Alliance Union Universe (Company Wars, Era of Rapprochement, and Hinder Stars)

The AU books are a bit different from the rest of the “series” I’ve included here, as they aren’t isolated novels, but they also (almost) all work as standalones, without any context from earlier novels necessary. To this end, I also have more varied ratings across the series than I do for most others. In most series, while I may appreciate specific things about specific books, and likely have a couple that I like more/less than the others, I tend to carry over my feelings about the series as a whole into my thoughts about each individual piece. For AU, some of the books I love and some I’m lukewarm on. Overall though, there are a couple of aspects of Cherryh’s writing style that I love throughout her works, it’s just that in some cases she allows this aspect of her writing get in the way of the story/plot.

C. J. Cherryh is an absolute master of a couple of things; character development and world development, and then a concept I’ve talked about a couple of times… the ability to almost micro-focus on a very small piece of her universe, while still creating the impression of a vast and epic conflict taking place in a vast and epic setting. The best way I can describe it is if you think of an interactive digital image that starts big and you can keep clicking on a quadrant in the image to zoom further and further in. Cherryh zooms pretty far in, yet it feels like the reader can see both the bigger picture and the limited/detailed view concurrently. This ability allows Cherryh to develop intense suspense with interpersonal drama but with a backdrop of a much bigger and more epic conflict. It’s a lot like a WW2 documentary that focuses intensely on one colonel’s personal journey through a single conflict, but the drama still feels vast and epic because we know how vast and epic WW2 really was. Maybe a better (and specific) example might be the 30 for 30 short that ESPN did about George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch in a world series game at Yankee stadium shortly after 9/11. Taken out of context, it seems like a rather trivial event to document, but considered in context, especially for those of us who experienced and were impacted by 9/11, the documentary takes on a whole additional level of suspense and drama. The difference is that 9/11 happened, and we already know how immensely eventful it was, so the documentary doesn’t really need to do much to establish the context for us. In the AU books, Cherryh needs to invent and provide all of the background context necessary to make us care about the characters living through the events. What she does so masterfully is that she implies the background conflict more than she actually shows it. Cherryh isn’t actually trying to write military sci-fi, where the drama is created within the major conflict itself by having the characters take an active role in the primary conflict, and we all know that it is questionable writing to spend too much expository time telling us about the background world conflict. Cherryh’s ability to give us the perfect amount of information, usually through little snippets of dialogue or background minor developments rather than any real exposition, allows us to focus on the more personal drama of the characters without too much distraction. Often, the characters themselves are hearing about what is going on in the wider world in the same fragmented divulgences that we are. We digest the information while the POV character is also doing so, and we learn how the POV character’s personal world is impacted by the news as he/she reacts to it. This obviously also makes the character development aspect of the story even more successful for Cherry. We truly live inside the skin of the 1 or 2 main characters for a short period of their lives. Whether or not the reader ultimately likes the main character, it is easy to sympathize with him/her, because we truly understand what their mindset is and what they are going through. The fact that we have the larger backdrop in frame just helps the reader understand that broader scope and why the characters are so worked up, adding to the scale of the drama.

Cherryh’s world building is also masterful in its realism. One advantage of science fiction, when it is set in humanity’s/earth’s future, is that there is a lot of real information to take advantage of. Our solar system, galaxy, and universe already exist and, whether we’ve fully explored them or not, we know quite a bit of information that an author can use as a base for their worldbuilding. Cherryh has chosen an extremely realistic seeming future to work in. There’s no teleportation or time travel or other extreme examples of “future technology”; genetic experimentation has allowed us to extend our lives, but not without consequence; cloning and test-tube humans exist, but the technology is far from perfect, requires quite a lot of training and modifying to accomplish the desired outcomes, and is really only managed at a large corporate/governmental level. The travel speeds shown in her novels are currently impossible, but they still require an extreme voyage from one location to another fraught with peril; the list goes on. Nothing that Cherryh has told us to be true in her future stretches the bounds of suspension of disbelief. Cherryh has truly immersed herself in “speculative fiction”, but her speculation is less “what would happen if X technology existed” and more along the lines of “what will happen when humanity expands outward from Earth?

Worth noting, especially as it ties into the realism aspect, is that Cherryh gives us POVs within each of the 3 major powers throughout the series; so we see the conflict from multiple angles. She does a remarkable job in inhabiting the viewpoint of each character and gives real strength of belief as to how that character would feel about the AU political struggles between the powers. After reading all of the relevant novels, I actually feel like the general conflict and distrust between the powers exists as an objective thing. I don’t feel like 1 side is right and the other wrong. There is no good and evil. Each character has the capacity to be the hero/protagonist in their own story. It’s not a Wicked scenario, where we know 1 side is supposed to be the bad guy, but we can understand differing viewpoints. There is no “supposed to be the bad guy”, which I think makes the stories that much more real. In one novel, we can inhabit an Alliance side character so completely as to take on their viewpoint about union or earth while reading them, and then feel completely in line with Union’s viewpoint in the next.

