sarashina_nikki

Bloody Game's season 2 has been a slog of a watch so I ended up starting Death and Other Details, which was on my list for a while but I forgot about it, and I'm missing Only Murders in the Building so it felt like the right time to check it out? Plus I ended up reading Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party at the same time, so I suppose I'm just in the mood.

I was actually just thinking that I love Only Murders for the characters and the setting, because the whodunits aren't that clever (season 3 being an exception for me, YMMV), and that in general, writing whodunits that can be pieced together satisfyingly is way harder than it looks! So starting Death and Other Details I'm already wincing that it opens with narration to "pay attention to details" because... we do. Murder mystery fans, I mean. Some cinematic/TV takes do the parsing out of details well (The Last of Sheila stands out to me) but it's hard to get us off-guard in a way that we're in on it instead of pulling the rug out.

Anyway Death and Other Details starts like traditional murder mystery but pulls away in the long form when the first two murders are solved by a confession, and there's a greater mystery underneath it that's also linked to a murder that happened before the show starts. Mandy Patinkin is the show's World's Greatest Detective, except the show actually belongs to his assistant/protege/client Imogene -- which I did think is a nice touch. The show does do a bunch of stuff well, including having interesting side characters that gain depth in the long form and some of whom could genuinely be the main characters of their own stories (Teddy and Leila in particular), the locked setting of a cruise ship is nice, and I did like the show's actual throughline which is that memory is flawed and can be difficult to rely on. Though on the flipside, digging through memory is what is used to "solve" the mystery, instead of detectiving (though Agatha Christie makes it look so EASY to combine the both).

( The show didn't stick the landing, though. Spoilers for everything. )

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Joey Scarbury - Believe It or Not

china_shop

I'm listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, which espouses imperfectionism, a philosophy of life where you acknowledge that you'll never manage to do everything, and you stop beating yourself up about that fact. (I'm only seven short chapters in, hence this massive oversimplification.) I was thinking about how this relates to my WIP folder.

I'm serially monofannish. When I move fandoms, my old WIPs generally acquire Permanently Discontinued status. Sometimes I post them to AO3 marked incomplete, and other times they lurk in a subfolder of my WIP folder, where I occasionally mourn their lost potential. But mostly they're easy to ignore.

Over the months and years in a new fandom, I naturally accumulate more WIPs. So how do I choose what to work on next? How do I blow the dust off and get the engine turning over?

( Below the cut: multiple lists! )

runpunkrun

a wild boar
is also blown about
by the typhoon
-1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

scaramouche

Not the Jules Verne novel, but the pop science book by David Whitehouse that has the subtitle The Remarkable Voyage of Scientific Discovery into the Heart of Our World. It's about what's inside planet Earth: crust, mantel, core, and all the fun stuff that happened to or happens because of these elements, i.e. earthquakes and volcanoes, continental drift, magnetic shielding, and so on. I got this book at a warehouse sale yeaaaars ago.

Fun topic! But the writing is unfortunately awkward. I've read enough pop science books by this point, sometimes in topics that are so far reaching (that book about time and time keeping, for example) yet have a certain flow that works to bring the reader bobbing along gently in the eddies of a topic even as it sometimes swerves in unexpected directions. The book makes attempts to do that, and uses the Jules Verne book as a signpost of sorts as it brings the reader "into" the planet layer by layer, but turns to various asides without warning (sometimes from one paragraph to the next underneath it) that are not brought back into the main narrative in a cohesive way, and the asides are sometimes too long for the actual point they concern the main topic -- especially true for asides of various scientists Whitehouse wants to highlight in the historical discoveries of earthscience. Also, author does not explain a lot of terms he should be explaining! I already know what declination is, for example, but it was harder still to follow certain descriptions, especially when it came to the movement within the mantel and how using seismographs to map the inside works. The author knows his stuff, but needs a better editor.

Anyway, planet earth is weird and has a dynamo inside that is one of the key factors leading the life on this planet. Also its way bigger and deeper than people usually think it is, and in many aspects we know less about it than we do about outer space.

