, he should now adjust his thinking and pick shelter wide enough for three. Hell of a thing, he said to himself. Hell of a thing for three kids to have to think of. The older generation had a few things to answer for.

+++

Only over his own dead body . . . granted numerous people would happily arrange that. God, there was so much water under the bridge. Planets were so complicated, compared to the steel worlds he’d lived in the last few years.

+++

Curious how the brain wore the body out, and how it didn’t work the other way around.

+++

Damn the situation. Damn the Kadigidi. He passionately hated gunfire. It always meant someone like him hadn’t done his job. And there was far too much evidence of that all around him.

+++

Power-seeking. Political games. The old, old reason. Hell of a mess, was what it was.

+++

But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

+++

But there was no room for second thoughts. Gravity had them.

+++

There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

+++

And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

+++

But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was. Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

+++

For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first.

+++

The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos . . . but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I didn’t particularly enjoy reading Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. She held aspects of the plot and context back from the reader way too long for how heavily foreshadowed they were. She brings up a lot of ideas in this book, and she brings most of them up in interesting ways. However, while I respect some of what she does here, I also think she didn’t use her ideas perfectly. So, let me start with two things to praise unequivocally, then get on to the muddled critique.

Kneeling on St. Mary’s stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat’s face and worn-out hose. She could never in a hundred years, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I’m glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.

Like Small Gods, Willis shows the good and bad of Christianity even-handedly. From Mrs. Gadson reading passages about pestilence to influenza victims, to the Bishop’s envoy’s party’s casual sexual harassment, Christianity doesn’t get a free pass from Willis. Yet she also shows Father Roche and Dunworthy and Mary all leading Christian lives full of charitable acts—even putting their lives at risk for others. I find this nuanced approach thought-provoking, which is what I want.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

My final unreserved praise for this book is that this new technology is just that: technology. Time travelling capabilities, inherently fantastic technology, come off common place. The people around it show some differences with us, but they’re still people, and they treat it sort of nonchalantly. It has limitations still, like cell phones sometimes being out of reception, you can’t just time travel willy-nilly. The professors are to varying degrees befuddled by it, but largely they treat it nonchalantly. It seems pretty honest to how people treat technology and I found it well communicated.

Apocalyptic was very likely the correct term for his even thinking he could rescue Kivrin, Dunworthy thought. He was worn out by the time Colin got him back to his room, and his temp was back up. "You rest," Colin said, helping him into bed. "You can't have a relapse if you're going to rescue Kivrin."

I think the central theme of the book is love for humanity, or charity. Many of the characters are examined in light of their selflessness. Not only the main characters, Kivrin, Dunworthy, Roche, Colin, and Mary; but also the secondary characters like Mrs. Gadson, William, Sir Blewitt, Montoya, and the bellringers. Where the main characters are unambiguously oriented on the welfare of others, these secondary characters follow paths that they view as attending to the welfare of others, but that conflict with the wills of others. And that’s a major sticking point for me, as well as a tactic I respect: no character is evil. Her characters all try their best. Some are more selfish than others, sure, but by and large sticky situations result from miscommunications and mistakes more than nefarious purposes. This means that there is little tension in the book—at least between characters. No central antagonist foils the characters, Just misunderstandings and mistakes. This isn’t necessarily a poor tactic, I like books that assume evil people think they’re doing good, but it doesn’t play well here because Willis focuses on so many ideas that there is little chance for tension to grow.

“You can’t go back,” Gilchrist said. “Haven’t you heard? We’re under quarantine, thanks to Mr. Dunworthy’s carelessness.”

It seems like a second theme shows the problem of the existence of pain to Christian theology. These ideas about what love is and how to show it, mixes with ideas of ease-of-life and leaves at least Kivrin questioning faith. Yet the central takeaway comes to the black plague being the theological underpinnings of atheism, and Willis doesn’t let this particular cat out of the bag until way too late in the novel for any depth to be reached here. Again, I like this theme, but it just doesn’t occupy enough of the book to be engaging.

It was impossible to imagine it overrun with the plague, the dead carts full of bodies being pulled through the narrow streets, the colleges boarded up and abandoned, and everywhere the dying and the already dead.

I don’t really understand what the future portions try to communicate. The past seems to be what Willis wanted to write here, at least she seems more excited to write the past, as it comes off more engaging. But then there’s this future section that mirrors the black plague. And it doesn’t really make sense to me as a writing tactic because I can’t tell what Willis tries to say with it.

None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.

In short, great premise, poor book. It held way too many cards too close to the chest for far too long. The first time Willis said that Kivrin is going to 1320, and it’s a good thing she’s not going to 1348 when the black plague hit, I agreed. The second time she did, I knew she was going to 1348, not 1320. Yet it takes half or more of this book for the characters to realize what Willis has already heavy-handedly hinted to the readers. That’s a bit too much reticence with the plot for my tastes, and it helped the book lack tension, lack teeth. How can you pull the teeth from the black plague? Willis seems to have done it—by confusing the narrative with an uninspiring epidemic tale in some future that’s unfocused, and by holding her cards too close for too long. Overlong for the conclusions drawn. Similarly, the character development’s flatness hindered this book’s power—and their general annoyingness sapped enjoyment. I end up respecting and decrying almost everything Willis does here. To the point that I’ll probably read another book in this series, but not right away. I want deeper character depth.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," he began in Latin.
He hadn't sinned. He had tended the sick, shriven the dying, buried the dead. It was God who should have to beg forgiveness.
"—in thought, word, deed, and omission. I was angry with Lady Imeyne. I shouted at Maisry." He swallowed. "I had carnal thoughts of a saint of the Lord."
Carnal thoughts.
"I humbly ask pardon of God, and absolution of you, Father, if you think me worthy."
There is nothing to forgive, she wanted to say. Your sins are no sins. Carnal thoughts. We held down Rosemund and barricaded the village against a harmless boy and buried a six-month-old baby. It is the end of the world. Surely you are to be allowed a few carnal thoughts.

