First of all I want to mention that, in the interests of cutting down on the amount of stuff I have to get rid of later, I read the Kindle edition of Downbelow Station, and I was surprised by how many typos there were. Not sure why it would surprise me that an ebook has so many typos, but I guess I just assume it would be easier to fix in that format.

Anyway, when I read this Hugo-winning novel for the first time back in the '90s, I didn't care for it much. It didn't feel much like science fiction to me, and it still didn't the second time through. Why it doesn't feel like SF is a bit of a puzzle, because it's set on a space station orbiting an alien planet, with a space war raging around it. I guess I'd say it reads like a blockbuster best-seller, by which I mean it's got a huge cast of characters that we move between from chapter to chapter, weaving the story from multiple points of view in epic fashion. I know that's not the deepest analysis, but it just feels like a generic blockbuster novel to me. It's a military story in a science fiction setting, and the military and political intrigue overwhelm the science fictional world-building, to my mind.

It opens with a big wodge of exposition about how Earth gradually started exploring the nearby stars and establishing a trade network mostly via space stations established in orbit around the nearer stars. Well, as I think I said in my review of Merchanter's Luck, I find the concept of interstellar trade kind of ridiculous to begin with, but be that as it may. There is actually some interesting world-building going on in the interstices of this story, having to do with how different the Union culture is from Earth and station/merchanter culture, but the problem is that station/merchanter culture isn't presented in a very interesting way in this book. That's a problem for a book that ends up being the story of the foundation of the merchanter's alliance, where the trading families finally form a political alliance in order to hold their own against the contending Union and Earth powers.

So the war in the book is between Earth and Union, fighting over trade access to the stars that the stations give, with various other factions trapped in between. Most of the action takes place on Pell Station, which orbits a planet with indigenous alien life (the first that humans have discovered out side of Earth), and that's my other big problem with this book. The planet is called Downbelow by the people who live on Pell Station, and the sapient aliens on the planet are called, unironically as far as I can tell, Downers. One of Cherryh's great strengths has always been her depiction of aliens, but the Downers are by far the worst alien race she created. They are twee, furry, noble savages speaking in a horrific pidgin taken out of the worst kind of colonial fiction. They actually seem to be borrowed from Le Guin's "The Word for World Is Forest," which is another anti-colonial work of science fiction that I don't care for much because of the noble savagery of the aliens.

Anyway, the most interesting thread of this very long, very complicated story is a flash of cyberpunk in the form of Josh Talley, who is a character swept up and used as a sex toy by the pitiless fleet captain Signy Mallory. His memories of abuse are so tortured that he asks to have his mind essentially erased, but it turns out (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) that he's actually a deep Union agent created in their labs and implanted with false memories to cover the fact that he's a saboteur. However, he has been so deeply messed with by both Union and Mallory that he believes the deep programming is the false self, and that's what gets partially erased. The truly false memories of being raised by an aunt on a sunny farm on Cyteen are left intact, and Josh is one deeply confused secret agent. The layers of false personality are quite fascinating. I just wish there had been more of that, which is probably why I enjoyed Cyteen a lot more than this one. 40,000 in Gehenna is a far better book too because of the truly weird aliens and the way they turn the humans weird too. Downbelow Station just seems like an overly-busy novel of political intrigue with way too many viewpoint characters for me to keep straight.

I should mention, first of all, that when I started reading this book, I mistakenly believed that it was written before Cherryh's Hugo-Award winning Downbelow Station. Not true. It turns out Cherryh started writing Merchanter's Luck and then decided she wanted to work out the back story, so she wrote Downbelow Station instead. So the feeling I got while reading this one that a lot of the backstory must be explained in more detail elsewhere turns out to be true. I actually found Merchanter's Luck pretty hard to follow at times, because it seemed to assume I knew things that I didn't actually know.

