The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

This story strolls from strength to strength. It strikes me as similar in some ways to The Fifth Season in that both stories feature a narrator of immense age and unreliable perspective, or biased perspective, and both stories’ narrator ends up being a character in the book. Is this a thing that authors are doing now?

This story builds a wide world in a small amount of pages. The gods are everywhere, lesser and greater gods, some working together in alliances, fighting other alliances, scheming for more political power over potential prayer givers. Some gods get great power from human sacrifices, some gods choose other paths to personal fitness. Human relations with the gods often involve deals: humans will provide X, gods will provide Y. Spiritual capitalism, or bartering, from small things like a willing human sacrifice for a god providing surprise in a key battle, to big things like protecting an entire border of a country from raiding for fealty to the god. And on top of this layer of godly court politics sit multiple layers of human court politics. Leckie effortlessly weaves these together because she tells a story that involves all strata of her world’s population.

The narrator, a god, is eventually realized in the novel as a character that the human characters interact with. This ties the human story of Eolo and Muwat into the spiritual story of the gods. Eolo and Muwat are in a world where the gods act regularly and openly on behalf of their chosen people groups, which keeps the gods in mind during the human parts. Falling out of this split focus on the gods and the humans, the time-scale for either half of the story similarly spans different realms. Leckie tells the gods’ story over thousands of years, and the humans story over just a few—though, as the gods interact with humans other than Eolo and Muwat, to some extent the whole of human history in this part of this world is exposed.

And that’s a part of how she weaves so much information in so effortlessly: instead of massive info-dumps, Leckie relies on the narrator touching on all aspects, scopes, scales of the story told regularly. It can be a little confusing at first trying to determine the thrust of the story, but by showing all sides of it consistently—regularly returning to the gods, the humans, and the specifics of Eolo and Muwat—the three weave together in a complex but clear picture.

The other technique Leckie uses to weave this all together so that it makes sense: she tells interesting stories. The story of the spear meant to find its mark is more than just an explanation of the gods’ reluctance to speak, it’s a memorable parable that I still contemplate long after finishing the novel. This seems so simple, but its important: instead of throwing away explanations that illuminate characters, places, or situations, Leckie crafts microfictional interludes that stand on their own as solid stories, but serve the rest of the story in showing some aspect of the characters. Leckie spends a lot of time showing through telling—she shows why the gods do not want to speak untruth by telling the reader a story about a spear meant to find its mark. Does that make sense, or am I just confusing telling and showing? I think Leckie blends telling and showing.

A very good novel, one I took a little time to dive into, but once I groked the interrelated nature of the three-fold narrative (another similarity to The Fifth Season), I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to just about everybody. Leckie is still adding to her string of good novels.

Provenance by Ann Leckie

This book focuses in on the life of one character—her family struggles, her difficulties with money, her hairbrained scheme to jailbreak her adopted mother’s political rival’s son. But it also manages to simultaneously focus on the larger, galactic political situation—after the Ancillary events, the AI demand citizenship in the treaty, so everybody is going to come together and debate it: the Raadchai, the Presger, the AI, and the Geck, at least. But the book focuses on Ingray, and her interiority.

As such, the strength or weakness of the book is based on the strength or weakness of Ingray. I found them to be a weak character. Not a character who has weakness, but a weakly drawn character—perhaps it doesn’t help to have a simple, coming of age main character, and then have your other characters point out how simple Ingray is. The starship captain says something like, “I know you, you’re going to panic for five minutes, then grasp the situation and think of something unexpected to do.” And Ingray does, again and again.

Yet, the fact that the panic almost always takes the same form lets the portrayal of Ingray down, removes some potential complexity from them, makes them more simple. Simply put, Ingray cries every time she is put under stress, freezes up, then sucks it up and holds her chin up and gets stuff done. Ingray often finds the strength inside themself to do this, but only after an initial panic and cry. That reaction didn’t start to bother me until the last third of the book when I realized that she rarely reacts otherwise no matter the seriousness of the situation—an attempt at her life? Good thing she already had a panic and cry about the coming confrontation with her would be assassin, because she was able to chin up and get it over with. Facing task master mother after long trip abroad, coming back broke with a fugitive in tow? Get the cry in on the way home, then face her stone faced. Exchanging herself as a hostage for a pack of schoolchildren caught in the crossfire of a small invasion? Sit down with the other hostages and have a good cry, then start thinking about how to escape.

My problem with this mono-reaction: going to the same well to draw tension into your novel starts to fade after time. George Martin fakes character deaths again and again, and I don’t believe him that characters are dead anymore. It takes the bite out of death. Here, I don’t really care that Ingray is crying again, just skimming a couple of sentences or paragraphs until she’s over it and gets onto the solution to the problem—no tension added from her crying. Her crying shows a realistic, relatable reaction profile, but until the second to last conflict, it’s the only one Ingray shows. Her coming of age becomes acting first, telling her mother “no”, then crying afterwards. And this new reaction unlocks a third one, telling her competitive brother “no”, and then not crying afterwards—the final conflict in the novel.