Current Mood: geeky

china_shop

A grey-scale banner showing a handwritten page with edits on one side, and hands typing on a laptop on the other. The centre text reads '@fan_writers.dreamwidth.org - talking about writing'.

mific and I have started a new comm:

fan_writers - for meta about writing. As the name suggests, we're primarily coming from a fannish context, but original-fic writers are also welcome! Bring us your links to writing-related meta on Dreamwidth or post directly to the comm.

Here are an Introductions post and a Resources post.

sholio

summerofhorrorexchange revealed today! I got an astonishing 15K(!!!) Biggles fic (!!!) which I won't be able to properly start reading until tomorrow, but I cannot WAIT, it looks amazing and I'm dying to read it!

Obligatory reminder that I have a fic in the exchange as well. Deeply mysterious, hid my tracks amazingly as usual. And there is a lovely selection of other horror fic as well!

Earlier today, before all of that, I posted yet another Murderbot TV-verse fic, System // Handshake (2500 wds, gen, post-canon). Summary is spoilery for the finale; it's loosely springboarded off another fic I'd read earlier.

There's also this seriously adorable short interview with the whole Murderbot cast (link goes to Tumblr) in which they talk about playing the Bitter/Sweet game from the show on the set. HOW ARE THEY SO CUTE, I DIEEEEEE

And, longer and more serious, but I really enjoyed watching this David Dastmalchian interview; he talks about the show, as well as some of his other projects (Dune; comic book writing) and is so adorably excited about the show and invested in it.

runpunkrun

Banner with text: fan_writers.dreamwidth.org: talking about writing. Black and white image shows hands typing on a laptop and a pen making revisions on a piece of lined notebook paper.

New comm for meta about writing! Moderated by fandom staples

mific and

china_shop!

tinny

TV ongoing

There was one more ep of HPI in June. I wasn't sure whether I enjoyed it at first, it takes a while to grow on you, and it ends on a cliffhanger, too. I think they could have moved faster in this last ep, nothing at all moved forward in it, it just heightened the tension. The show is usually better at pacing than this. And now we have to wait until September for the final four eps. At least there's a smallish fandom on AO3 with very good authors who will tide us all over, I'm sure. Even one or two who write in English. \o/

I finished Murderbot. I didn't enjoy the middle episodes as much as the previous three. I didn't hate them, either, but they were definitely farther away from the book, and not in a way that made me go "oh yes, this makes sense". I had difficulty finding the parallels and figuring out why they changed so much in the first place. I did enjoy the Sanctuary Moon self-insert, and hated the added sexual harassment (of Murderbot). All the Murderbot emotional things were good, except for when they intersected with the romance/sex aspects. By ep 6 I really enjoyed it again right through the end. Either I'd gotten used to the many changes by then or they were indeed getting more logial, idk? I thought it had great character development, good novel-divergent choices in service of telling us more about Murderbot's character, and they really stuck the landing. They gave the character of Gurathin in particular more of a bond with Murderbot than I remember from the novellas, but that was definitely one of the choices I enjoyed. You can watch it on Apple or where I live it's on Disney+.

Finally finished the Parallel World watchalong. By the end, it got more and more absurd, trying to squish its remaining plot into the last few episodes, with important plot points happening off-screen and mentioned off-hand, oh, and a two-year time skip. The last ep was even more weirdly paced than the previous ones, and almost none of it made any sense. We're glad we're done with it. We'll start watching When A Snail Falls In Love in July, which is a rewatch for me. I'm interested in how well it holds up compared to when I first watched it seven years ago. My other watchalong has finished HPI (s4 - I'm still in the process of translating the subs for s5), and started North of North. Instant hit, as I expected. <3

I watched two more eps of Love Scout (which I'd started ages ago, in March), the kdrama about a workaholic female boss and her male secretary - and I think I should stop. The main couple is good, but lots of the rest of the show is annoying me. The pacing is very slow in places, both leads have other romantic interests that bother me, and overall it's just not doing what I want it to do. Mostly I just went back to it because I was so tired I couldn't concentrate on anything else.

TV new

I tried the first few minutes of Dept Q, because several people on

tv_talk mentioned it, but I think it's too dark for me. I might try again at some later point.