So what's it about? On one level it's a Boy Meets Girl story. It's also a boy and girl from opposite sides of the track story, but both are from the merchanters culture that is part of the backbone of Cherryh's big Union-Alliance future history. The merchanters are essentially the Alliance part. In merchanters culture, families own and run freighters that run between stations and planets. Edward Stevens (not his real name) is the last survivor of his family and runs their small fifty-person freighter essentially by himself. Allison Reilly, on the other hand, is from a large and prosperous family that runs a massive freighter with a thousand people on it. These two hook up for sex while on layover at one of the stations, and before too long have formed an unlikely partnership with Reilly wealth investing in Stevens' crappy little ship in an attempt to set up a new trading line in a newly-opened direction. This is part of the back story that got confusing to me, because I didn't fully understand what was in it for the Reillys.

It can also said to be a story about pirates. Stevens' family was essentially massacred by pirates when he was ten, and he has since then become more or less a pirate himself, running shady deals at the fringes of legal trade because he doesn't have the resources to do legitimate business. That's part of what his new partnership with the Reilly clan is supposed to solve. However, the book portrays even the very legitimate, prosperous Reillys as a form of pirates themselves, who are able to legitimatize whatever questionable business they get involved with through legal and bureaucratic maneuvering. Beyond that, and most confusing of all for those who haven't read Downbelow Station, is that Stevens' ship, Lucy, is more or less hijacked by Signy Mallory at the last minute to run suspect cargo to the station they had intended to trade with in a strictly legal capacity. Mallory is a caption of a huge military ship that's part of what's called alternatively the Company Fleet and the Mazianni. They are a military arm of the old Earth Company that started the interstellar trade routes to begin with (as is explained in Downbelow Station) who have more or less gone rogue as Earth's policital power has waned. In short the Mazianni are basically pirates, and one of their ships, possibly even Mallory's, is very likely to have been the one that attacked Stevens' family ship and massacred his family when he was a child.

Well, as always in Cherryh, there are no simple good guys and bad guys, just a lot of mutually antagonistic, selfish factions jostling with each other for advantage. It's never, ever clear who is on whose side, and everybody suspects everybody else of betrayal. Nerves are always just about to snap, panic and tears are always just about to break out. I have to admit that his book kind of wore me out after a while, maybe because I find the merchanter culture (and the idea of interstellar trade in general) basically unbelievable to begin with. But maybe I'd have enjoyed this one better if I'd read Downbelow Station first, because mostly this one left me feeling confused and like I was missing huge chunks of context. Which was true! Maybe that deflated all the political intrigue for me, because it's very much a novel of political intrigue between all the various factions.

However, I thought the ending was a particularly damp squib, and I think it's because Cherryh was resisting the traditional requirements of the pirate story. In a traditional pirate romance, the orphan who survives the pirate massacre ends up being a prince, and this story, which offers a corporate princess is the form of Allison, practically begs for Stevens to end up being a prince from some other wealthy family. But he's not. We do learn his real family name in the end, and it's a name that some of the other characters have heard of, but it doesn't appear that they were an especially affluent or important family, certainly nothing like the Reillys. Cherryh always resists the easy pay-off of traditional story forms, but somehow the uneasy truce she always ends up with instead didn't work for me in this story. Maybe pirates always up the ante, demanding something more dramatic. Whatever the case, this seemed like a lesser novel than the other Cherryh books I've been reading lately.

This is a very dense, complex, difficult novel, even by Cherryh's standards.It's squarely set in her Union-Alliance future history, and it first came to my attention through the references to the events of the book in Cherryh's Hugo-winning Cyteen. Unlike, say, Port Eternity, which is also about Union space and the azi but takes place off to the side in the future history, this one refers to major historical events, like the War between the Union and Sol forces in Downbelow Station that led to the Merchanters Alliance. In fact, the colonization effort in 40,000 in Gehenna is a continuation of that war by other means.

