More Cherryh Rereads
May. 9th, 2006 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI was still craving Cherryh after finishing the Foreigner marathon, so over the next week or two I re-read Downbelow Station, Merchanter's Luck, Rimrunners, Tripoint, and Finity's End, together making up the main strand of the Alliance/Union series. (There's also the prequel duology of Heavy Time and Hellburner, and Cyteen, and a bunch of other loosely connected books that seem to be in the same Universe if not the same century or region.)
Downbelow Station is a big, complicated book, the story of Pell Station over months of war, with multiple threads and viewpoints and intricate, shifting webs of loyalty. Cherryh's distinctive prose style is rather less in evidence than in some of her other books, but it isn't exactly a light or easy read. This time through, I did at least feel that I was following what was going on. The physical arrangement of the rotating station may not actually work, but it's a vividly realized setting.
The other books are much smaller in scope, each focusing on a single ship; each of the last three is the story of a single outsider adjusting to a new ship and crew, while in Merchanter's Luck the outsider belongs to the ship, but he acquires a new crew. Bits of the ongoing war happen in the books, but most of it is background to the struggles of ordinary spacers trying to get by; Finity's End does bring home some of the human cost of the big offstage battles.
Tripoint ends with a ship setting off on a long journey, apparently off the map on which most of the series gets place; as far as I can tell, we never find out what happened to them after that. It almost seems as though there should have been a sequel, but there wasn't.
Downbelow Station is a big, complicated book, the story of Pell Station over months of war, with multiple threads and viewpoints and intricate, shifting webs of loyalty. Cherryh's distinctive prose style is rather less in evidence than in some of her other books, but it isn't exactly a light or easy read. This time through, I did at least feel that I was following what was going on. The physical arrangement of the rotating station may not actually work, but it's a vividly realized setting.
The other books are much smaller in scope, each focusing on a single ship; each of the last three is the story of a single outsider adjusting to a new ship and crew, while in Merchanter's Luck the outsider belongs to the ship, but he acquires a new crew. Bits of the ongoing war happen in the books, but most of it is background to the struggles of ordinary spacers trying to get by; Finity's End does bring home some of the human cost of the big offstage battles.
Tripoint ends with a ship setting off on a long journey, apparently off the map on which most of the series gets place; as far as I can tell, we never find out what happened to them after that. It almost seems as though there should have been a sequel, but there wasn't.