I also watched part of the first episode of Phineas and Ferb, a new season came out last week, after a break of 13 years(!). I have never watched this in English before (only ever dubbed on TV), so that'll be a change I'll have to get used to.

I watched all of The Residence within three weeks. It's not something I'd get fannish about, but the humor was very much up my alley and I enjoyed it. It had a weird thing where five minutes into every episode they'd do a recap of the things that had *just* happened. Not even in previous episodes, just in that same episode! I thought it was just cdramas that did weird unnecessary flashback things, but that was noticeably weird, too. But on the whole, the show is a solid rec. It's a homage to old detective stories, with a beautifully eccentric detective played perfectly by Uzo Aduba, and just overall very funny and very well cast. It's on Netflix.

Lastly, I watched the first few eps of The First Night With The Duke, which is a transmigration kdrama with Ok Taecyeon - he's the duke who falls in love with a secondary character instead of the 'planned' female lead, and the transmigrated fan first tries to fix the narrative and then of course falls in love with him, too. Taecyeon is the only reason I've watched even a few eps of it. It's not terrible, but also not really my thing, and of course the historic kdrama costumes don't do anyone any favors, not even Taecyeon. Not all episodes have aired yet, it's on viki. Im really looking forward to his BL, which is slated for August, if they don't push it back, so that's not too long now.

ranalore

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: discontent
Current Location: i am not permanent

sholio

Terrible Temperature Flash authors were revealed this evening, and I wrote two not at all predictable fics:

A Touch of Warmth (Biggles books, Biggles/EvS, 1000 words)
This was entirely for the mental image of Erich wrapping his coat around a chilled Biggles. ♥

Taking the Heat (Babylon 5, Vir & Londo gen, 2500 wds)
Londo gets heatstroke on Centauri Prime. This was a treat for the h/c of it all.

china_shop

guardian_wishlist is returning next month, yay! It's my favourite event. It runs like

fandomtrees: people sign up with a wishlist of things they'd like to receive, and then anyone can make them gifts. One of the things I love about it is that every year I make things that would never have occurred to me otherwise: the SID Team writing RPS, Arthurian-inspired AU, tea shop AU, Zhu Hong learning martial arts, Li Qian joining the SID, etc.

I find most of my own prompts revolve, by default, around my main /-pairings, so I try to make a conscious effort to include gen and &-pairing prompts in my signups too. And (speaking not as a co-mod, but as a co-participant) I'd like to gently encourage everyone else to do the same, if they'd like to receive that kind of thing, because I love writing little gen and other-pairing things (as well as SW/ZYL), and prompts are love. :D

china_shop

From Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, chapter 4:

As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do.

This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.

rachelmanija

Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.

tinny

The current round at

retro_icontest was about things we love. It was originally meant for entertainment-type things, but the challenge explicitly included stock, and my muse decided to use that opportunity for a change. So, the things I love: HPI, my current favorite show and obsession, and... my cat. :D

Reasons I love HPI: because Morgane can't resist a puzzle, because Karadec is soft-spoken and sensitive, and of course because of the romance.
Reasons I love cats: because they're cute, because they're curious and often hilarious, and because their fur is so soft.

I'm happy to receive all kind of comments, including concrit! All icons shareable. Credit for brushes and textures I use can be found here in my resource post.

Previous icon posts:

glitteryv

Re-reads. HUH

* Towards Zero by Agatha Christie (Classic mystery) - A group of ppl gather at Gulf's Point, home of Lady Tressilian. Among the guests is famous tennis pro Neville Strange, Kay Strange (his second wife), Audrey Strange (his first wife), and a handful of other folks. There's a palpable tension that keeps climbing once murders begin to occur...

I first read this book when I was in 6th or 7th grade. After hearing that the BBC was gonna drop a new adaptation (and having watched another version), I decided to pick this novel up to refresh my memory. Even though it's the 5th in the Superintendent Battle series, I first read this book as a standalone and that's how I approached it this time around.

FWIW, I was disappointed with the story this second time. It had a good build-up, great atmosphere, etc. However, the whole plot kinda dissolves in the last two chapters. There are sudden coincidences that help solve the crimes and reveal the murderers identity. But everything was so convenient that I almost felt secondhand embarrassment. I gave this book a 2 out of 5.