Explorer by CJ Cherryh

This book stands among Cherryh’s best. Bren and friends’ reuniting Phoenix and Reunion station does what it says on the tin: an exploration of places nobody from the unnamed atevi planet has ever gone, and many people still don’t believe exists. Here we go. Journey narrative, political intrigue, situations turning into clusters, and meeting an alien species; unravelling the Ramirez mystery that helped carry the last couple of books, teaching the aiji’s heir what’s what in the universe, and gunfights⁠—Bren in lots of gunfights. Well, okay, like two gunfights, but still. In one of them Bren liberates a political prisoner from as deep inside hostile territory as possible.

Figure it. If there were two humans, there were two sides, and if both had a pulse, politics would be at work somewhere in the business.

This action packed-book concludes this trilogy. One thing I want to just mention in passing about the trilogy: it follows Cherryh’s usual pacing across three books⁠—meaning that Precursor opens the three fairly tamely, then Defender ramps up the tensions and complicates the situations once understandings have been reached, then Explorer explodes with action, new information recontextualizing earlier understandings, and follows the characters through their rational courses.

“Yolanda kept her standoffishness from local culture. I didn’t. I fell far more deeply not just into downworld culture, but into atevi culture, and the one thing that both infuriates me and encourages me is that Ramirez appointed me to succeed him. Me. My view of the universe. My atevi-contaminated, impure view of the universe humans have to live in. It’s not a degree of importance I ever wanted, I’ll tell you. But the thought that Ramirez meant to do it, that he actually approved what I am—is what gives me the courage to get out of bed and go on duty.”

This specific book’s pacing also shows the strength of Cherryh’s storytelling. Her book begins just before arrival at Reunion station, which allows the scene to be set before rushing into an alien encounter, and an encounter with long-lost humans. On the brink of the unknown, Cherryh establishes the relationships between characters, then pushes them through that fog-bank, and they don’t understand what they see. They find an alien ship, the human station, and neither matches what the characters expected. Classic Cherryh pacing: set the scene through the characters, their relations, and what worries them; then explore those worries through revelations or journeys; then resolve through logical reactions by the characters; all in a mix of psychological depth, adventure, political intrigue, physical violence, and change. Solid and stunning.

Separation of nations that have once met is dangerous: that seems the most accurate expression of kyo views of politics. What has met will meet again. What cannot stay in contact is a constant danger of miscalculation. Curious notion. Possibly even demonstrable, in history. One wonders whether this is a refined philosophy, out of successful experience. One is very certain we need to go slow with this.

The story illuminates the theme: Bren and company take responsibility for solving a problem they didn’t create. Instead of leaving Reunion station to die, they roll into the area and immediately take steps to correct Ramirez’ mistake of not communicating with the kyo, Phoenix’ difficulties dealing with Reunion, atevi-human interactions, and he tries to moderate the interactions of the three human factions (ship, station, Mospheiran) and all of their subfactions (ship-Jase, ship-Sabin, ship-Guild). This strong theme advocates fixing problems when and where you find them, through humility, and not kicking the can down the road to a future generation.

Play it by ear. Adapt. Abandon the plan. Look for the new pattern in events as they fell. It was not the human view of crisis management. But it was profoundly atevi, profoundly valid. Had not such thinking even become Mospheiran, over the centuries? Had not the paidhiin worked and fought within the university and the government to get that flexibility with their neighbors installed in place of a more rigid, history-conscious policy?

Cherryh has firmly established herself as one of my favorite authors, and one of the best science fiction authors. This trilogy here, books 4-6 in the Foreigner series, certainly help that. Bren changes over the course of this book, becoming less formal and more action oriented. Finally coming to terms with the life he left behind. A great book.

Defender by CJ Cherryh

Three years after Bren and company take the space station, Bren spends the first third of the book confused at the pieces moving around the situation: himself, robots, Ramirez, Geigi, Jase, Yolanda, Ginny, Ilsidi, Tabini’s heir, a long dead ruler’s funeral, and the silence of Tabini keeping Bren in the dark. Then he spends the second two thirds helping push those pieces as fast as possible, hoping he pushes in the correct direction. All while dealing with family emergencies from a vast distance. This story of conspiracy, political intrigue, and negotiation relies on a competent Bren dealing with rapidly changing situations to come up with potential solutions. When first introduced to Bren, back in the first trilogy, Cherryh tells the reader that he works as a diplomat and translator. Yet Cherryh’s plot and characters show him like a spy: his kidnapping, torture, ignorance, and actions do not match up with what Cherryh tells about Bren. However, her we see diplomat Bren in full force. In short, Bren’s effectiveness and understanding drive the plot—thanks in large part to CJ Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person perspective.