These split-focus books—the interior emotions of a single character who isn’t some all-powerful emperor played against a wider political background that intrudes in increasing ways throughout the book—strike me as sensational. NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season pulls it off brilliantly, as does Leckie’s Provenance here. However, that style of narrative does somewhat depend on how well the main character holds the interest and sympathy of the reader. And here, Ingray was just too one-sided for me to invest in like I invested in Jemisin’s Essun. Yes, Ingray changes, but only finally in the last ten to twenty pages, too little too late.

The theme of the book examines vestiges, historical artifacts, in their present relationship with society. In America, something like the Liberty Bell probably wasn't actually rung out after the Declaration of Independence was Signed, but it was there at the time, and so we respect the cracked hunk of metal. Leckie tries to dive more deeply into these relationships between artifacts, the truth of their historicity, their role and place in society, and our personal feeling about them. It's a fascinating discussion that held my interest throughout the novel. She uses the word "Vestiges" to cover post-cards and declarations of independence alike—as well as all manned of keepsakes and mementos and souvenirs in between. I'm not sure she comes to any new idea here, but she examines the concept and concludes that they are, ultimately, replaceable and repairable, but still somehow invaluable to a culture. So, though the reflection doesn't provide any major insights, it does trace pathways of thought that broaden the discussion around artifacts, rather than deepen them. Some characters try to use vestiges for racial arguments, some for personal glorification, some for gravitas, some for pure monetary profit, and Ingray sees all these characters in her homespun adventure and reflects on them all.

I found this a fascinating world and a fascinating story, but I found Ingray to be a flat character that let the whole thing down a little.

Chanur Series by CJ Cherryh

This series has five novels that tell three interconnected stories: the first book, the middle three (published as three books, but they're really just one), and the last one. This Space Opera series tells an adventure tale of inter-station traders travelling faster-than-light to try and make a buck or two, becoming increasingly engaged in politics, and eventually coming to grips with their political reality as well as their personal reality. The stories focus on the characters and use action to change them or confirm their natures. Unlike other Cherryh novels, the focus of these is almost exclusively on single characters per book, though Chur, Hallan, and Tiar also get some alone-time on-screen, mostly due to their unique abilities. The story starts with, and focuses on, characters from a feline race of intelligent creatures: Pyanfar for the first four books, and Hilfy for the last. And Cherryh doesn't leave it there: the secondary Hani characters who play the antagonist role in the first novel come back in the second story arc and become, if not heroes, then at least sympathetic. Three things about Cherryh’s writing that really come to the fore in these five novels.

First, the laws of physics and tendencies of economics help build the world and tell the story. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article calls these novels, "Unusually realistic examples of space opera", and that's a great way to put it. Technology and the laws of physics deeply influence the possibilities of the economic and political realities within this universe. For instance, time dilation exists in this universe⁠—unlike other Space Opera tales that ignore hundred year old physics. The speed of light has importance here: as a Chanur ship approaches a station, the light from their dropping out of FTL hasn't reached the station yet, and they have an opportunity to monitor the traffic and communications within system, light hours old information, before anybody else knows they've arrived. This fills in the context of this new situation they have dropped into. Then, the delay between sending and receiving a message⁠—due to the speed of light⁠—plays an important role both in perception of situations, and in decision making. Also, the political organization that guides these alien species trading together is just that, a loose political affiliation that tries to regulate trade for everybody, rather than a political force. (Or, at least it starts out that way...) Cherryh rationalizes the economic and political intrigue in ways that, if you like Cherryh’s other writing, you will love here. It absolutely feels "unusally realistic".

Second, the sparseness of her voice. I don’t know how to explain this adequately. So, her narrative follows her characters who don’t describe things they already know, don’t explain as much as dwell on and recontextualize pieces to puzzles they’re given. Let me try an analogy: sometimes, when I read a Greek Myth, I think, “Huh. I don’t think I get that one? Why? And why was that seen as entertaining?” Then later something happens in my life that recontextualizes it, and I go back and re-read it, and it’s newly emotionally effective, or logically understandable as a story. Cherryh has a tendency towards that type of writing. And these books more than a lot of her other books. That’s not a bad thing. I like books that require some effort from the reader, some contemplation from them.

Third, and I know I’ve said it before: she writes aliens well. Really well. Throughout the series, alien species tend towards more and more screentime, and understanding of them grows⁠—but never in leaps and bounds, never in a way that contradicts earlier knowledge, or doesn’t coalesce into a whole. The Compact (Yes, this absolutely is Space Opera, the central organization of trade is called The Compact) is made up of a methane side and a oxygen side⁠—each space station split down the middle. And from the start, when Pyanfar knows nothing, the T’ca and Knnn are entirely obtuse. They’re scary. But, by the end of the fourth novel, by the end of the second of three stories, some understanding is present. They’ve been seen on screen enough times now that Pyanfar becomes more comfortable around them, and hence the reader is allowed the same cautious thawing.

How does she write her aliens well? This question drove me to look up her writer’s advice and compare it to her work here. In her, “Creating a World and Culture”, she states, “First, your environment. That becomes a biological given. It produces the beings you're writing about. Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better.” She then goes on to talk about how the alien species do things that humans either focus on or spend time doing⁠—finding differences between us and them, and using those as jumping-off points to further creation: eating, dying, questioning, modifying spaces for shelter, communicating with others, and believing about the afterlife. Out of these basic questions, and a knowledge of biology, her aliens come.

