When Moby was younger, he used to read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, a habit picked up from mom. She claimed she could read several books a day, but 2 in one week was good for me. But of course when I started working full time and could not sit around reading all the time, I made the switch to audiobooks. They can be expensive, but they are such a very good way to whittle away time while your driving or stuck in traffic.
And luckily, Audible has been doing a great job the last year or two in adding some great stuff. ‘Catalog’ type stuff from 20 years ago, sort of classics from authors like Joel Rosenburg, CJ Cherryh, Elizabeth Moon, Dave Duncan…the list just goes on. I will likely add more about Audible and the great titles they are adding every week in another post.
So anyways, it was weird when I actually bought and read a book last month, and then finished that book and bought another. Now there are about five books in line so to speak. I went with some old favorites, some new ones, and some titles from favorite authors that I never got around to. The first two I read were a couple of CJ Cherryh’s earliest novels, two that are not available on audio, Hestia and Wave Without a Shore.
Author CJ Cherryh
I cannot think of anything negative to say about CJ Cherryh. Her style doesn’t treat the reader like they are stupid, you have to sort of just keep up sometimes, and then put the pieces together as you go. She calls it ‘tight 3rd-person’…but Moby has no idea what 3rd-person means. OK, I do know, but it’s still funny. Plus, she has an asteroid named after her, and not everyone can get that. A star? Sure, but not just an asteroid, no sir! So, anyways, you know with those credentials she’s freakin’ hard core.
Her sci-fi works typically occur in the reality of the aliens, not the humans in the stories, and nobody does it better. These two books were some of her earliest works and in them you can see how she was developing some of the ideas, concepts, and themes that would become her trademark. I think I wouldn’t have enjoyed or appreciated them quite as much without being more familiar with where her writing has gone, how much further she has carried these ideas, and ‘looking back’ so-to-speak on these two.
I read this one for a couple of reasons. It was one of CJ’s first published books and it has a sort of ‘Avatar ripped this this one off’ sort of vibe from the cover and all. Like Midworld by Alan Dean Foster, there are a lot of very closely related aspects to the stories.
Hestia is sort of like a ‘rough draft’ of Cherryh’s later works…you can see how she was working on many of the themes that reappear time and again. They are a bit less developed, but that’s part of the fun in going back to these books. This one focuses a lot on the ‘mindset’ of the different parties and how it affects their relations and such.
Overall I found it to be a decent read and well worth the time. My only criticism would be that having read so much of Cherryh’s work now and ‘looking backwards’ by reading Hestia, you can see how much deeper the novel could have gone.
Slow start, but wow! It’s hard to say much without ruining the book for you, but this one got really, really good near the end. It’s actually pretty deep for a sci-fi novel. There’s only one spaceship, and it only makes an appearance twice. Come to think of it, that is true too for Hestia, but the ship there is more central to the story. Wave Without a Shore is more about classes in society, chaste and such. Basically, it is a novel about perception, and mass perception at that. About how the society you live in, grew up in, etc., can define your reality. But, just because it is YOUR reality, doesn’t mean that others are not experiencing the exact same happenings through their own perception, offering them a different reality of their own.
This again is seen in her later books, in things like the aliens and how they ‘see’ things differently. And like I said earlier, nobody does it better.
Fans of Cherryh’s novels should really take the time to ‘go back’ and read these earlier novels. Recommended.
