What Makes This Book So Great (9 page)

And when did it stop being daring for people to swear “like a trooper” and become normal? My memory is that in South Wales when I was a child adults swore in Welsh, and what they said, translated, meant “God” or “the Devil,” and “bloody” was pretty strong swearing in English. But my memory of being a young adult in Britain in the early and mid-eighties didn’t include other young women casually saying “fuck” the way they do now. I think there has been an actual change, and it isn’t just that literature was coy about recording what people said, as that what people say has changed. I’m sure this is also a difference between Britain and North America, and maybe between different areas too.

And in the future? Well, there are fashions in these things. Perhaps our texts with their liberal scatterings of “fuck” will eventually look as quaint as Trollope’s dashes.

DECEMBER 3, 2008

22.
“Earth is one world”: C. J. Cherryh’s
Downbelow Station

Downbelow Station
was published in 1981 and won the Hugo in 1982. It is in many ways the central book of the Union-Alliance series. It’s about the Company Wars. Most of the books in the series are dealing with the aftermath of those wars, flotsam and jetsam left in their wake.
Downbelow Station
is central, it has many points of view (many of them important people), and it’s about the end of the war and the formation of the Alliance. It has a marvellous perspective on humanity in the wider universe. I have to admit, though, it’s a hard book to like.

There’s a story that after Cherryh had written this book, someone told her every scene had to do three things (any three things), so she went through and removed all the scenes that only did one or two, without replacing them with anything. I don’t suppose for a moment that this really happened, but it’s one of those legends that’s truer than the facts.
Downbelow Station
is a dense, complex book written in a terse, futuristic style, from multiple points of view, some of them alien and many of them unpleasant. It feels disorienting and slightly disconnected and as if something somewhere has been left out. It’s definitely immersive, and the history is real enough to bite, but even on a re-read it isn’t a book I can sink into. I bounced off it the first time I tried to read it, and even now it’s my least favourite and the one I read only when I’m doing a full re-read of the whole series. Again, I don’t think this is a good place to start.

All of Cherryh’s characters are ambiguous, but nowhere more than here, where there are so many of them. The plot is a complex maneuvering of factions and realignment of interests. There are space battles, and there are economics of space stations. There’s a compelling beginning where a warship turns up with freighters full of desperate refugees that have to be accommodated at the space station without warning. And there are all these factions and points of view.

The Mazianni are a Company fleet that have been fighting too long. They’re exhausted, hard as nails, and can’t stop. Signy Mallory, one of their captains, is ruthless, competent, deadly … and really not very nice.

The Konstantins are nice. They run Pell, a space station circling an alien planet and clinging to its independence at a time when Earth is giving up space to Union, seen here as unmitigatedly terrifying and appalling. They’re definitely nice, all of them—we get three Konstantin points of view, Angelo, Emelio and Damon—but their very niceness is their fatal flaw, the hamartia that causes their tragic downfall—except not quite, because the novel is a eucatastrophe, not a tragedy.

Elene Quen is a merchanter who is married to Damon Konstantin and staying on Pell for a while when she learns that her own ship, and family, have all been killed.

Josh Talley is a Union spy who after his brainwipe becomes something very interesting but also very ambivalent.

Satin is a hisa, an alien from Downbelow. The alien point of view is convincingly alien, but the hisa are, regrettably, furry noble savages. Cherryh has done much better aliens absolutely everywhere else she has aliens. I find the hisa embarrassing with their pidgin English and their names “Sky sees her” and “Bigfellow” and “Sun her friend.”

Ayres is a Company man, come from Earth to sell out the Mazianni and all of space. He starts off seeming deeply unsympathetic, but by the time Union have been horrible to him for most of the book, I feel terribly sorry for him.

Jon Lukas is a resident of Pell who tries to play both sides against the middle. He’s hardheaded, self-interested and very unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong.

Vassily Kressich is a resident of Q, the Quarantine Zone where the refugees lead lives of riot and gangs, and who is so desperate, he’s the pawn of anyone who uses him.