“I don’t envy you in that regard. But you came out sane. And decent. And worthwhile. It’s what we do, more than who we are, that makes our personal lives a mess. If we didn’t do what we do for a job, ordinary people might figure out how to get along with us.”

But that doesn’t mean Bren understands everything. At many points, Bren wonders why Tabini wanted him at the funeral on the planet. But when the reveal comes a third of the way in, he realizes that Tabini didn’t need him there so much as need him away from the station. This makes sense based on Tabini’s character, as Cherryh’s characters usually make sense. I already know Tabini uses those around him as assets—he devotes himself to their safety, but only to a point. They all are expendable for the greater good, as Tabini is in charge of the greater good. But beyond that, his secretive ways and desire to double check everything make sense in this specific situation—which Bren and the reader do not understand until later in the book. Also, the atevi-human interface gets in the way, as Bren wants to like Tabini and feels slighted at Tabini keeping him in the dark. This feeling reinforces the alienness of Bren and the atevi. Alienness always works both ways.

God hope the house of cards he and Tabini had built lasted long enough to provide a pattern for the girders of a whole new world.

The plot again shows Cherryh setting up a situation, then dripping and implying information about the characters to the reader, meaning that the ending falls rationally out of the people involved. I want to dwell on this for a few more sentences because this tendency brilliantly guides a lot of Cherryh’s work, and all of the books in this Foreigner series so far. She holds back information from Bren and the reader—due to her tightly focused, third person narrative—to help set up tension and mystery. But she also pulls no punches—a passing statement early in the book that the ship is fueled and can move at any time comes home at the end when it undocks from the station. This pace of revealing information drives Cherryh’s plot pacing: slightly too long for a reveal in Voyager in Night, perfect pacing in Precursor.

“Gently, gently, young man,” Ilisidi said. “Haste only startles what you wish to catch. Stalk your desires. Don’t snatch.”

The theme here shows Bren dealing with assumptions, learning truths, and then trying to react in wise ways to the new situation. This applicable theme seems a bit broad, sure, to some extent all books are about this theme. But Cherryh really dives into the theme, throwing misunderstandings, surprises, and multiple opinions at the reader to show how Bren’s rational note-taking and thinking helps prioritize problems and isolate unknowns, suggesting ways to deal with the unknowns. And then, because she pulls no punches, we see him trying various responses, some successful, some not. This willingness to let Bren not succeed every time perfectly shows Cherryh’s strength at creating characters. If Bren ever succeeds without cost, I would stop reading these books.

Atevi relied on a rational universe. Humans on the island enclave of Mospheira had faith in miracles. Humans on the starship over their heads had more faith in a second armed starship and a planetful of allies, in a universe otherwise sparse with life.

The one thing I would say about this book is that it wouldn’t make much sense without first reading Precursor, at least. Ilsidi and Tabini are really sketched in here, as characters, and the reader could easily be lost without having some sense of how those characters react to reality. But, being a sequel in a series I think should build off of each book, this potential negative is actually a positive to me. I’m glad Cherryh didn’t spend twenty more pages explaining these two characters.

“We do not forget,” Tabini continued, as nerve and flesh all but liquefied in relief and bodyguards stood down from red alert. Tabini swept on, in possession of all attention. Thank God no program dropped. Breathing itself was at a minimum. Tabini’s oratory was all fortunate threes now, rapid, hammering into nerves still resounding to two strokes of the bell, still waiting for the resolution of their universe. “We do not break our strong connections with all that Valasi-aiji built. We do not abrogate our traditions. The more knowledge we acquire, the more we rationally comprehend the universe, the more we control our own destiny—”

One last comment here. Cherryh baits and hooks the reader, she doesn’t pull punches. But she also bait and double or triple hooks the reader. When Ramirez moves to his deathbed, Cherryh hooked me hard. I know things are going to blow up with the ship then, and maybe the station too. But then Ramirez lets out that the other station that suffered an alien attack, Reunion, has survivors aboard. Now I’m hooked again, with this juicy problem facing the characters. And right then, Ilsidi and Tabini’s heir appear on the station. And Bren’s mom starts maybe dying. And Jill leaves Toby. Cherryh just piles on the problems and the book can’t be read fast enough from there. Bait and double hook. I need to do this more in my own writing.

His security had not been idle. Never, ever think it. “So you have suspicions.”
“It’s our tendency, is it not?”

I adore this book. Where Precursor stands among Cherryh’s best work, this one falls just barely short of that. Bren doesn’t change so much as his understanding of his relationships with those around him change. And only having one character so far, that lack of change did drag the book down a bit for me. This shows a book more about adventurous negotiation than character development, and I always advocate for character development. Don’t get me wrong though: this book is about the characters, firmly about them and not the adventure, but because those characters don’t change much, the book doesn’t hit me as hard as Precursor did. However, this is probably my second favorite in the series so far. Good book. Solidly good book. Well worth the read after Precursor.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and folded his hands and stopped where he was, listening, waiting while a very sick woman tried to gather her faculties.
“First off, tell the dowager she’s a right damn bastard.”
It was no time for a translator to argue. Mitigation, however, was a reasonable tactic. “Aiji-ma, Sabin-aiji has heard our suspicions regarding Tamun and received assurances from me and Gin-aiji that we have not arranged a coup of our own. She addresses you with an untranslatable term sometimes meaning extreme disrepute, sometimes indicating respect for an opponent.”
Ilisidi’s mouth drew down in wicked satisfaction. “Return the compliment, paidhi.”
“Captain, she says you’re a right damn bastard, too.”

