More early Cherryh
May. 26th, 2026 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellI think I last checked in on this after reading Gate of Ivrel, which I thought was a pretty average planetary romance. After that:
Well of Shiuan: Now this is something special. Suddenly we're talking about deep time, insane aristocrats, and a doomed planet that cannot be saved by some last-minute feat of technological magic. It's very much more Tolkien than Burroughs. Possibly the best middle book of a trilogy I've ever read.
Fires of Azeroth: Sort of Tolkien-like again, with the qhal sort of playing the part of wood elves. A decent conclusion to the series, but badly overshadowed by the prologue, which is a parting shot from Shiuan and just served as a reminder of how good book 2 was.
Wave Without a Shore: And then into one of the more obscure corners of the Alliance-Union continuity, in fact so obscure that you can't really tell that it is part of the Alliance-Union continuity. This takes place on a planet where everyone is ranked by brainpower and the protagonist is the smartest man on the planet, competing with the other elites to impose his own version of reality on the rest of society until events intervene.
For a while this felt like it could have been an attempt to write like Ursula K. Le Guin, until about halfway through when it suddenly turns into a standard Cherryh story of a man who goes among aliens, absorbs their mindset, and becomes a mediator between societies. Le Guin would have found time to deconstruct the whole alleged meritocracy, but Cherryh's hero remains objectively ranked #1, he's just found a new use for his talents.
Also, I've commented before that human women tend to be unlucky or incompetent in Cherryh stories where there are aliens, and this is the most extreme example yet. There are three named women in this book, and two of them exist solely to draw a contrast with the protagonist's utter brilliance, and get killed off as soon as their part in the story is done.
What I should be doing at this point is checking out Exile's Gate, but when I was looking up information about the Morgaine books, I learned about a book previously unknown to me called Witchfires of Leth, and that diverted me onto a new reading project...
Well of Shiuan: Now this is something special. Suddenly we're talking about deep time, insane aristocrats, and a doomed planet that cannot be saved by some last-minute feat of technological magic. It's very much more Tolkien than Burroughs. Possibly the best middle book of a trilogy I've ever read.
Fires of Azeroth: Sort of Tolkien-like again, with the qhal sort of playing the part of wood elves. A decent conclusion to the series, but badly overshadowed by the prologue, which is a parting shot from Shiuan and just served as a reminder of how good book 2 was.
Wave Without a Shore: And then into one of the more obscure corners of the Alliance-Union continuity, in fact so obscure that you can't really tell that it is part of the Alliance-Union continuity. This takes place on a planet where everyone is ranked by brainpower and the protagonist is the smartest man on the planet, competing with the other elites to impose his own version of reality on the rest of society until events intervene.
For a while this felt like it could have been an attempt to write like Ursula K. Le Guin, until about halfway through when it suddenly turns into a standard Cherryh story of a man who goes among aliens, absorbs their mindset, and becomes a mediator between societies. Le Guin would have found time to deconstruct the whole alleged meritocracy, but Cherryh's hero remains objectively ranked #1, he's just found a new use for his talents.
Also, I've commented before that human women tend to be unlucky or incompetent in Cherryh stories where there are aliens, and this is the most extreme example yet. There are three named women in this book, and two of them exist solely to draw a contrast with the protagonist's utter brilliance, and get killed off as soon as their part in the story is done.
What I should be doing at this point is checking out Exile's Gate, but when I was looking up information about the Morgaine books, I learned about a book previously unknown to me called Witchfires of Leth, and that diverted me onto a new reading project...