So the ostensible plot is that the totalitarian Union has decided to colonize the planet Gehenna with a mixed force of born-men and azis. The azis are considered lab-born: genetically-modified clones who have also been conditioned or programmed using what is called "tape," which delivers information/instructions to the subconscious subliminally. Most azi are basically slaves who have had the ability to make decision programmed out of them, but there appears to be another category of Union citizens who have been genetically modified and slightly conditioned but who still can make independent decisions. One of the additional layers of complexity in this novel that I don't fully understand is that some non-azi people sneak onboard the colony ship disguised as azi. It's not clear to me why they do it (for sheer scientific curiosity?) or who organized it (a mysterious "board"), but the main character in this group, Gutierrez, swiftly becomes a team leader amongst the regular scientific "civs".

40,000 in Gehenna bristles with all kinds of ancillary documents and commentaries, from genealogical trees to maps to scientific reports to diary entries, and I think there's a lot of information buried in these documents that would take multiple readings to fish out. What the novel really ends up being about is how the Union abandons the colony -- and in fact never really intended to follow through on the colonization plan -- and how the abandoned colony transforms over the course of multiple generations. Because the cloning labs are never set up, the azi are allowed to reproduce in the usual human way, but because the tape training systems are never set up, they are never trained how to raise their children. So their children are strange and detached to begin with, being raised by parents with no independent judgment or feelings of their own.

However, the other layer of complexity to the novel involves Gehenna's natives -- a variety of apparently semi-intelligent lizards that the humans call ariels (the small, green, pretty ones) or calibans (the larger, uglier, grey or brown ones). The question of the sapience of the lizards hovers over the novel and is a source of argument between the human scientists. Gradually the calibans, who initially seem harmless, grow more aggressive toward the colonists, and the descendants of the colonists form disturbing relationships with the calibans. As so often in Cherryh, the humans become more alien, but what's interesting about this novel is that the aliens seem also to grow more human in terms of aggression and territorialism. The humans who form the closest relationships with the calibans basically can't communicate with other humans any more and are considered Weird even by the strange standards of the nearly autistic descendants of the azi.

What's also interesting is that Cherryh seems to be in dialogue with Anne McCaffery's Pern books here: a lost colony of humans who have formed a symbiotic relationship with reptile aliens. She even refers to the aliens as dragons occasionally, and of course they are color-coded as well. But Cherryh's aliens are decidedly more alien than McCaffery's, and the form of communication between the two species, while non-verbal, is not telepathic. Instead, the lizards use a non-verbal form of language called Patterning, which is described as symbolic. Eventually Cherryh delves into how this works, but for the most part we only get a subjective experience of it, which can be baffling at best.

Meanwhile, off-planet humans are trying to understand what happened to the colony. In Cherryh's future history humans try to practice non-intervention when they encounter alien species, but this novel is an interrogation of the whole concept of non-intervention. Human scientists inevitably get drawn into relationships with the descendants of the colonists and their caliban allies, and the whole question of the neutrality of scientific observation comes up. It's safe to say that Cherryh doesn't believe in scientific neutrality or objectivity. The observer has an influence on the observed, and this has political implications as things finally come to a head hundreds of years after the initial colonization.

One of the things that wasn't completely clear to me after a first reading was whether the political factions that form between different alliances of human descendants and calibans reflects a difference in the descendants of pure azi genetic lines and those that also have non-azi genetic lines in them. Really it might have to do with those humans who had rearing only from azi parents and those who had some rearing from non-azi parents somewhere back in the past. The main difference between the two factions seems to be the one eats grey calibans and the other eats only fish, but the one faction also seems to patriarchal while the other has female leaders (and warriors) as well as male.

There were parts of 40,000 in Gehenna that reminded me of the horrific aspects of Voyager in Night, particularly the claustrophobic encounters underground that cause traumatic transformations in some of the characters. There are grotesque sexual encounters that feel very much like rape, but in which the characters seem to just surrender to it because it's the only way they will survive, even though they know they will be something completely alien on the other side of the experience. These sequences are ugly and terrifying, and they seem to embody Cherryh's theme of becoming alien in the most visceral terms. It's a horrific experience, and Cherryh embraces a tragic view of the human condition. People have no control over their lives, they get hurt, they get abused, they get changed, and all they can do is try to make the best of whatever traumas life deals them.