The challenge that Cherryh sometimes runs into is inherent in what I’ve also called her strength. I love the fact that she has strong characters and prioritizes the personal/interpersonal drama over the big epic conflict, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know how the relevant incident of the epic conflict resolves. Sometimes the background conflict is just particularly exciting, and other times its impact on the characters is such that the resolution of that conflict feels momentously important. Unfortunately, the more localized aspect of the drama usually unfolds before the climax of the broader drama, and Cherryh usually cuts the story off at that point. Sometimes this works out fine (although it’s usually what keeps my ratings at a 4 instead of a 5). Other times, it has a notable negative impact on the book. I would imagine this is especially true for fans of military sci-fi or that type of novel, for whom the conflict and action are more important than the literary elements and interpersonal drama. The novels where I find this not to be an issue at all are Cyteen and Regenesis, which also happen to be my favorite of her works. In these titles, the main character is also arguably THE central character in the broader drama, so the local drama and broader conflict are inextricably linked. I was fortunate in that Regenesis was already out by the time I had read Cyteen, so I did not need to wait the 21 years for its sequel. This is not an ASOIAF situation, Cherryh is not a slow writer, she just has many different “series” that she works on, and so rarely writes direct sequels. It’s not that Cyteen is incomplete without Regenesis, but it does feel MORE complete with its sequel attached.

One tricky question many people have with regards to the AU books is where to jump in. Cherryh’s standard answer is that “just like real history”, you can read in whatever order you want. There are 2 exceptions, as Cyteen must be read before Regenesis and Heavy Time must be read before Hellburner. Personally, when authors make this sort of statement, I tend to read in publication order. I do think Downbelow Station is a great starting point as it helps establish the larger context of the struggle/animosity/confusion between the major political and military players in the universe. This background knowledge is presented to some extent in just about every novel, but I think Downbelow Station does it best. In my opinion, it’s nearly impossible for an author to truly write a series of related novels where any reading is equal to any other. The first book the author writes will invariably focus more on establishing the broader context and setting, because the author can be positive that the reader knows nothing. In later books, the author has already given us some of the background information, and it would not only waste space, but test a reader’s patience if we had to continuously be reminded of things we already know. I find that, even if you don’t need to read in any given sequence in order to understand what is happening, you definitely get more out of a story if you know everything that is available to you at that point. It’s worth noting that I personally first encountered Cherryh with The Faded Sun trilogy, but these novels have little to no connection to the group of books included in this review, and I think they’d need to be considered separately. I think the Faded Sun trilogy is a good introduction to Cherryh’s style of writing, but it doesn’t cover any of the history or context needed for getting into the Company Wars novels.

Notable books:

o Downbelow Station (4*): I include this in notable books A) because it won a Hugo. B) because I think it should be the jumping in point for the company wars and related novels. DBS is noteworthy because there is heavy human/alien interaction, which is only the case in a couple of the AU books. Most other instances are in novellas or short stories, or the interaction is fairly limited (such as on Cyteen). The Downers are a well-developed species with enough agency and personality to make them worthwhile characters. The conflict is about as grand in scope as any of the AU books, with definitely more action, and the characters feel like real people. Cherryh maintains her ability to give us a very personal story within the confines of a much larger plot, though the character set may be a bit expanded from some of the other novels. What kept me from giving a 5* review is simply that the novel isn’t as engrossing as it could be. I’m not sure if I was still just getting used to Cherryh’s style, or if I was young enough to not be as capable of appreciating its particular assets, but I really liked the book, I’m just not sure I loved it.

o Cyteen & Regenesis (5*): I mentioned these 2 before, but they are my favorite of the AU novels. I think Ari 2 is the most intriguing of all of Cherryh’s characters. Instead of us getting into the head of someone of middling importance who happens to have a major impact on the novel’s plot for some reason or other, Ari is the most important character in the set. She isn’t all powerful, or really powerful at all to start, but we know that is where her arc is headed because that is the whole point of her existence. I think this is a bit more interesting that the standard nobody who rises to importance because of destiny or some such thing. AE2 is literally built to inherit her geneparent’s title and position, but despite everyone knowing this is where it is going, watching AE2 work through her odd privilege/restriction lifestyle while trying to be her own person, while everyone else is trying to mold her into someone else is a really fascinating dichotomy (quadchotomy? double dichotomy?). I think the plot is well paced and the suspense well built, and I simply found that, in this case, Cherryh’s mastery of her craft melded with a riveting story that finally matched her writing skills. For most of Cherryh’s work, I find her writing skill is her standard bearer, and plot sits in the passenger seat (in the backseat in a couple of instances). In Cyteen and Regenesis, this was not an issue. I know many don’t find Regenesis to quite live up to its predecessor, but I read them back to back and honestly thought they worked as a single story without any problematic break or shift in quality for me.

o Finity’s End (5*): It’s harder for me to put my finger on why FE is a 5* relative to most of the other novels in the AU universe. I don’t think the plot or context of the novel is a cut above the others. The writing is Cherryh’s normal brilliance. It just grabbed me and held on more so than the others for some reason. I don’t really have a good rationale for it, though based on the Goodreads ratings, FE seems to have one of the higher scores amongst the AU novels, so others seem to agree with me.

o The Faded Sun Trilogy (5*): This trilogy worked for me on a couple of levels. The coming of age story is very well done, especially considering the character going on this journey is not human, and thus it has a unique flavor. The world building (species development?) of the Mri as Sten attempts to truly become Mri is fascinating and very much my cup of tea. The plot is gripping and the twists are rewarding. And all this is wrapped up in Cherryh’s excellent writing. I think this trilogy succeeds on a more standard basis than most of Cherryh’s works (at least for me). Instead of really loving one or 2 aspects at the expense of others, I think we see a more complete work.

o I have not read any of the foreigner series…