Precursor by CJ Cherryh

This series of books seems to be composed of trilogies so far. So, according to CJ Cherryh, pick any third book and if you like it, continue with that trilogy. This book starts the second arc.

As a space plane carries atevi to the stars for the first time, they dock at an abandoned space station and begin to negotiate directly with Phoenix, the recently returned excession-spaceship. Three factions attempt to negotiate for what they need and want, while Bren, the interpreter and the person who understands the most about all three factions, tries to find a position that is best for all three. Conspiracy, complex political maneuvering, and watching how different technology levels and environments has affected different cultures differently.

Nonchalance was a position from which, if wrong, there was very little chance of recovery.

The story structure here fascinates me. Outside of a paragraph or two, no intro-info-dump afflicts the opening chapters. Rather, Bren leaves his family and Mospheira, heading back to say goodbye to Jase, who has been invited upstairs. When he boards the plane, surprised by the presence of a Mospheiran delegation to the station, he screws up initial contact with them. He fails to anticipate his own participation in the trip. Then he says goodbye to Jase and dines with Ilsidi. Only then does Tabini order him to go to the station. Alienating part of the Mospheiran delegation starts looking like a screw-up, instead of the warning he had intended. He realizes he enters this situation half-cocked, not having had time or foresight to debrief Jase first. And then opening negotiations with Ramirez go well, very well. Ramirez and Ogun see the reason of Bren’s arguments, the Mospheiran delegation overcomes their resentment and agree in principle, and everything goes better than expected. At that point, two-thirds of the book remains to be read. This tension of everything going well but so much book left to read crushes the hope Bren feels⁠—the reader knows some shoe is about to drop. But this setup brilliantly establishes the scene, what the reader needs to know for the next two-thirds of the book to work, shows Cherryh in control of the story and deftly maneuvering the reader’s experience to draw them into the story. With just one main character and point of view, she creates a complex situation and context that the rest of the story naturally and rationally falls out of.

And a great deal that was human wasn’t within his power to choose anymore. He’d already lost everyone on the island; he was about to lose his only human companion on the mainland. He wasn’t happy about it, but that was the choice far higher powers made.

And this tactic is a tendency for Cherryh. Or, as she puts it, “Anticipated consequences have to really happen, and have to be dealt with… no 'it was all a dream.'” Here, Bren anticipates struggles of negotiation on the station, with both Phoenix crew and Mospheirans. When things go swimmingly, the reader knows a catch is coming, because Cherryh has already built that expectation in. Looking at her characters the reader easily knows where the catch is coming from⁠—the captains have mostly failed to clearly communicate in good faith, and one hasn’t communicated at all. Turns out that one betrays the others. In short, she builds a complex situation, and watches what unfolds. She doesn’t plan, she lets the characters carry the story. Another Cherryh quote about writing, “The whole book, for me, is character.” In other words, her books come from her characters: they build the situations, their environment defines the worldbuilding, and their personalities provide the solutions and moral dilemmas. This strong writing tactic allows the book’s meaning and depth, even when the main character is weaker than Bren. Or, in Cherry’s words, “So 'well-drawn' and 'morally strong' adult characters of whatever gender carry swords and banners only for local color. More importantly, they carry principles or hypotheses of behavior as the useful and significant tools of their trade, and they test those principles for validity constantly against the situation posed… doing it in fiction so that people who read the story can gain the life experience not by a lecture but by deep analysis and integration of that character's experiences and reactions.” Yes please, I want to read more of this.

It wasn’t humanly possible. If atevi hadn’t been a continent-spanning civilization and a constitutional monarchy to boot, with rocketry already in progress, they couldn’t possibly have done it. . . certainly not in his lifetime.

Okay, enough about the structure. The best structure doesn’t conceal boring story, and this story supports the structure. Talking about stakes, these stakes put the species at risk, but that risk comes at an unknown point in the future, whenever the alien murderers get around to maybe attacking. So, due to distance, that tension feels distant. The tension on the characters rests on personal and political will, as well as their cultural goals.
⁠—Tabini wants to push atevi to FTL-levels of technology, because he believes in technological progress. Tabini thinks of knowledge as good, and sees giving labor to Phoenix as gaining immense knowledge and experience.
⁠—Mopheirans want to define a safe, stable economic footing they can operate from in the future, natural for a people whose neighbors technologically match them but control all the natural resources. Mospheirans also want to limit their risks, having history with Phoenix using them to do the dirty, dangerous work.
⁠—Phoenix wants fuel, labor, resources to continue their way of life⁠—wandering through the stars trying to establish new colonies. Being stuck in space, they must deal with the planet’s residents. They fear the atevi and Mospheirans, though the Mospheirans less so because they know that evil, the atevi are still unknowns to them. They also really want some help fighting the aliens that murdered the residents of the last station they built.
Within those cultural desires, each character also wills their own good. Whether it’s Kroger and her lifelong obsession with robots, Tamum and his desire for power, Ramirez and his need for speed and compromise, or Bren and his goal of peace and understanding, even a little segregation if it will help. These personal intentions wrinkle the cultural ones, giving complexity to the story. But I also see how these personal goals do not contradict the culture of the character: Kroger wants safety for Mospheiran lives, and her robot obsession roots in that desire; Tabini wants knowledge and experience in a place no atevi has gone, so his compromise secures that at some risk to atevi life; Tamum wants personal power, perverting the Phoenix desire for a safe haven to refuel at and trade with.

