It's Not Just Me: A Science Fiction Novel for You to Try

Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy , Staff Picks , Fiction

I was reading Publisher’s Weekly’s list of their top 100 books of the year yesterday, and I was surprised and delighted to find C. J. Cherryh’s Pretender on the list.  (We won’t go into how surprised I am to find that it’s November already, and best-of-the-year lists are coming out.) 

Surprised because Pretender is the eighth volume in a complicated, densely sociological science fiction series.  It’s hard to imagine what kind of book would be more difficult to persuade someone to try than a book that can only be read after going back and reading seven other books, all in a genre that tends not to be wildly popular anyway.

Delighted because I love this series.  Because I think Cherryh is one of the best writers of science fiction today.  Because Cherryh uses the conventions of speculative fiction to tackle big, thoughtful questions about humanity and civilization.  And because she writes the coolest aliens around. 

The first volume in the series is Foreigner.  In the backstory of that volume, a tiny human colony was stranded on the planet of the atevi and discovered the hard way that culture shock is a force to be reckoned with.  Despite mutual good intentions, the two civilizations were plunged into all-out war, so absolute were the misunderstandings between them. 

So for the past two hundred years, all contact between the races has been limited by inviolable treaty to a single human translator, the paidhi, who struggles, inch by cautious inch, to build an interface of language and shared technology between them.

That is, until unforeseen events thrust rookie paidhi Bren Cameron deep into atevi internal politics and a frantic race to space.

In Pretender, many twists and turns later, the now seasoned Bren has returned from an interstellar embassy to find atevi civilization in civil war.  Can the progressive leader who sent him regain power in time to cope with the new problems Bren is bringing back from the stars?

It’s fascinating stuff.  Cherryh really tries to imagine “otherness.”  Here, her aliens are evolved from herd animals, and she sets up in wonderfully elaborate detail the kind of thought processes, emotions, and civilization such a race might have.  I can’t begin to describe how beautifully it’s all worked out.

She has written other terrific series, too, all big and bursting with ideas.  Try The Pride of Chanur, her first volume about a human stowaway on the spaceship of a leonine race, the hani.  That one’s told from the hani point of view (the female hani, of course, since male hani stay home to defend clan territory from other males, and everyone knows they’re too emotional to make it in the interstellar workplace).