To my mind this all adds up to some very powerful fiction, and it actually reminds me of some of Delany's more avant garde explorations of similar themes in his later career. Cherryh is just as radical as Delany in a less avant garde fashion. This is a very high concept novel told from multiple and clashing points of view over a long period of time, and as I say, it's a challenging and difficult work to digest. Sometimes I feel that Cherryh bites off more than she can chew and doesn't always give us adequate context to understand all the layers (cf Gutierrez posing as an azi), but perhaps further readings will reveal the context that I missed the first time. Cyteen has long been my favorite Cherryh novel, but after my recent Cherryh spree, focusing on her odder early novels, I'm beginning to think I've barely scraped the surface of her greatness. I'll be reading more.

'He felt uncertain what his life had meant up to this point. He remembered well enough. But the importance he had attached to things was all revised. His life now seemed more preparatory than substantive. He looked forward to things to come. There would be a world, he believed; and he was called on to build it. He would become more and more like a born-man and he would be on this assignment for the rest of his life, one of the most important  assignments even born-men hoped to get. All of this was due to his good fortune in having been born in the right year, on the right world, of the right gene-set, and of course it was due to his excellent attention to his work. There would be only good tape for him, and when he had gotten where he was going, when he looked about him at the new land, there were certain things which would have to be done at once, with all the skill he had. People believed in him. They had chosen him. He was very happy, now that all the disturbing things were over, now the he could sit in his own bunk and know that he was safe ... and he would have just about enough time to understand it all before they would be there, so the tape promised.' (C.J. Cherryh, 40,000 in Gehenna)

This is another stand alone novel from fairly early in Cherryh's career (copyright 1985). The bibliography at Wikipedia thinks this takes place in the Union-Alliance universe, although if there's evidence in the story, I missed it. Interestingly the bibliography lumps it under the category "The Age of Exploration" with two of the "magic mushroom" novels: Port Eternity and Wave without a Shore, the former of which is clearly in the Union-Alliance universe and the latter also not providing any evidence either way that I noticed.

The subject-matter of this novel is prime Cherryh material. An apparently human child called Thorn is being raised by an alien warrior named Duun who is a member of a guild called the hatani that I believe I've read is based on Japanese martial culture, and possibly specifically the samurai code. The aliens are covered in fur and have claws and doglike ears. Thorn is a freak to the aliens, but Duun is raising him to be hatani -- a radical act that is politically dicey. So as so often in Cherryh we have an outcast struggling to survive in a hostile society, and we have a human learning to be alien.

This is a very good book, and I was interested to see, also in Wikipedia, that it was nominated for the Hugo. It doesn't seem to me to have much of a reputation now, but I was pretty impressed with it. The central mystery of the story is where Thorn came from, and the answer is complex and builds to a climactic revelation that completely transforms the scale and perspective of the story's frame of reference. It's a little overwrought at times, but that's really my only criticism. Cherryh is very good at holding her secrets close to the vest through tight control of narrative point of view and also at depicting the political in-fighting amongst people who have very different understandings of what is important and thus very different agendas. All of this is revealed and resolved in a very satisfactory way in the eventful finale.

It's been a couple of weeks since I read this, so I'm not sure how good my memory of it is. Anyway, I found it the most difficult of the Cherryh books I've read to understand in the first place, and it's also the weirdest and creepiest of the three "magic mushroom" novels collected in the Alternate Realities ominbus. The other two, which I've previously reviewed, are Wave without a Shore and Port Eternity.

