Review: Forty Thousand in Gehenna
This is clearly an earlier work than Cyteen, and Cherryh seems to have still been working out where she was going to go with the azi, which means that there are a few inconsistencies between the two. Don't let that put you off- this is a really good book, slightly clunky in places where it feels like she's still working out exactly where she is going but her world-building and her envisioning of sociological alternatives is second-to-none.
much of the book is spent in a sense of confusion about how things work- first the abandoned colonists trying to make the new world fit in their expectations, then the descendants of colonisers trying to understand how the descendants of the colonists have evolved as a society. I don't want to say any more about the plot because you're either interested in this sort of thing or you're not.
I've read quite a bit of sci-fi, speculative fiction, and fantasy, but most authors don't seem to question their own assumptions about How Things Work- their worlds are extensions or slightly alternate versions of our own. Cherryh seems very aware of observer bias, including her own, and is continually questioning what it is to be human, how society structures our thought-patterns, what it is we take for granted about our world and what would happen if we changed it. She is one of the few writers who can make me think her aliens really are alien, their thought-patterns are truly not like our own, and where you have to work really hard to understand their thinking. At the end of the book, you come back slightly changed. Not many writers can do this.
much of the book is spent in a sense of confusion about how things work- first the abandoned colonists trying to make the new world fit in their expectations, then the descendants of colonisers trying to understand how the descendants of the colonists have evolved as a society. I don't want to say any more about the plot because you're either interested in this sort of thing or you're not.
I've read quite a bit of sci-fi, speculative fiction, and fantasy, but most authors don't seem to question their own assumptions about How Things Work- their worlds are extensions or slightly alternate versions of our own. Cherryh seems very aware of observer bias, including her own, and is continually questioning what it is to be human, how society structures our thought-patterns, what it is we take for granted about our world and what would happen if we changed it. She is one of the few writers who can make me think her aliens really are alien, their thought-patterns are truly not like our own, and where you have to work really hard to understand their thinking. At the end of the book, you come back slightly changed. Not many writers can do this.