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Tripoint Q1 - Setting
The greater setting of Tripoint is the neighboring stars to the Solar System, after a long and bitter war. Earth and the Solar System were defeated by their old colonies, which formed into two distinct polities, Union and Alliance. Alliance is a buffer state between Sol and Union consisting at this time of the gigantic Pell Station, and the near-earth world of Pell. Union consists of several systems including Viking, where the story starts, and the less earthlike, but still habitable world of Cyteen. This setting called the Union/Alliance setting, is home to many of Cherryh's works, including the Hugo winning Cyteen and Downbelow Station set on Pell Station and Pell. The novel is named for a three body brown star system called Tripoint located between Viking and Pell - all action in the book takes place at Viking, Pell, or Tripoint, or in between, aboard the Sprite and the Corinthian.
I am so deeply immersed in this setting that it is colored by all the other Alliance/Union books I have read, though like most of Cherryh's books in this setting, it is intended to be standalone. Did Cherryh adequately explain the setting for the purposes of reading the book? Did you get what was going on enough to follow? Sprite and Corinthian are both ships, but very different in how they are run. Did the two cultures make sense within the greater setting? How difficult would it be adapting from one to the other?
Comments
I certainly got the difference in operation between the two vessels, and liked that. However, I found very few differences between the viewpoint characters who all (to my reading) sounded pretty much the same. I had to keep checking other contextual clues to work out even whether a man or woman was telling the story, let alone older or younger. They were all kind of cynical and manipulative!
I also read just about all of Cherryh's Merchanter books, including Tripoint, so coming back to this universe was like returning to a childhood home. There was certainly a lot of context from the setting that influenced characters and the choices they made.
As for Richard's point about the characters being the same: yes, I found that too. The main characters are all damaged people, but many of them are damaged in very similar ways.
This is my second Cherryh, the first being Pride of Chanur, which was also a Clash monthly pick. With Chanur, I sometimes had difficulty parsing Cherryh's writing, and I did here, too, though not as much.
Was there enough setting? I'd say barely enough. I did manage to follow along most of the way to near then end (then got lost). I had no idea that Viking was a planet, or a station, or what. I had thought Downbelow was a station since there's a book of that name, but here Downbelow was described as a planet. Tripoint - I had no idea what Tripoint was in terms of a geographical entity, but I did clue in to the conceit that Tom, Marie, and Austin are a 'three body problem' in the novel, which I thought was rather clever.
So, despite the geography being rather vague, I'm not all that sure it mattered. I mean, these were all just locations in the story. Most of the action took place in loading bays, or bars - did it really matter whether these rooms were on a planet on the right side of space, or a station left? I don't think so. So there was enough setting to get the story across - but not really enough for this to feel like a rich novel. Now, I was aware it was the 6th novel in the series, so I figured that much of the setting was revealed in previous books.
Also, I really felt like I was reading a Clash campaign report - I can really see the influence here that Cherryh has on your adventuring style, both in terms of plot and setting elements.
Cherryh was a huge influence on StarCluster, no question! I also wrote a supplement called Merchanters and Stationers which works with StarCluster 4 Free - or any StarCluster 4 game - to really Cherryh-ize the game, but I only give it away to someone who asks for it. It's not available through Drive Thru at all.
Downbelow is the hisa (aka downer) name for their planet. It's a quasi-habitable world for humans, who need supplemental oxygen there, just as hisa need lesser amounts of oxygen and use masks when working on the station. The Human name for Downbelow is Pell's Planet, the space station orbiting it is Pell, and Downbelow Station is actually the place on Downbelow where food is grown by humans and hisa. To the hisa, their sun is their god, and they work on the station as a sort of Hajj. Humans trade with hisa, and grow human food on planet, thus Pell's position commanding the route to Sol, plus it's own source of biologicals, means Pell is vital to everyone in space. Pell is the capital - and at the time of the book only inhabited place - of the Merchanter's Alliance. Downbelow's star is Tau Ceti.
Viking is a station as well, in the Epsilon Eridani system, about 5.5 LY from Tau Ceti. It is a big asteroid mining and metals refining station - very industrial.
At the time of this book, the only known inhabited planets are around Sol, Downbelow in the Tau Ceti system, and Cyteen, capital of Union, which orbits Lalande 46650, a red dwarf almost 20 LY from Sol. Cyteen's highest animals are dangerous insectoid megafauna called playtytheres, and omnipresent asbestos-like spores in the air. The planet was partially terraformed, with big precipitation towers cleaning the air, but the Platytheres and other Cyteen life are the only source of Rejeuv, so most of the planet is left alone. Earth crops need supplementary light supplied by lighting towers to grow well. Everything else is Stations.
BTW, Cherryh never gives infodumps like the previous. You learn by inference and experience.