I used the word “desperate” several times, and I could have used it several more if I were talking about what happens to these people as the book goes on. It’s a novel about desperate people, desperate space stations, desperate aliens, a desperate space fleet that’s out of choices. It’s desperately claustrophobic too, with people hiding in tunnels filled with unbreathable air, not to mention that the whole of Pell is an inescapable trap. It’s marvellous that Cherryh manages to pull a happy ending out of all that.

That said,
Downbelow Station
is a book I re-read only because I’m in love with the universe, kind of the way one puts up with one’s spouse’s irritating relations.

DECEMBER 9, 2008

23.
“Space is wide and good friends are too few”: Cherryh’s Merchanter novels

Merchanter’s Luck
(1982),
Rimrunners
(1989),
Tripoint
(1994) and
Finity’s End
(1997) are all stories of individual spacers in the time immediately post–
Downbelow Station
. They’re all excellent books, and they are where I suggest people start with this universe, so that when they get to
Downbelow Station
they are already invested in the universe. The title of this post comes from “Sam Jones,” a song that Cherryh wrote and Leslie Fish sings, and which I think of as another story in this set.

Imagine the universe of
Traveller
or
Elite
. Then imagine it made sense in depth and had up-close personal human stories happening in it. These books take place in merchant ships and space stations. The very occasional living world glows like a jewel in the dark. The ships started off slower than light coming out from Earth building stations as they went, and built up a culture like that, but then pretty much at the same time they discovered other living planets, faster-than-light and rejuv—a drug that keeps people at about the biological age when they start taking it until they’re well over a hundred. Then came the War, between Earth and Union, with the merchanters caught in the middle, until the Treaty of Pell that ended the war and formed the Merchanter’s Alliance.

In these books we see ships and people of all kinds. There’s an independent whose family were killed in the War barely making it as a trading ship, and a thriving family ship where rejuv keeps so many generations alive that young people can’t hope to have useful work before they are themselves old. There are Union ships and Alliance ships that have been militarised. There’s a Mazianni supply ship and a beached Mazianni trooper who finds herself aboard an Alliance military ship with very mixed feelings. Most of all these are the stories of spacers, with their sleepovers on stations, their thin margins of profit, their shared experience of the deep dark and going FTL through Jump.

They are also all about the very human need to belong, to have someone to love and somewhere to call home.

More than anybody else, Cherryh has thought about what it would mean to live in space. I don’t know whether it’s scientifically plausible, but it feels entirely real in its nested implications. They don’t have day and night, ships and stations work all the time, in shifts, they have mainday and alterday which overlap when morning for one is evening for the other. The ships are communities, families, villages, matrilineal with children concieved with partners off the ship but growing up aboard. They dock at the stations and because they don’t have the rotation they use in motion to create gravity, they have to sleep off the ship. This leads to romance in
Merchanter’s Luck
and to rape and revenge in
Tripoint
. The way Jump stretches age means there’s a crew member in
Rimrunners
who started off on sublight ships, and is very significant for the protagonist of
Finity’s End,
who got left at a station while the ship went on.

These books all stand alone, with very little overlap of characters with any of the others, though there’s considerable overlap of locations and history. They can be read in any order. And every single one of them has a happy ending, or stops at a point that could in any case plausibly be taken for a happy ending.

DECEMBER 10, 2008

24.
“A need to deal wounds”: Rape of men in Cherryh’s Union-Alliance novels

From Signy Mallory to Ariane Emory, Cherryh has a tendency to write female characters who are not just powerful but actually abusive and male characters who are not just helpless but actually raped. What’s with that?

Rape of men by women is remarkably rare in literature generally and yet remarkably prevalent in these books.

This is Signy and Talley, early in
Downbelow Station
:

“You’re getting off here,” she told him, staring at him who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him by the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. “You’re lucky,” she said. He reacted to that the same way as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful. They had played with his mind on Russell’s. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds … limited murder to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors to blot out the horror outside. She had sometimes nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew.

