Rider duology, Cherryh

[cahn]

This post is for ase, who refused my protestations that I did not like Cherryh's novels but did like her short stories, and convinced me to read Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider by telling me that there were proto-sentient black horses (well, horse types) that liked bacon.

So... I'd been complaining for a while that there was nothing else Bujold-like to read, but... this is almost it. (The "almost" will come in a bit.) Weber doesn't count; he's nothing like Bujold except that they have both written books that take place in space and sometimes contain space battles. But ahem. The Rider books did several things for me:

-it sucked me into the action to where I forgot who I was and was totally immersed in the story. This is neither a necessary (e.g., John M. Ford, even Megan Whalen Turner, who writes in a slightly distant style) nor sufficient (Mercedes Lackey...at least before she got really silly) condition for me to love a book, but there is a really really high correlation there. And the absence of this in the other Cherryh books I'd tried was a huge barrier.

-The world was actually pretty well imagined, though the first book in particular suffered a bit from a heavy-handed religion (though this was greatly mitigated in the second). There seemed to be actual thoughts about economy and ecology! wow!

-there were sympathetic characters. This is a necessary condition for me. I was also happy that some of the unsympathetic characters in both books turned out to be more complex and sympathetic, just like in real life. (When I first met the people who are now my best friend and husband, I didn't think much of them, and they didn't think much of me. This changed.)

-you were given enough insight into the villains' heads that you could understand why they acted as they did, even if you thought they were kind of lame. Bujold is pretty good at this. Orson Scott Card used to be the king of this (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, the Call of Earth series, Pastwatch), before he got old and maudlin and started inventing psycho supervillains (yes, Shadow series, I am looking at you). I really think this is a good thing, because in real life? No one actually thinks s/he is a supervillain; everyone feels justified in his/her actions.

Now for the almost: this differed from Bujold in that Bujold has a penchant, which I share, for world- and universe-shattering events (and people-shattering events) to happen in her books. I feel kind of like the world has been put back together in a different way when I'm at the end. Cherryh is much quieter. The inside of one or two people's heads is maybe shifted around, hardened in some places, softened in others, cracked in a couple of places, opened up in others. The world is explained, but not necessarily obviously changed or split open. This is, of course, a perfectly valid mode of telling stories, probably with some advantages over the shattering kind in its subtlety-- it's just that I wasn't expecting it, so it threw me a bit in the first book, and then I was much happier with it in the second.

Also, the nighthorses were brilliant. They are like Valdemarian Companions on crack.

Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

You know, this puts the finger on something that I think is somewhat unique to Cherryh among popular SF authors: most people agree on that author's superior works (e.g., most people think Card's Speaker for the Dead is a good book and think Children of the Mind isn't nearly so good; or, for Bujold, think Memory is miles better than Diplomatic Immunity) but people seem to have wildly different ideas on which of Cherryh's books are "the best"...