So, this seems to be a case of designing in a notebook, and then cherry picking the important or interesting data for the novel itself⁠—rather than a massive intro-info-dump, or an info-dump halfway through. By the end of the fifth novel, fundamental things about Stsho gender phasing biology remain unknown; the Kif tendency to push and prod and judge solely on their own morals with little cultural relativity has hinted at, but not explained, a homeworld culture never seen in the books; Hallan Meras’ encounter with the loading cart reveals more about the T’ca and dockside regulations, but nowhere near enough for Pyanfar's cautious thawing to take place for him or Hilfy.

In short, she keeps the aliens alien by:
• Not explaining them, except in what the characters know and rely on in dealing with them;
• Letting her characters curiously question the alien natures and discover pieces that only lead to more questions;
• Discovering and expanding on the ways they fundamentally differ from humanity in the way a bear or mosquito does, including communication, eating, death, etc. She takes all these one-step further, at least. Ok, so the Kif are exclusively carnivores, so they're competitive like earthly carnivores. But where Cherryh distinguishes herself is taking that further: therefore, when the meet an unexpectedly strong outsider, they're going to respect and follow and learn from and feel threatened by and threaten;
• She designs them first, and then never reveals the whole design.
In looking at it this way, this technique apes the old adage, “don’t show the monster,” which I agree with if the story wants the monster to stay monstrous. But she applies this adage to things that are not monsters, aliens, and they read as alien. Again, in Greek Myth, some of the magic of Myth is that the gods, titans, and other immortals operate on a different biological, moral, and spiritual level, and that constant mystery and surprise helps Myth beguile. For instance, Cherryh never explains humans. Tully is a known quantity by the end of book four, but his people remain mysterious to Pyanfar and Hilfy throughout. Cherryh rides this almost fourth-wall breaking line, by relying on the human reader to input their knowledge of humans to contextualize the novel's humans' actions, knowledge her main characters clearly lack. Brilliant.

My one single critique arrises from the way the first and second books relate. At the end of book one, many things seem solved in an optimistic way. Humans have discovered The Compact and Pyanfar has an exclusive contract to trade with them, saving her clan and culture, and the whole Compact, really. But the second book ignores this optimism and opens on a pessimistic note with Pyanfar held hostage and released by possibly different unknown parties, with her trading license revoked and her stranded. Reading these back-to-back like I did, this jarring shift took a few pages for me to understand, and at the end of the series it still feels like a bit of a cheap writer’s trick, like Cherryh wrote herself into an overly solved position, and had to hit a reset button to get the story back off the ground. That’s not to say that the middle three novels, composing a story by themselves, didn’t absolutely engage and engross me, just that a part of the story makes little sense by the end of the novel, Cherryh doesn’t explore that aspect enough for me to feel emotionally invested in Pyanfar’s misfortune, though I am still curious about it. It's almost as if the first book didn't need to be in the series, or was a rough draft.

In short, these novels show a lot of the strengths of Cherryh’s writing, and some of the weaknesses. Though it’s a Space Opera Adventure that I adore, I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody. I can think of two or three people that I can’t wait to tell about these books, but in requiring so much from the reader, and in skipping a major plot point that, between books, shifts the whole tone from victorious to defeated, recommendations have to come with a caveat. However, wholeheartedly, I can recommend her techniques of creating alien species and populating a universe. I am floored by how well she writes aliens. Where some of her books take a few pages, or a third of the book, to start getting to a point where I can’t put it down, here each book’s pacing brilliantly starts off with a bang and continues from problem to solution to new problem consistently and I turned the pages happily, devouring these stories. Finally, the realistic feeling of the aliens is matched by the realism and rationality she puts into designing the universe and reacting to physical laws and economic tendencies that help inform the story and keep it based in our reality. Brilliant stuff.

[EDIT 2/1/2020:] The novel series does some gender role reversal. Hani women are allowed off the planet's surface, while each tribal pride's male is not. Excess men retire to reservations and must fight to the death, and win over and over again to even find a chance of getting off the reservation alive. Men who portray any divergent masculinity die immediately at the hands of traditionalists, or must be strenuously protected by their family. I find this gender reversal engaging and wonderful: instead of simply reversing the roles, Cherryh reasons out what a matriarchy might look like, and uses stereotypically masculine traits to identify reasons why men constitute the hani second sex. For instance, she calls men flighty and over-emotional⁠—phrases that some men continue to call women today. Yet, instead of just "switching the pronouns" like some unimaginative authors have done in their gender reversal tales, Cherryh reasons out what stereotypical traits of males would be construed by those two words, and the hani males are viewed as unreliable or lazy, and quick to anger or sulk, especially when denied food. Cherryh uses the same words that men have used against women for centuries, yet changes what they mean to reflect toxicly masculine tendencies. This fantastic work leads to a gender reversal tactic that I adore. I've only ever respected one other gender reversal book this much, Y: The Last Man by BK Vaughan.

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.