“One certainly does ask,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what are these people scared of?”
“The aliens, sir.” “Banichi and Jago aren’t aliens. You and I are. That below is their planet.”

With these desires in mind, the story makes perfect sense. Where then does mystery come from? It comes directly from a lack of information. The story shows some good negotiations breaking down as one side quits communicating. Bren doesn’t know what occurs, neither does anybody who talks to him. As a reader, I’m just as in the dark as Bren⁠—again, Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative ties the reader directly to the character deftly. Tension also arrises from this not knowing. Bren has an agreement between Tabini and Phoenix secured. But when the Phoenix principle leaves the picture, he’s left stranded, trying to understand what the range of possibilities are. This mystery clears up when more information floods the reader. Rather like Asimov’s writing tactics, though Cherryh does it better by relying on characters.

He couldn’t beg off from his job or ask why in hell human beings couldn’t use good sense. He’d asked that until he knew there was no plain and simple answer.

One consistent and astounding strength of Cherryh is creating cultures. Above, I listed the main three cultures here and their general goals. These goals come directly from the worldbuilding, from the environment. Phoenix crew, stuck on a spaceship for years, relies on rigid discipline and schedules to survive psychologically, because they relied on that physically for so long. Any outside input puts them off. Atevi ruled their planet alone for thousands of years before humans came, and still do. Therefore, their desire to catch up with this excession-spaceship shows a desire to retain their place of dominance in their own affairs. Mospheiran’s descend from people who ran from Phoenix crew’s nastier behaviors, therefore their desire for protection. Also, their lack of natural resources compared to Atevi leave them desperate to find any niche they may fit in the future. Through these environmental, historical concerns, the cultures Cherryh builds make sense, feel realistic, despite being full of aliens and unlikely technology. She writes, worldbuilds, storytells, and entertains brilliantly.

Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvation; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.

The one question, as always, in a series concerns the nature of sequels versus stand-alone works. I said in my notes on the last book, “I’m feeling that this series should have books that build on each other, not stand-alone novels, and that she's torn between the two strategies.” What I meant is that series books will often try to bring the reader up-to-speed with intro-info-dumps, or they’ll assume the reader has read the earlier books and leave new readers at a loss for understanding. Both dangerous tactics to me. Here, she clearly wants this one to stand-alone. I think this book perfectly deals with the issue⁠—a couple of paragraphs establishing context of the other books spread through the fist chapter, then trust the readers will understand and get on with the story. I don’t feel I need to have read the first three to get this one. Yet, the first three exist as context to this one, so maybe I found more to like in this one because I read the others. It would be interesting to find somebody who read this one first and discuss with them.

“So the paidhi, too, doesn’t trust implicitly.”
“I don’t trust. I find out.”

The theme here shows Bren keeping his head under fire, being flexible and humble, but also flexing his power when he needs to. Again, he has a hard job, and his regrets at what that does to his family life cause questions, but not wavering. It's a theme shot through the entire novel, that every character supports, while each add to the discussion. Loyalty to the ship, to Tabini, to Bren, to safety⁠—these all come into play as the situation changes dramatically and rapidly. But Bren's job here shows the old adage about war⁠—two seconds of terror and hours of waiting. Cherryh focuses in on the terror instead of letting the waiting drag the novel down. Bren wonders what he can do, then he does that, instead of wringing his hands at being unable to do anything. It's a theme that rings true in my life too.

“You, nadi,” he said to Banichi, “ought to be asleep.”
“A superfluous habit,” Banichi said. “Conducive to ignorance.”

I love this great book. Cherryh writes to her strengths without relying on her experience⁠—she writes a strong story and world that doesn’t offer fan-service. For me, this book exists in the same sentences as her best work. This exciting tale engages adventure, physical danger, complex political conspiracy, technology and environment providing vastly different characters and cultures, and deep personal insight to carry me away. I read the third third in a single sitting, last night, until 1 AM. I look forward to starting the next book tonight. This tour de force creates a book I intend to constantly refer to for my views of how to write well. Perhaps some small concession to showing the routine of the Phoenix crew would help new Cherryh readers, but I doubt it is necessary.

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Again Asimov structures his story with scenes separated widely. Third novel in a row. This time Seldon grows older, each scene exists years apart. Instead of searching for Earth, or trying to understand humanity through different groups, here scenes show stages of the Empire’s collapse and Seldon’s aging. The journey idea of the last two novels serves this structure better, but hey, this wasn’t entirely unreadable.

Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

Is there tension? I mean, by now everything published in the Foundation series points to Seldon winning. With Seldon facing physical danger and the interventions not yet recorded, I feel no tension. It feels more like, “I wonder how Hari Seldon gets out of this,” because I know he does. Though that tendency appears in a large amount of Asimov’s writing, it’s just more poignant in these two prequels. (This critique equally applies to the last novel too, Prelude to Foundation, though there the mythic tone imparted by the mystery-filled encyclopedia quotes really help my interest in it. It may just be that Seldon’s origins and early struggles interest me more.)

People live and die by nonsense. It's not what is so much as what people think is.

