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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
In Destroyer (2005) and Pretender (2006) C. J. Cherryh continues her exploration of loyalty, family ties, feudal devotion, and personal friendship. Further recurrent themes include the community cut off from broader human culture, and the solitary human who takes on alien characteristics so as to serve as the human interface with otherness. The large, empathetic companion animal, the professional judge/assassin, constant travel, and the shifting environment of jump space are other familiar images. The special emphasis here is on the ties that bind in Cherryh's social and physical universe. The essay argues in particular that the author's aim is to contrast a modern conception of friendship, founded in friendly feeling, with a more classical conception, philia, and that her environmental consciousness has developed over the years.
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Carolyn Janice Cherry, born in 1942, has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since the mid-1970s, when DAW Books, under Donald A. Wollheim, accepted three completed works in succession--Gate of Ivrel (1976), Brothers of Earth (1976), and Hunter of Worlds (1977)--and gave her an advance to work on a three-volume novel The Faded Sun (1978-79). The name 'C. J. Cherryh' was chosen by her editor, apparently (and oddly) to disguise her gender and make her seem exotic. She was a classical scholar by training, at Oklahoma and Johns Hopkins universities, and has been a high-school teacher in Oklahoma. Although her literary output includes short stories, (1) she has usually preferred a larger canvas.
Apart from a parahistorical pastiche, The Paladin (1988), set in a kind of medieval Japan but with no pretence at historical accuracy, Cherryh's work is divided between hard science fiction and fantasy, though some of her books, overtly given a medieval or primitive setting, are actually placed within a more solidly science-fictional universe. My own tastes lie with the SF (even if her fantasy is more thoughtful and original than almost anything else written recently in that genre), and it is this, and particularly the Foreigner sequence, that I shall discuss in the present article. Much of that SF is linked, often very loosely, with a detailed Future History in which colonists and the crews of interstellar spacecraft create new societies at odds with each other, with a variety of non-human species, and with their distant home world, Earth. The 'Company War', in progress or in retrospect, dominates many of these stories, in an internal chronology from Hellburner (1992) to Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983).
The most famous of C. J. Cherryh's novels, two with Hugo Awards, are Down-below Station (1981, written to provide the back story to Merchanter's Luck, 1982), Port Eternity (1982), and Cyteen (1988), but many others also have their staunch admirers: on the SF side, The Faded Sun (1978-79), Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983), the Chanur sequence (1982, 1984-86, 2000), Rimrunners (1989), Heavy Time (1991), Hellburner (1992), Tripoint (1994), Finity's End (1997), Rider at the Gate (1995), and Cloud's Rider (1996), and even the most recent Gene Wars sequence, although its first volume, Hammerfall (2001), strikes many readers as unendurably slow as its heroes trek backwards and forwards across a vermin-infested desert; on the fantasy side, Ealdwood (1981, 1983), Rusalka (1989-91), Faery in Shadow (1994), and the Fortress sequence (1995-2006); the Morgaine sequence, which includes her earliest published work, is fantasy against the background of a wholly unearthly science (1976, 1978, 1979, 1988). Her earliest work (The Faded Sun and the Morgaine sequences aside) had to be compressed within the boundaries of single short books: Hunter of Worlds (1977), Serpent's Reach (1980), Wave without a Shore (1981), Port Eternity (1982), Merchanter's Luck (1982), Voyager in Night (1984), and Cuckoo's Egg (1985). (2)
As the appetite for larger explorations of created worlds has grown more obvious, and publishers' confidence along with it, Cherryh has usually preferred much longer works, often mistakenly called 'trilogies' rather than 'three-volume novels'. Sometimes these longer works evoke a little too much the tedium of months-long voyages backwards and forwards through the dark or across the sands, and explore a little too lovingly the tortuous reasonings of whatever character she has chosen as her chief viewpoint on the world. Even the longueurs, in retrospect, will usually prove significant. At any rate, the shortest novels (such as Voyager in Night, Serpent's Reach, Hunter of Worlds) are ones that many readers would gladly see extended, although there are doubtless even denser worlds and stories lying in wait that Cherryh will prefer to develop. Maybe she will instead make the earlier ones available as 'shared worlds' (like the Merovingen medievalist SF stemming from Angel with the Sword (1985), or the fantasy Hells dreamt up in collaboration with Janet Morris and others).
Cherryh's alien species, like Poul Anderson's, have social and ethical systems founded in alien biologies, and thereby help to highlight features of our own biological and cultural natures. The oxygen-breathing aliens are mostly, for good biological reasons as well as dramatic ones, humanoid, though with very different ancestries. (3) The only exceptions are the hive intelligences of Serpent's Reach and the lizards of Forty Thousand in Gehenna, both of which communicate without words. Methane-breathers seem to have no common form, except that they are almost wholly incomprehensible to oxygen-breathing humanoids.
Foreigners
The Foreigner sequence buds off from Cherryh's mainline Future History and is never likely to be woven back into it. We are to suppose that a near-future Earth, unable after 'the Company War' concluded in Downbelow Station to control any of the starships and remote colonies founded out towards Tau Ceti and beyond (and also unable to penetrate the worlds of the non-human Compact described in the Chanur novels), is sending out a colony ship in another, unnamed direction. Something goes wrong in hyperspace, and the colonists eventually find themselves entirely elsewhere, in orbit around an inhabited, alien world, and seriously at odds with the long-term crew of the starship that has transported them. It is with the relations between colonists, crew, and the alien atevi that the sequence is concerned, as we see them through the eyes and memory of Bren Cameron, appointed as ambassador and interpreter (paidhi) between human colonists and those native to the world they have--not quite accidentally--invaded: the atevi, tall, black-skinned, golden-eyed. (4)
Some features of the imagined world are echoes of Cherryh's earlier visions; some modify that vision. In the earlier novels passing through hyperspace (Cherryh's preferred SF technique for avoiding generation-long passage times between her scattered colonies) was either instantaneous, or else a period of madness that humans (but not the hani, the lion-like aliens of Chanur) needed drugs to endure. Over time, the passage-time has become the entry to a profounder world, one in which some species thrive, and all may catch some glimpse of hidden pathways or the thoughts of distant friends (Port Eternity, Chanur's Legacy, Tripoint). In the Foreigner sequence it is a much more ordinary affair, slowing thought and perhaps changing the laws of motion just a little, but allowing no respite from the tedium of travel.
Travel is itself so common a feature of Cherryh's novels as to require some explanation: her characters are always in motion, from here to there and often back again. Anyone not in motion soon loses touch with what is happening. On the world of the atevi, as in earlier novels, there are large, loyal beasts who live alongside the central, sapient aliens: in The Faded Sun these are empaths; in Rider at the Gate they are the 'nighthorses', who, like other creatures of that world, can radiate illusions and safeguard their riders from them; in Hammerfall and The Forge of Heaven they are nano-engineered beshti; in Foreigner and its fellows mechieti are a smaller presence, (5) retaining that same combination of comfort and extreme danger, and helping Cameron to a better understanding of the species that he must deal with.
Cameron is the most developed version of a theme yet more important in Cherryh's work: the solitary human surrendered, by chance or by appointment, to be the working interface with aliens. (6) It may be that this theme reflects her own sense of herself, as a storyteller set at...
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