The scenario, to the extent that I understood it, is that three humans -- a brother, sister, and childhood friend who has married the sister -- have scraped together enough money to buy a cargo ship, and they are working in a star system when a large alien ship of some kind swoops in and grabs them. All three of them are scanned, and two of them are painfully killed. The two who were scanned are then re-embodied and begin to interact with the survivor. Further scans are made of, I believe, all three, and then some of those scans are re-embodied, so that there are multiple versions of the characters with different memories depending on when they were scanned and re-embodied. That's part of what makes the book so confusing, and then on top of that all the aliens are referred to with names that consist of non-letter characters, often nested in ways that are slightly different but look very similar.

It's also a horror story, which is not my favorite genre by far. Terrible things happen to all the human characters, and it appears that the aliens are experimenting on them for obscure purposes. By the time I got to the end, I was pretty much completely lost. I had literally lost the plot and didn't understand the resolution. Still, it scores extremely high on the wild-ass weirdness scale, and once again I give Cherryh a lot of credit for writing something so strange and different from her other work, and to DAW for publishing a book that wasn't even remotely commercial in nature. Those were the days, by grab! 1984, to be exact. That seems appropriately dystopian, in fact.

Port Eternity is the second of three Cherryh novels that have been referred to as her "magic mushroom" novels. The first is Wave Without a Shore, and the third is Voyager in Night. The three novels have a reputation of being offbeat, and they have been collected in an omnibus called Alternate Realities.

Port Eternity is a kind of metafiction. It is specifically a story about the Arthurian legend. At it's core its about the wealthy owner of a pleasure space yacht that's called the Maid of Astolat. The staff and crew of the ship are azi, which are people from the Union part of Cherryh's Union-Alliance universe, who are clones that have been conditioned or programmed using pre-recorded instructional tapes. The azi are created according to the designs of their owners, and Dela is a woman who lives in a kind of romantic daydream based on Arthurian legend. Therefore her azi are all based on characters from Arthurian legend and specifically from Tennyson's poem, Idylls of the King, which is quoted at the head of every chapter. Dela sets off on a pleasure cruise with her latest lover, Griffin (hmmm, where could that name come from?)

The next layer of the meta is that Dela's azi personal assistant, Elaine, has been secretly indulging in a story tape that's clearly a version of Tennyson's poem. Story tapes are experienced in a way similar to how the behavioral conditioning of the azi is applied: you take a drug and then the content of the tape is piped into your receptive brain, and you live the story out vicariously, like a kind of virtual reality. Therefore Elaine is conscious of how she herself and all her fellow azi staff and crew are shaped to be like characters in the tape, not just behaviorally but in their physical cloning. This gives her something like a tragic view of things as she watches, for example, her personal favorite, Lance, struggle to accept that his services aren't needed while Griffin is giving Dela the pleasure she craves, and it also shapes her view of how Vivien, who is, or at least perceives herself to be, slightly superior to Elaine in the ship hierarchy, behaves. The other azi on the ship are Lynette, Percival, Gawain, and (ominous music) the nerveless Modred, who is conditioned to be analytical and asexual.

As for what actually happens in the book, the Maid is stranded in subspace during a failed FTL jump. Initially this is a very hallucinatory experience in which the whole universe seems to be turned inside out and nothing makes perceptual sense. Eventually, however, they become accustomed to their bizarre new surroundings, and they encounter a large artificial structure that has attracted other ships to it over time. After that it's an ongoing struggle to understand what the structure is and what is happening to them and what to do about it as the existential crisis gets more and more tense and the preprogrammed relationships start to fray. Our understanding of what the characters are up to plays out against our understanding of the characters and the story they're based on.

The concept of the azi is a fascinating one that Cherryh explored to even greater effect a few years later in her Hugo-winning novel, Cyteen. What's interesting here is the way in which the azi are a kind of fiction to begin with -- which is to say, they are created things that may or may not serve the purpose their creators intended -- and who in this story have to grapple with their place in another kind of fiction. The conditioning of the azi creates an air of control and fatalism, and yet their biological nature makes the conditioning uncertain. Meanwhile Cherryh gets to play around with vicarious experience, dreamlife, free will, and the relationship between story and reality, and yet she's doing it in a purely genre, as opposed to literary, way. Just as with Wave Without a Shore, it has the feeling of an experimental work while not being avant garde at all.