It’s a sticky trick, prequels. Asimov’s problem here is that he relies on the same old danger he always has--physical violence. I know Seldon survives to old age already, the title of the series gives away his success even to somebody reading these two prequels first. So, these two, and mostly this one, come across as fan service. Yet, in Prelude there still exists a chance of Seldon being some sort of conglomeration of people, a fiction, and this Seldon being replacable. But that doesn’t happen, and this story falls flat. Not because Asimov didn’t do what I would’ve done, that would be the worst critique ever; simply because I struggled to find tension in the last novel, hence the conspiracy theory, and failed to find it in this one.

You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can’t always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you’ve planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.

How could it be done better than this? Well, raise and answer different questions, apply different stresses, and resolve differently are ever only the three options. Instead of answering the questions of psychohistory, clearly what the fanbase wanted, he answers the question of what Seldon was like as an old man. Not as engaging. Instead of applying interpersonal conflicts and politics, Asimov apply’s physical violence that the reader already knows isn’t dangerous. He still has trouble writing characters. Instead of resolving this as a triumph, it takes a Shakespearean tragedy turn, which I don’t mind so much.

The word 'tradition' covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.

All that said, this novel shows Seldon’s devotion, and losing everything he loves. The personal and public sacrifices to his job, to his calling. It’s chilling and heartwarming simultaneously. Asimov knows this story from the inside, this being his last written book, and it’s his final statement: beware dreams, you know not what they will cost, and prioritize rationally to ensure you serve what you believe. This theme engages the reader well, and it had better, because to book focuses on it.

You don’t need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life.

In short, not a great book. But also not unreadable. The theme grabbed me and I happily stared at the car wreck and triumph of Seldon’s life. However, when it was over, I rejoiced. I’m not sure I want to read more of Asimov’s long fiction. This is bad fan service.

People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.

Inheritor by CJ Cherryh

This third book in the Foreigner series closes the first trilogy’s arc. It shows why Bren has been promoted and promoted by Tabini. It concludes the conflict between Bren and the Human Heritage group, as well as between Tabini and the atevi aiming to take him out. It starts six months after the landing of the two humans from the spaceship Pheonix, and unfortunately the start is rough. Cherryh spends two full chapters rehashing what came before, filling in the reader on the six past months. And this intro-info-dump detracts from the novel to me. I’m feeling that this series should have books that build on each other, not stand-alone novels, and that she's torn between the two strategies. But, once Cherryh gets into the story, some real magic happens.

You couldn’t say that human word ‘border,’ either, to limit off the land passing under them. An atevi map didn’t really have boundaries. It had land ownership—sort of. It had townships, but their edges were fuzzy. You said ‘province,’ and that was close to lines on a map, and it definitely had a geographical context, but it didn’t mean what you thought it did if you were a hard-headed human official trying to force mainland terms into Mospheiran boxes. So whatever he had experienced down there, it didn’t have edges, as the land didn’t have edges, as overlapping associations didn’t have edges.

One of the strengths of this book is that Bren and Jase have a touchy relationship. Bren’s optimism at having Jase around turns sour when Jase doesn’t offer friendship or bring a good attitude—understandable to a human raised on a spaceship coming to a planet for the first time this late in life, but necessarily quite frustrating to his teacher. Everything is offputting to him: scheduling conflicts, the food, movement, weather, a horizon. Add ontop that Jase is learning a complex culture and language, and Jase is way out of his depth and unsure what is happening around him. He takes plans made on inadequate information to be Bren breaking his trust, and this mutual distrust guides much of the novel. The central question to this thread could be paraphrased, “how to repair a relationship with a power differential that got off to a bad start.”

The stirrings of affection that good actions made in a human heart.

As Cherryh tends to do, this engaging theme plays out across the backdrop of the whole novel—almost every single scene ends up informing, progressing, frustrating, or affecting this theme. I enjoy writers who take a complex situation and change it over the course of a book. If done well, readers will follow. Cherryh does it well by making it more complex. Jase and Bren have breakthroughs, setbacks, distractions, misunderstandings—and the more the reader sees, the more complex in their mind the situation is. Sometimes a key piece of information—like Jase's father's death's fictionality—is left as a mystery to the reader until much later in the novel, when everything suddenly falls into place. Also, the other parts of this novel, the other major threads running through it, inform the stakes of their relationship, inform the state of it as effectively as the two humans do. Everything informs everything else in Cherryh’s novels, and I couldn’t be more happy to read her work.

Let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to his imagination. That was the plan. It was, though he hadn’t thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species had in common.

A second theme, and one that Jase and Bren share, is distance from family leading to reprioritizing familial connections. Their jobs keep them away from family. When Jase’s father dies—though that ends up being a codeword for Yolanda needing an escape from Mospheira—Bren struggles to comfort him, as Bren’s family is currently going through death threats and midnight phone call annoyances. Neither Jase nor Bren can do anything about either situation. This powerlessness forces both to face the possibility that something else is more important in their lives, and that’s an uncomfortable place to be. Bren believes in the greater good of broad peace. Jase believes in his own excession-ship emergency. For both, it’s a matter of do the job and give their families the best chance possible, or don’t do the job and everybody could die, including their families.

In such moments he asked himself what potentially disastrous and crazy idea he’d given his life to serve.