Now what that says is that she knows he has been damaged and she has been systematically abusing him all voyage, “dealing little terrors.” Ick.

In
Cyteen
Ariane Emory even more directly rapes Justin, with the help of drugs, and rapes his mind, too, in complete violation. The text does see this as a terrible thing to do, and we sympathise with Justin and hate Ari for it. It’s also entirely plot necessary, and far and away the worst thing in the book. Ari also confesses to having hurt Florian. And there’s also the whole issue of azi. Any relationship with an azi is non-consensual, no matter how enthusiastic the azi in question has been programmed to be. They’re not capable of giving free consent. They get tape to make them like it, the same as for anything. This is fundamental to what azi are. This is all entirely necessary to the story.

In
Rimrunners
Bet Yaeger kills two potential (male) rapists in the first few chapters. But when she thinks about what happens to newbies on the decks in Africa and what she has herself done, it’s also rape. This is what Bet’s like, and it isn’t graphic or even onstage, but it also isn’t particularly necessary.

In
Tripoint,
Marie Hawkins, who is very unstable, has been raped, and she has fantasies of raping her rapist in return, specifically of violating him without consent. Also her son Tom, the product of the rape, has sex forced on him during Jump when he isn’t in a condition to give consent. It’s rape even if he enjoys it—he doesn’t understand what’s going on or who is with him. Again, I wouldn’t say this was necessary to the plot or the themes of the novel.

So what is going on? Clearly, Cherryh’s seeing rape here as part of a power balance thing. Historically, it has usually been men who have had more power. In a non-sexist future, some women will also have power. Men with power in this universe are fairly hard to find, but when you do find them they quite often tend to be rapists, too: the male Mazianni captains, Austin Bowe, Geoffrey Carnath vs non-rapists Angelo and Damon Konstantin, the captains of
Finity’s End
and
Dublin Again,
Denys and Giraud Nye. So it does seem as if she’s working on an axiom that some human beings will rape other human beings if they can get away with it, which has been historically true of men, and it would be sexist to think it would not be just as true of some women if women also had power.

I do find this more than a little disturbing, but it’s completely logical unless women are inherently nicer than men, which I do not believe. It’s a pretty unpleasant thought though, when you drag it out and examine it.

DECEMBER 21, 2008

25.
How to talk to writers

Writers are people, and they were people before they were writers. They change lightbulbs and buy groceries just like everyone else. Really. Because they’re people, they vary. Some of them are jerks, but many of them are very interesting people to talk to.

Writers will usually talk about their writing if you want to talk to them about it. But they can also talk about other things!

Writers mostly aren’t celebrities. They have a little bit of demi-fame within the community, and that’s it. For the few who are celebrities it’s different, but most writers are only too glad to have their name recognised.

However well you feel you know a writer because you have read their books or their blog, until you’ve met them you don’t know them, and they don’t know you. They’ll probably be happy to talk to you at a signing or a convention, but they’re not your instant best friend.

If you happen to be introduced to a writer you haven’t read, do not say, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t read any of your books.” This just causes embarrassment. The normal state of affairs for an ordinary writer is that most people they meet haven’t read any of their books. This may be different for Terry Pratchett and J. K. Rowling. But ordinary writers that you might happen to meet won’t expect you to have read their work. This totally isn’t a problem unless you mention that you haven’t. What are they supposed to say in response? “Oh, that’s all right”? “Go away, you illiterate ass”? There just isn’t a good answer and it leaves the writer spluttering. (Anyone who wants is welcome to my answer: “Oh, that’s OK, you can give me the five dollars now.”) I understand the urge to say you haven’t read them. It comes from guilt. But don’t say it. If you feel guilty just quietly go and buy one of their books later. And there’s no reason to feel guilty. Nobody expects you to have read every book in the world, least of all the writers. Writers see their sales figures. They know that statistically it’s unlikely that you’ve read their books.