Cherryh has said in an interview that Donald Wollheim allowed her to write this kind of offbeat novel as long as she kept it short and continued to produce big middle-of-the-road science fiction blockbusters like Downbelow Station and Cyteen, but I suspect that this was due to the special relationship they had and to the moment in publishing history in which this was occurring -- i.e. the era of the wire rack displays in drug stores and such, where a steady flow of mass market paperbacks fed the ravening maw of readers looking for a cheap thrill. I seriously doubt that even best-selling writers have this kind of freedom anymore, but what do I know? It's not as if these three novels by Cherryh had much of an obvious impact on the field, and they are still amongst her least-known books. On the other hand, it's pretty cool that they're still in print in that omnibus. On that note I've got to say that the original DAW paperback cover is one of the ugliest and least evocative they ever did.

They had experimented ... with living human senses; and the brain could be re-educated. Eyes could learn to see rightside up or upside down. Somewhere in the waves of energy that impinged the nerves, the brain constructed its own fantasies of matter and blue skies and green grass and solidity, screening out the irrational and random.

A reality existed within us too, tides of particles that were themselves nodes in chaos, all strung together to make this reality of ours. And in this place the structure of matter gaped wide and I could see it ... miniature tides like the tides of the moving galaxies in one rhythm with them, and us spread like a material veil between, midway of one reality and the other.

No, I thought again, and leaned against the veil/wall in my chosen viewpoint of what was, was, was ... don't look down. One was advised not to look at such things and never to know that all of us were dreaming, dreaming even when we were sure we were alive, because what the brain always did was dream, and what difference whether it built its dreams from the energy affecting it from outside or whether it traced its own independent fancies, making its own patterns on the veil. Don't lean too hard. Don't look.

I slid down onto the corridor floor and heaved up my insides, which was my body's way of telling me it had had enough nonsense. It wanted the old dream back, insisted to have it. I lay there dry-heaving until I dismissed my ideas of dreams and eternities, because I hurt inside and wanted to die, and if I could have waked and died at once I would have gladly done it.

--C.J. Cherryh, Port Eternity

When I was hanging out on rec.arts.sf.written back in the '90s there was a discussion of C.J. Cherryh in which someone mentioned her three "magic mushroom" books -- Wave Without a Shore, Port Eternity, and Voyager in Night -- which were presented as the three weirdest novels that Cherryh had ever written. The three were later collected in an omnibus called Alternate Realities. Although I've read only nine of her novels up to now, in two widely separated clumps, I liked what I'd read enough that all three "magic mushroom" books immediately went on the big, imaginary To Be Read pile in my brain. Having been inspired by Ann Leckie's list of her ten favorite SF novels to get back to Cherryh again, I finally picked up a copy of the earliest one, Wave Without a Shore, which was published in 1981.

As a side note it was also interesting to realize that Wave Without a Shore was the first novel Cherryh published after Downbelow Station, for which she won a Hugo in 1982. At least that's the implication of the list of other books by Cherryh included in the original DAW edition of the book, which lists the short story collection Sunfall between Downbelow Station and Wave Without a Shore, but doesn't mention her other 1981 publication, The Pride of the Chanur. One of the things that makes Wave Without a Shore unique in Cherryh's bibliography is that while it's lumped under the broad umbrella of her Union-Alliance Universe stories, it isn't connected with any of the series or subgroups in that story universe. Port Eternity and Voyager in Night, along with Cuckoo's Egg are thrown into a category called The Age of Exploration, about which the Wikipedia bibliography comments, "These novels share a common theme, but are unrelated to each other and can be read in any order." My impression is that none of these stories is explicitly linked to the others in the Union-Alliance universe, but as John Clute points out in his entry on Cherryh in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the apparent isolation of these novels from the others might be taken as proof of the effectiveness of the Gehenna Doctrine governing the Union-Alliance universe, which is basically the same as Star Trek's Prime Directive, forbidding meddling with weaker civilizations. It's a sign of the remarkableness of Wave Without a Shore that even within that kind of loose association, it can't be linked to the other stand alone novels even thematically.

