Present Writers: C.J. Cherryh

[mrissa]

This is the latest in a recurring series! For more about the series, please read the original post on Marta Randall, or subsequent posts on Dorothy Heydt, Barbara Hambly, Jane Yolen, Suzy McKee Charnas, Sherwood Smith, Nisi Shawl, Pamela Dean, Gwyneth Jones , Caroline Stevermer, Patricia C. Wrede, Lois McMaster Bujold, Nancy Kress, Diane Duane, Candas Jane Dorsey, Greer Gilman, Robin McKinley, Laurie Marks, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman,Rosemary Kirstein, Karen Joy Fowler, Susan Cooper, Ellen Klages, and Lisa Goldstein.

When I heard that C.J. Cherryh had been named SFWA Grand Master, I half-shouted, "well, it's about time!" Cherryh has been incredibly prolific for literally longer than I've been alive. She has over eighty novels and loads of short stories. She's won all the major awards. If Cherryh is not a Grand Master, the term has no meaning.

So with all that gigantic body of speculative fiction work to consider, there's always the question: where do you even start? I have several answers.

1. The Pride of Chanur. The first of the Chanur series, this has strong family themes, interesting aliens, lots of derring-do...basically all the things you might want in a Cherryh novel. For those of you who love cats, the fact that the protagonist's species is similar to felines may be a bonus, but if you're not a starry-eyed cat person, it's not the kind of cat content that gets annoying.
2. Finity's End. Did somebody say strong family themes? The Alliance-Union books are full of families having family drama at FTL speeds. This one happens to be a favorite for me, just because of the shape of the characters or maybe because I read it at just the right time. It's sharper and less murky than some of the others, and the sense of space is amazing in it.
3. Foreigner. This is the beginning of a series that is still ongoing; book 21 is due out later this year. Don't worry, you can stop at any time! Seriously, it's divided into trilogies, each of which is doing its own thoughtful and related thing. There's a lot of science fiction that posits that what humanity has over other species and/or robots is our capacity to love. The Foreigner series actually considers that: what would it look like if an alien species had similar but different primary emotional wiring, what if it was not just "aliens are broken, those poor aliens who Know Not Love," but rather "here's how they work that's related, here are the places they and humans could trip over the differences." I find it fascinating, and I love watching the relationships that work in their own weird ways.

There are plenty of other good places to start if you have an interest in Cherryh's considerations of love, loyalty, humanity and the other, but those are my recommendations. I'm really glad that she's still around giving us more ideas every year.

Comments

[arkessian]

I keep forgetting how old I am. I discovered CJ Cherryh when I was allowed (in the Lower 6th, so age 18) to leave school at lunchtime on a Friday, and could travel home by an indirect set of buses that took me through Birmingham City Centre, where I could stop off at the lovely but long-gone Hudsons bookshop. An assistant who knew I was always looking for SF by women pointed me to a bunch of yellow spines and said: she's a woman. Ignore the initials.

And so I bought Brothers of Earth and Hunters of Worlds and Gate of Ivrel. And (almost) everything else she has written since.

[ellarien]

Oh, I remember that Hudson's from my student days in Birmingham! It must have expanded into several adjoining units, because on one level parts of it were on opposite sides of the (small, pedestrian-only) street, but downstairs it was all one huge space. Central Birmingham was like that. It became a Dillons later on (by the mid-1990s) but when I started visiting Birmingham again in the 00s it was gone, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for the site now. But I think the one-volume edition of the Morgaine trilogy that was my first exposure to Cherryh came from the much smaller campus bookshop, which was also a Hudson's back in the early 80s and is now, sadly, a Costa Coffee.

[arkessian]

Burlington Arcade, I think, off New Street? I fear it's a Starbucks now.

[davidgillon]

Just named Chronicles of Morgaine (of which Gate of Ivrel is a part) when Sean Grigsby was for favourite science fantasy books earlier. And all three of those would have been among my early Cherryhs.

[davidgillon]

For someone who does lots of writing in series she's covered so much ground over the years. Personal favourites:

The Paladin : exiled warrior takes on traumatized teen as a student, because she keeps shooting arrows at him when he says no.

The Goblin Mirror : two half-trained princelings from a backwater kingdom get caught up in a half-trained witch's quest for vengeance against the goblin queen. Sort of fits in her Slavic fantasy phase, but not as explicitly as the Rusalka series.

Fortress in the Eye of Time : An aging wizard wishes for one of the vanished Sidhe Lords to stop his ancient enemy returning, and gets an innocent.

Arafel's Saga : from Cherryh's Celtic fantasy phase. She's one of the people who remembers dealing with the Fair Folk isn't supposed to be safe, or simple.

Cyteen : Union (from her Union-Alliance books) runs a Manhattan Project to recreate its greatest mind, and there's one brilliant child at the point of the scientific knife.

Is there any other writer with so varied an output?

[pameladean]

I blazed through early books -- the Morgaine books, the Faded Sun books, on and on, and suddenly I hit Downbelow Station and couldn't read Cherryh any more. Her prose repelled me. I don't mean that that I thought it ugly or anything of that sort. I just couldn't read it. It was as if it were in a language that didn't like me.

I sadly gave up on Cherryh until, many years later, Raphael was reading Foreigner and laughing uproariously, and finally read me the pizza scene. So I tried again and have not looked back. I still can't read Downbelow Station, though. I think Cherryh is effectually five or six writers.

P.

[mrissa]

How are you with Forty Thousand in Gehenna? I'd put that in the same bin with Downbelow Station or maybe more so, but mileage varies, so I am curious.

[oracne]

THE PRIDE OF CHANUR was my first Cherryh when I was in high school, and it led to much bingeing.

[davidgillon]

Downbelow's where her sentence structure got very run-on IIRC, I remember this as I was very conscious it was something I needed to fix in my own writing. ISTR she actually acknowledged it herself somewhere, might have been an interview in Locus, might even have been in a foreword somewhere.

[davidgillon]

There's such an interesting idea at work in that one, but I'm not certain if the reason it doesn't get more attention isn't it generates so alien a society, even if it is a human one.

[pameladean]

I have a lot of sympathy for that; it's an issue for me in my writing too. I can sually manage to read other people doing it; I think with Cherryh it must have been a combination of run-on sentences and fairly complex underlying concepts. She conveys a lot of information in a short space, much of the time.

I should try to find the interview. I've read curiously little of her own remarks about her work, given how much of her work I've read. I mean, that's the right emphasis, but still.

P.

[pameladean]

I haven't read it; and while we definitely have a copy somewhere, I can't find it on a first pass. I think somebody I talked to about it bounced off it for reasons relating to style, so I didn't ever try to read it. If I can find our copy, I'll give it a go.

P.