Fires of Azeroth by CJ Cherryh

1. This third book in the series somewhat lightens the mood: where the last two worlds precipitated and warred constantly, this one has dark elements, but is much more peaceful and traditional fantasy adventure tone. Think Tolkien, as one often does in fantasy, though she pulls little else out of that writer’s works than a balance of pain and pleasure that allows the book to be enjoyable.

2. In short review: Roh’s army and the heroes end up on a feudally peaceful world, sexual tension still intact after the kiss at the end of the last book. Roh breaks with the army early while Vayne and Morgaine get allies for once. Vayne is then separated in an ambush and taken to Roh.
—And this is where Cherryh starts to show what she will become: through exploring Roh’s situation, both complex political intrigue and deep character study come to the fore in a few successive chapters. Cherryh ignores Morgaine for these chapters, preferring to discuss Roh’s struggle with his other self, using that as a springboard the allow Vayne to change in meaningful ways. The building tension through Morgaine's absence for chapter after chapter engages. Later, Morgaine recognizes Vayne’s changes when they are reunited and reinstates Vayne as an honorable warrior, which necessarily changes their relationship too. This is classic Cherryh and it really sucked me in: she is skilled at psychological and political drama.
—Back to the recap: Vayne and Roh call on Vayne’s allies to lead them to Morgaine, which they do, but the army follows. The army tears itself apart when the leadership is decimated—mostly by the main characters—and the novel ends peacefully.
—I include this recap for two reasons: first to point out that Cherryh realizes her strengths, or writes what is interesting to her, and creates a complex world populated by complex characters; second to show that the novel is really in three parts: Vayne and Morgaine, Vayne and Roh, Roh with Vayne and Morgaine. As usual, Vayne is the key element, but he actually changes here, through the influence of Roh, and that allows Morgaine to change somewhat too—she stops not looking behind her and ends up helping the world before she shuts the gate. This is a more confident Cherryh and it shows in an engaging tale told.

3. The writing is good. I remember no moments of astounding beauty or cringe-inducing writing, and the voice she later fully adopts is still somewhat tentative here. But this is better than readable.

4. The theme here grows out of the characters directly. Vayne is split between the ways of his world, and his new experience living with Morgaine’s duty. He wants to be kind and honorable, but he serves a master who lacks interest in morality in order to achieve her goals. Roh is half evil man, half good guy, and the two are struggling against each other. Central to Roh’s struggle is a desire to survive that both sides of him share. Morgaine is hell-bent on closing the gates, but realizes that it doesn’t need to involve so much destruction and hardship. In the cave she plays up her badassery for her purposes, but at other times she actually becomes gentle and loving to strangers. All three are finding their strengths and weaknesses and balancing them. Morgaine’s anger and stubbornness is used as an asset alongside her humanity. Vayne’s love of Roh is finally placed in a proper context in his role as Morgaine’s slave, and it ends up helping his master. Roh’s struggle is able to help all three in his selfless acts, born out of anger over what gave him that split personality. This theme of using our traits and emotions for better ends is throughout this novel.

5. In all, this is clearly the best of the first three novels in the Morgaine cycle of four. I don’t have the fourth yet, so we’ll see if I ever find it and get a chance to review it. But in terms of focus and worldbuilding, Cherryh is really coming into her own here and I like Cherryh a lot, so I’m a fan. But it’s not a great book. That structure feels weird, as if each of the three parts doesn’t quite fit together: it feels like a different author between the first part and the second two parts. It’s not a small complaint, but it’s not debilitating.

Well of Shiuan by CJ Cherryh

1. So much better than the book right before this—changes that speak to a massive amount of growth as a writer between Gate of Ivriel and here. These notes are trying to figure out why I like this so much better and what changes Cherryh makes? I feel justified in this comparison as the four Morgaine stories are often published in a single volume, and this one starts seconds after the last one ends.

2. Gone are the awkward, fantasy word choices like “hi” being used for directions or spatial physical relation. She still uses a couple of awkward phrases, such as “did he turn around, he was sure to see her tears.” But that bothers me much less than the poor word choices of the last novel. The writing has gone from horrid to readable.

3. The story allows more of the interesting science fiction context to color the pages. This is still a fantasy tale purportedly set within a science fiction world, but here the science fiction is present in more than just the intro info dump. Some of the alien beings who created the gates are characters within the novel. The antagonist acts on-screen in ways that support the science fictional context—rather than the last novel where he is on-screen for a short time, then is later revealed as the antagonist and is said to be chasing the main characters but we don’t see any of it until he catches them; in other words, Cherryh shows him here. Also, Morgaine tells more to Vayne—of course he doesn’t understand it, but the reader can infer quite a bit. But most importantly, those ten thousand people who disappear before the last novel—those whose disappearance is still so significant on their original planet after one hundred years—ended up on this planet a thousand years ago, and that’s a big science fiction part to this fantasy tale. By allowing the science fiction to bleed more into the actual story within the pages, the interesting and more unique elements of this world are more apparent, and that intro info dump is finally believable by affecting the world.
—For instance, Roh locks a gate and leaves a hologram message—not quite “help me Obi-Wan Kenobi”, but the same tactic: Morgaine cannot figure how to unlock it, but she teaches Vayne some of the basic controls. She doesn’t teach him the what, merely the how. It’s like telling Vayne nothing of computers except how to control-alt-delete a computer off. He knows how to do what Morgaine wants him to, but not why it works or what he is doing, or even the name of the object he interacts with. His bafflement at Morgaine’s fiddling is wonderful for the reader because they can inherently infer what she is doing—trying some key commands and common passwords hopelessly in frustration at Roh locking her out—but Vayne doesn’t. It lets the reader feel like they know more than Vayne in a way that doesn’t rely on an omniscient narrator. In later books, Cherryh does this by having chapters devoted to different characters that are acting in the same situation, but this tactic is also really good.
—In short, here it is apparent that this is science fiction told as fantasy, where the last novel is really all fantasy.