So what is Wave Without a Shore about? It's hard to say! It has been described as more philosophical fiction than science fiction. It's set on a planet called Freedom, on a continent called Sartre, in a province called Camus and a city named Kierkegaard. The planet has been settled by humans, who have displaced an alien race called the ahnit. More than one reader has pointed out that the novel can be read as precursor to China Mieville's The City and the City, because the humans treat the ahnit as invisible, and furthermore treat some of their fellow humans as invisible too. They choose not to see them even when they are standing nearby or even taking something that belongs to the unseeing person. The protagonist of the novel is Herrin Law, a genius who is sent to the University in Kierkegaard to study art. There he meets two other geniuses, his lover, Keye Linn, who studies ethics, and his best friend and rival, Waden Jenks, who is the son and heir of the planet's ruler.

What's a little difficult to understand is the basic premise of the story, which I've seen described as an exercise in solipsism. (The title evokes limitless solipsism -- a system without feedback.) Herrin, Keye, and Waden are all struggling to impose their Realities on each other, which seems to be both a philosophical exercise and a power struggle. It's as if the one who can come up with the best theory of the world controls it. All three are working in different realms, but really the central struggle is between the artistic vision of Herrin and the political vision of Waden, who is trying to open the planet up to the Outsiders -- that is, to the off-planet civilization that's presumably part of the Union-Alliance universe. (One of the clues that the Gehenna Doctrine is indeed in play comes at the end when one of the off-planet officials remarks that if there is a native government it puts matters in a "special category," although it's unclear to me whether by native he means the human settlers or the ahnit.) The Outsiders, like the ahnit and the outcast planetside humans, are invisible to most of the humans on Freedom, so Waden is doing something radical by inviting them to participate in the planetary economy.

But really, the bulk of the novel is a contest of wills between Herrin and Waden, with occasional interludes of jousting with Keye as well, although she ends up being a relatively minor character. Herrin creates a great work of art that threatens to subsume Waden to his vision, and this eventually causes a rupture between them that throws the whole weird seeing/unseeing arrangement into chaos. As always, Cherryh limits us rigidly to what her protagonist can see, so it's difficult for us to get a larger perspective until his changes. When it does change, also as so frequently in Cherryh, it is breathtaking. What I suppose is different from a lot of the novels of hers I've read is that Herrin isn't an outsider himself. Usually her protagonists are marginal characters to begin with, working inward from the edges, but Herrin is a supreme creature of privilege who ascends to the highest level of his society. But while her outcasts all have to control their feelings because their humanity is being denied in some way by external forces, Herrin controls his own feelings out of an attempt to control reality. Thus we still get the sudden outburst of raw feeling that are so common to Cherryh's stories, and the release gains great power from the earlier absolute control and repression.

It's definitely a strange book. It feels like one of those nearly experimental narratives that are so common in science fiction, which result from sheer imaginative exploration and extrapolation. What if there were a society that valued the ability to control one's perception of the world through philosophical constructions? Since much of the story is set at the University, it feels like a university novel too, with young people living the bohemian life and learning the limits of learning. It reminded me at times of Elizabeth Lynn's A Different Light (published three years earlier), because of the focus on the artistic process. Mostly, however, other than the sense in which it's a precursor to Mieville, it feels like a Cherryh novel. Her frequent theme is the way that her characters become alien, and that's true here too, at least in the broadest sense. There are scenes in which Herrin interacts with an ahnit named Sbi that are truly remarkable for how thoroughly and intimately his Reality is breached and transformed. Those moments pack real emotional, somatic, and psycho-social-civilizational wallop. That's Cherryh's superpower as a writer, I guess. Is there anyone better than her at evoking a sense of encountering the alien?