Tripoint Q6 - The Whole Enchilada
Overall impressions, opinions, likes, hates, etcetera!
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Comments
- Hard to tell character voices apart
- Secondary characters (in some ways) more appealing than primary ones
- I'm sure ships especially family ships would have better ways of addressing crisis
- The notion of varying styles of running ships was intriguing - from memory The Expanse picked up on this by having Belter Ships more like Family ones here, but Earth and Mars ones more like Corinthian (except more overtly militarised)
- The setting and context were interesting, and I can easily see how multiple stories could fit into it. It occurred to me that the preferred routes business was again like Forever War where there are certain combinations of collapsars which lead to sensible routes and short cuts, and others which just go the long way round
- The battle scene at the end was excellent
Overall I'm very glad to have dipped a toe into Cherryh's work but am in no great rush to repeat the experience. I can imagine reading another one in say a year's time
Overall, I'd say I liked the book. I might have liked it more, but there were a few things that held me back. One was that I really felt like Cherryh was writing to her club members, and not being a club member there were too many things that I didn't get because she really only hinted at them, but never explained them.
And the other thing that prevents me from really enjoying Cherryh is that she doesn't really care for sentences. And I find all these little half-sentences strung together to be rather hard to follow. Things like this chapterlet opening: "Figure they'd be first in or last in." I mean, who is doing the figuring? First or last in what? And who's going in? It's all very confusing.
Also, I never imagined that out in the galaxy in the far future, people would still say things like "The Hell I don't, you sumbitch!" People didn't even still speak like that in the 90s when this book was written!
Yup, fair points. Like you, I found the vocabulary to be very stuck. Swearing is, I think, a difficult one to get right - do you use contemporary naughty words and assume that your readership will simply work out that that isn't exactly what's being said, but it gives a flavour of just how naughty it is? (Which is basically what happens here). Or do you make up words like Farscape did - frel, anyone?
But for me it spilled over into names - I mean, would Austin and/or whoever he hooked up with (I forget if we know this) really have called their son "Christian"? Doesn't seem to me that religion is especially important to anyone in the story, and particularly not the main characters, so why would he be named like this?
Her name is Beatrice Perrault, Gaby Perrault's aunt. She is the Corinthian's truly excellent pilot, and a prima donna bitch. She is mostly offscreen throughout the story, but omnipresent by implication. Often the unnamed pilot pulls shit with the ship that she shouldn't because she's pissed about something. That pilot is Beatrice. The Perraults are a French Merchanter family, and Merchanters are conservative culturally because they age slower than Stationers due to relativistic effects. Christian is a Perrault family name, and like Beatrice and Gabrielle, French in origin. All this is in the book, mostly hinted at.
Seems that almost everyone is pissed about something almost all of the time
I got the relativistic aging business and thought that was done well (though maybe Forever War handled the total disorientation brought about by a century or more of timeslip - nobody seemed that bothered about the passage of stationer time and didn't expect anything to change much while they were gone. The main issue seemed (reasonably enough) that if Tom had been sent off on some radically different route then you'd lose him forever in timeslip because you'd never be able to resynch. (Again, in Forever War the female protagonist Marygay Potter found a handy shuttle that burned a lot of planetary years for hardly any of hers specifically so that she could resynch with the male protagonist William Mandella, which I've always thought was a pretty neat trick
)
The relativistic effects are not so severe as in Forever War, as they are jumping short distances, rather than going full on STL. Cherryh explores this in Finity's End, where a pregnant crew member is trapped on station during the war, and commits suicide after delivering a child. The child is grows up and is finally joined up with his age mates, who are all like four or five years younger, after the war ends. They put him with his age mates because he knows NOTHING about being on a starship.
Generally speaking, I would say so, by the old definition. She doesn't really care if she is thought to be Hard or not, calling what space ships run on fuel, for example, but she uses science well, and her tech feels tight.
I've been trying to think of anyone else used this idea - mental hazards, I mean, not physical ones like colliding with something at super-fast speeds - and so far have failed
I think this isn't one of her better books. The characters aren't that distinct (they're all suffering from poor anger management), very little happens in the plot, and the climax lacks impact for new readers.
I think this is a very fair criticism, and that's coming from one of her "club members".
I really like Cherryh's phrasing. It may be a bit of an acquired taste, but it's certainly distinctive. When I read a lot of her books, I found myself often slipping into that style in my writing and speech.
Were her choices constrained by 1990s American concerns about profanity? After all, she wrote books popular with teenagers.
Niven did something with his "blind spot" appearance of hyperspace, where looking at it for extended periods could send you mad.
Asimov well before the 1990s used "unprintable" as a substitute phrase for naughty words in the Foundation series so I suppose it was an entrenched writing strategy.
Yes I'd forgotten that, thanks for the reminder
It's the same thing I deal with all the time as an RPG designer. Core book + supplement, or self contained game. With the StarCluster 4 line I have elected to write games that are complete unto themselves, and always run into the criticism of 'a fifth of the book I already know because it's the same as my other StarCluster 4 games', while I have gone the other direction with the BloodGames 4 line, with a single Core book and several setting supplements, inciting the 'I have to buy two (or three) books to run this game? Pfaugh!' reaction. Cherryh chose the Core Book+Supplement route and doesn't repeat information.
Like Neil, I have acquired the taste, and enjoy it. It reminds me of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet.
I think I would have enjoyed this style more if the viewpoint character voices were more different, so that you could tell who was speaking without having to go through a kind of forensic process of deduction! One character speaking / thinking like that would have been fine, but all of them?