And that’s one thing this novel does well: tie up threads leftover from earlier books. Why did the ship come back? We now know because there is a threat within twenty light years. Will Bren and Jago ever sex? Yes. As awkward as human-alien intercourse inherently seems, after three books building it up, and a scant couple of paragraphs of sex-scene, it’s at least understandable, at least been foreshadowed enough, at least contextualized enough after the fact to not be seen as wish fulfillment. Will Human Heritage get control of all human government? No, but that’s the plot of this novel and becomes a close-run-thing. Will Tabini be able to gather enough allies to his side and overcome threats to his throne? Yes, but it requires the help of unexpected allies and personal danger to many.

“We suspect everything.” They had reached the doors. “We act on what we know.”

This tying up of threads reveals things that recast aspects of the first two novels. A mystery throughout was why Bren kept getting more and more political power. Well, this book finally explains it. Bren’s actions have directly led to Tabini gaining more allies. Ilsidi came to Tabini’s side through Bren’s explanations, actions, willingness to be tested, and forgiveness of his broken arm from the kidnapped interrogation. Geigi came to Tabini through Bren’s actions, even though those actions were largely accidental, his instincts led him to the right place. The island of Dur. The atevi public. The Assassin’s Guild. These things didn’t necessarily make sense to Bren or the reader throughout either, but by the end of this book, they do—again, Cherryh's tightly focused, third person narrative relies on the main character gaining understanding for the reader to.

Go to the leader. Always go to the leader when the bullets start to fly: rally to the leader.

And this recasting of earlier actions and motivations helps Cherryh resolve the book, gives closure. Sometimes it’s a character explaining things to Bren, sometimes it’s Bren taking those explanations and extrapolating what he learned about atevi from them into other mysteries. And sometimes it’s new information, like Jase’s end-of-book reveal about a potential rival in space. In her earlier works, Cherryh would often rehash circumstances through interior monologue, to explain to the reader what new information meant to older actions. Here she does the same, but spread across three books instead of just one. It’s a tactic that keeps me reading Cherryh, even though it sometimes manifests as a horrid intro-info-dump.

And in that one simple example he saw why humans could become so disruptive of atevi society in so short a time, just by existing, and dragging into their liking persons who really, never, ever should be associated with them in the atevi sense. Humans had created havoc without knowing the social destruction they were wreaking on the foundations of society where people could be badly bent out of their comfortable associations.

At the end of this book, I was thrilled with the series so far. But those first two chapters did detract from this book. The pacing was strange because of them. Usually there’s some action to grab the reader’s attention right off, followed by a slow rise in comprehension and tension, then an explosion of action to end the book. Here there’s just the slow rise to explosion, and it doesn’t work as well for me. Maybe she thought that because this is the third in a trilogy, the action at the end of the last book sufficed to draw the reader into this third book. And it did for me. But it also means that this book isn’t great. It’s good, but not great. Even after three books, the characters still grow, and the aliens still feel alien. Brilliant writing. In the way that everything is interconnected, this is a complex book of political conspiracies and personal relationships—just what I want.

So if their languages didn’t say quite the same thing and their bodies didn’t quite match and the niches they made that said this person satisfies enough requirements to make me happy were just a little different-shaped in their psyches, the center of that design might match, leaving just the edges hanging off. But didn’t his relationship with Barb have unmatched edges? Didn’t every close relationship?

One last thing to note here is that Cherryh seems to have grown comfortable with her world. Instead of constantly saying that some numbers are good and others are bad to the atevi, here she starts to give examples: three is good, four and two are bad. This also comes out in her word choices, as she starts to let some really beautiful sentences inhabit the novel. For example, near the end she writes, "The vast dish passed behind them, the dusk deepened to near dark, and the company stayed close around the dowager as they rode." That’s a really well written sentence, hinting at the context in ways understandable to the reader: the vastness of the central communication station on the planet looking out to the vastness of space, the timing of their arrival at dusk, the priorities and associations of the people who surround the dowager. And yet the sounds it creates are pleasing to my ear, despite being a summarized list of sorts, setting a scene, closing another scene. All that consonance will grab my attention every time.

That office building out there, the Maganuri Building, built to house the study committees proposed by the legislators opposed to the growth of government, was beginning to be plagued by sewer and electrical problems. The opposition blamed sabotage by Tabini’s agents, or by the old aristocracy, a wide range of conspiracy indeed, and no few of the commons avoided it and wouldn’t attend committee meetings there because of the reputed bad numbers.

A couple more quotes I wrote down while reading:

It was a risk. Their whole lives were a risk. But you limited them where you could.

A written mistake might fall into the hands of news services interested in catching the paidhi in such an infelicity. The press daren’t take on the aiji, mustn’t, in fact; but a lord of the Association was a fair target; and in less than a year he’d become such a person—protected, still, in certain ways, but increasingly fair game if he made a blunder that saw print.

As a minor court official, again, he’d been immune from such public relations assassinations. As a major player in affairs of state, he, like the aiji, was a target of such manipulators, and his strike in return was a standing order for commendations to any clerical who by handwriting, postal mark, or other clues, identified one of these nuisances by name, handwriting, and residence and posted them to others in the pool.

Invader by CJ Cherryh

This book showcases Bren coming to grips with four aspects of his world: the invasion of the Phoenix, his own power, the complexity of three societies, and his own motives. But really, the latter three aspects fall out of the first one—the arrival of an excession spaceship just before the book starts. That’s the first point I want to make: Cherryh uses that excession ship to spark the rest of the story by exploring it deeply. Nothing is wasted here, Cherryh uses most of the whale. The flipside, of course, being that each page isn’t jam-packed with action. (If you want that, go read the John Carter books. I didn’t hate them.)