4. This story is built well. Instead of having the exciting first action occur off-scene—like Vayne murdering his brother in the last book—Jherun discovers the tomb, confronts Roh, and slashes Fwar’s face on-scene, which directly leads to her falling into Morgaine and Vayne’s hands, also on-scene. It really helps to see the action in the story. Also, by spending so much time on Jherun at the start, the world is fleshed out by the time Vayne and Morgaine arrive. It’s a more memorable worldbuilding than the last novel’s listing of clans and their characteristics. When they get to new places, contrast shows what the new places are, rather than Cherryh having to tell too much.

5. The theme of this novel is less about identity and more about trust. Morgaine and Roh both use others for their means, but trust and assumptions are the central focus of the story. The Marshlanders and barrows men trust Morgaine to free them, but she plans to do nothing like that. Rather, she manipulates their hopes to use them brutally for her own ends. When they realize the truth about her, they attack her en masse and lose handily to her science fiction weaponry. She has a mission and duty, she is driven to forgo all others for the sake of her mission, and she cannot trust any person as she is the last survivor of her team. It’s a terrible portrait of somebody with a single-minded purpose. It’s a warning about obsession and the lengths one goes to with priorities, and it all rests on the questions of trust.

6. The one part that didn’t make much sense is Roh seeing through Vayne’s deception and still trusting him in the end. My assumption is that Roh thinks Vayne not a threat, which aligns with Vayne not killing him earlier. But it is striking and puzzling when Roh invites Vayne through the gate because it doesn’t feel like it quite fits. Is it because Roh considers Vayne simple and thinks he can manipulate or trust in that? Is it because Roh is busy with guiding the whole world's population through the gate? Is Roh flush with victory and over-confident in that moment?

7. In all, I enjoyed the book, but it’s not as profound as some of her others. This is an adventure tale wrapped up in a fairly evident warning against obsession. I guess it’s probably good young adult literature, but not very enlightening or complex for me today. I typically leave Cherryh novels contemplating things like intelligence, the echoes of our personal pasts, the importance of cultural history, or appropriate levels of restrictions on human behavior. Here, the novel left me with no real burning question or topic. But I’m willing to forgive this lack of an idea rolling around in my head days later because the story is so well told and the mood is believable and consistent. At least first novel’s horrid intro info dump's second half is absent here.

Gate of Ivrel by CJ Cherryh

1. The beginning of this novel is difficult to get through: so self-indulgent in that density of unknown names in the intro info dump—fifteen or sixteen made-up fantasy names in a page and a half. Your reader has not been given the chance to know or care yet! This is the worst intro info dump I’ve read. If I wasn’t curious about Cherryh’s first novel because I've fallen in love with some of her others, I would not have read any more than a couple of pages.

2. A part of that intro info dump describes the background for the world, and another the background for the story. If you must have separate backgrounds for both, maybe they need to change. So, it’s a science fiction world that has collapsed back into fantasy—though here that familiar ubi sunt motif is portrayed as paranoia or lust for power rather than curiosity or awe or frustration. This split is not Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, but more like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which has just a single sentence showing the post-nuclear war context. And that’s interesting in the abstract. But in the specifics of this book, with one science fiction character hiding everything from many fantasy characters, it comes off confused—the context of these time-warping gates being built and people failing them may be interesting, but the story of a quest to close one of them is restricted from her intro's premise. She didn’t use that work she put into world building, so the novel comes off discongruous.

3. The writing is bad. There is a tendency in fantasy to overdo the cadence and wording of the work: “Lo, thusly spaketh your Lorde” type stuff. Cherryh here isn’t that bad, but it’s bad going that direction. The word “hi” is used throughout in situations like “she rode hi the mountain Irvel”, or “he put his helm hi his head.” Ugh. Horrid.

4. The story entertains well though. It’s a fantasy quest and chase where everything keeps going wrong: the main character accidentally kills his brother and gets banished right off the bat, then he is forced to work with his religion’s devil and gets Stockholm Syndrome, he gets poisoned, he gets captured, he is encouraged to suicide, he narrowly misses being sucked out of his dimension, he is shot at more times than I can count, his body is almost stolen from him by a soul that uses other’s bodies to continue living, he loses the key to closing the gate, he almost breaks his oath, and he’s almost left behind at the end. It’s not a pleasant quest for him. Remarkably, Cherryh doesn’t use deus ex machinas to free him from all these situations—his freedom and safety comes about from as many diverse influences as his dangers do. And, like Gawain and the Green Knight, dealing with the cold and snow in armor is almost more of an antagonist than any character.

5. The world is built through showing over time. Despite the intro info dump, it’s a growing familiarity as these names are used in the story itself. And, as implied above, the parts of the world she does include in her story are important and have effects, which really helps it all stick together well. Nothing is forgotten, except the science fiction undertones laid out in the intro.

6. So, in all, not my favorite Cherryh novel by a long, long shot. It’s bad. The theme deals with identity and community, and the story hits at some early strengths that Cherryh will build on later—also, she does begin to leave out unimportant things in a way that hints at her later, tight voice. But to see the progression she went through from here, in 1976, to Downbelow Station in 1981 is staggering. And it’s hard work and practice that got her there: she published something like 14 books over that time period and had a few of them written before her first publication here.