C.J. Cherryh's Fiction

   ... Fear had killed the worlds between. To use the mri, one had to play the
   Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go.

   The belief that it would be different ... this, she cherished, as she
   believed in humankind.

   She played the Game.

Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.

Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades. Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior. Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities. But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.

   He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic, and shining with opal
   tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview,
   but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic
   noise came through.

This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"? And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.