Average people didn’t analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.

In the Pheonix’s arrival, Bren faces an immense amount of work. His job is to translate humans to atevi, and vise versa. Yet nobody has seen the ship or heard from its crew for around 200 years. That time includes a war between the atevi and the humans who stayed behind, a breakdown of the station, the landing of the rest of the station bound humans—there are significant cultural differences between Mospheira and Phoenix. (Example: America 200 years after independence from the UK) And after a week kidnapped in the woods, Bren finds himself better able to understand his atevi kidnappers instead of his fellow humans. The plot of the book traces Bren, Tabini, Deana, Ilisidi, and the human reactions to the ship’s return, culminating in a landing of two illiterate translators from the ship, formalizing the new three-way power structure.

The knowledge that if the future of humankind on Mospheira and in this end of the universe wasn’t in his power to direct—it was damned sure within his power to screw up.

One of the foremost problems is Deana. Because of his kidnapping, the human government flipped and sent his backup—a woman he has had a lifelong rivalry with. They come from different political camps—she is human-first, while he tries to foster cooperation and communication and equality between the atevi and humans. Their political backers differ. Their strengths, weaknesses, and experiences differ. She does things Bren wouldn’t, and he certainly does things she wouldn’t. Tabini, the head of the atevi, sides with Bren, putting Deana’s life in danger. After she attacks Bren, and after some significant empathy thought experiments, he tries to exercise some of his power to save her life and find a place for her before the human government decides what to do with their situation. This backfires on him when Deana gets kidnapped/runs away to Tabini’s enemies, and that devastates Bren. He went out on a limb for her, risking his political power to take her under his wing, and she throws it all to the wind to attempt to throw him under the bus. To Bren, she calls into question the future of peace and the entire world for her political beliefs that he doesn’t find justification for in his experience. Bren starts to learn about power here, personally, not from theory. As he uses his power sometimes it comes off great, twice people try to assassinate him, and he usually gets betrayed left and right.

“How do you define fool?”
“I don’t attempt it. I wait for demonstrations. They inevitably surpass my imagination.”

In learning about power, Bren finds the central struggle of his political position: the competing authorities of atevi and human are personally competing priorities to Bren. He must protect himself from Deana’s backers, which means he cannot communicate fully with any humans. Yet his conscience guides him to acts that some humans consider treason, potentially endangering his family. He justifies this with the idea that his actions serve a greater good—a better future for more people. He attempts dispassionate observation, but he also feels anxiety and internal conflict. I really resonated with this theme throughout the book, and I think it is the main theme here. He second guesses himself, and this leads to a deep character study by Cherryh: what could living a good life cost?

Death wasn’t an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away—that, he might do.

This theme of fighting against self-interest is poignant throughout the novel. Deana accuses Bren of self-interest and selling the humans out, but she’s coming from a place of wanting human dominance over the atevi. Her political backers align with their Human Heritage Society, which seems as racist as it sounds. But the atevi do not buck the trend of distrust: various atevi associations are as anti-human—more so as assassination remains a very real possibility in their culture. Through all this, the addition of the third wheel of Phoenix up there in space, creates a very complex background to Bren’s actions. And that’s what this book is: complex political, cultural, and personal conspiracies played out over three growingly complex societies.

Reality always put a texture on things, a chaotic topography of imperfections, that imagination had foreseen as smooth and featureless.

Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative voice allows this complexity to dawn on the reader slowly. As Bren comes to grips with the importance of FTL and number-counters, so does the reader. As he starts to guess at atevi and human connections and reasons, so does the reader. Instead of dumping everything on the reader at the outset, Cherryh slowly doles out information. Questions unravel into complexities over chapters, giving the reader time to ingest new context and reflect on its importance. Again, I’m a huge fan of Cherryh’s voice. But usually she uses more than one main character to let the reader in on some of the context. Here she focuses solely on Bren. I want another character, sure, but by focusing solely on Bren, she brilliantly paces the flow of information to the reader, building the context throughout the book, increasing the complexity throughout the book, helping the reader understand more as the book goes on.

For a human, he thought, he was doing remarkably well at figuring out the entanglements of man’chi after the fact; he’d yet to get ahead of atevi maneuvering—and he’d no assurance even now he was looking in the right direction.

One thing Cherryh consistently does is war. Though it may not always be total war, she usually builds the characters and their positions early in the book, before somebody makes a move and it all gets decided on a battlefield. This tendency echoes human history. It shows yet again that Cherryh consistently touches on what makes us human throughout her works—we try and try to avoid conflict, but sometimes conflict is all that will decide the issue. In our lives, that often means conflict other than physical. Yet when the stakes are as high as Cherryh’s narrative makes them, physical violence seems unavoidable. This means that her books usually end with a bang, as this one does.

Ludicrous, on one level. Grimly humorous. And not. Atevi historically didn’t engage in vast conflicts, when little ones would do. But important people and ordinary ones could end up quite effectively dead.

I realize in this second book that so far the series has been court drama, an understated comedy of manners. Also a first-contact tale where the aliens are humans and the residents are atevi. It’s starting to seem like Cherryh wants to explore first contact past the first few days of contact, and really delve into cultural differences, cultural relativity, and struggles inherent in trying to work together when so many groups are self-serving. I’m along for the ride so far, if she does. Another good book here.

He asked himself how he’d gotten into this position, except one good intention at a time.