I DNF'd

* Making It Fierce by Ian O. Lewis and Luke Jameson (M/M romance) - Elijah was a marine for 14 yrs until an accident led to him getting discharged. Now he's making a living as an audiobook narrator and voice actor. Lucas is a radio DJ and audio producer. They meet when Elijah rents studio time to record a v. important (for his career) audiobook.

The gist of the story is that both MCs want to love and be loved. For Elijah, that means meeting someone who doesn't mind he's got some physical injuries (including disfigurement) and also PTSD. Meanwhile, Lucas is tired of being everyone's one night stand.

Frankly, the writing was ATROCIOUS. Both MCs sounded exactly the same. And, for some weird-ass reason, the authors decided to dedicate entire pages to the het (really bad) romance that Elijah was recording. Awfulness all around. Thankfully, I'd borrowed this from my library cuz I'd have been pissed to have spent money on this. I gave this a 0.5 out of 5.

Had an awesome time at first (but it all went downhill from there)

* The Duke Who Didn't by Courtney Milan (Historical Romance) - Set in the late 1800s England, the story is abt Chloe trying to help her father set up a business for the upcoming village festival. She's got NO time for anyone's nonsense. Especially Jeremy.

Meanwhile, Jeremy is back in Chloe's life (after being away for years). He's DETERMINED to woo her and (hopefully) marry her. His only problem is figuring out how to tell her that he's the duke that everyone in Chloe's village seems to despise...

Funnily enough, I bought this book in 2020 (when it was published), started reading it, and stopped by chapter 3 for no reason I can think of. So I went back to the start and managed to read it all the way through.

FTR, the writing was AMAZING (as expected from a Courtney Milan book). I also really liked the relationship between Chloe and her father, the many perspectives on being part of a diaspora, and the description of all the yummy food Chloe's father cooked. Oh, and I loved how grumpy Chloe was; she had a fun personality and was someone v. easy to root for.

OTOH, however, it took me AGES (at least until the last two chapters?) to finally warm up to Jeremy. On top of that (and despite enjoying a lot abt the book), I'm still not fully convinced abt Chloe and Jeremy's romance? In part, I think it's because, once the romance part gets going, there's a v. strong screwball comedy vibe that comes to the foreground. Chloe's hyper-organized and serious vibes vs. Jeremy's carefree and chaotic good ones. I found it tiresome. YMMV.

The OTHER thing that lowered the rating for me is a

HUGE SPOILER

OK, so Jeremy's ENTIRE CONFLICT is abt Chloe's v. likely negative reaction once she finds out he's the Duke. He's STRESSING THE FUCK OUT abt this from the second he shows up in the novel. HOWEVAH, by chapter 5 or 6, there are a couple of character who let him know they know he's the Duke. And, OFC, after "coming clean" to Chloe, it turns out that she's known he's Duke FOR YEARS. As a matter of fact, the GORRAM ENTIRE VILLAGE knows and collectively decided to just, you know, play along for funsies?

NGL, I HATED THIS SO MUCH!!! In part cuz I guess I was somewhat emotionally invested in the goings on. Other readers have loved this twist. IDEK, y'all. It is a pretty low-angst book and the intimate scenes were good too. My local library does have the next 2 books in the series, so I'm planning to get around those eventually. I gave this book a 2.1 out of 5

Had a good time

* You're Ours by D.C. Emmerson (M/M/M romance novella) - Tyler works as a comptroller in a nameless company. One night, he accepts a dinner invitation to Jackson (a fellow comptroller) and SKy (Jackson's husband)'s place. The mood turns hot and then all three tumble into bed...

NGL, I was ready to DNF this novella cuz I can be v. picky/techty when it comes to office romances. [NB: technically, Jackson is one level above Tyler, but that's handled mostly OK and then there's a good resolution that works for everyone w/o breaking up the triad. I'm just mentioning it in case anyone else gets as (potentially) squicked abt these kind of unequal work dynamics as I do.] But this is a v. low-angst book. Or, better said, the angsty part has some weight to it. I also liked that all three characters were ADULTS with real jobs and stresses.

There was a smidgen too many sex scenes (which were good). Also toward the end, the author seems to have run out of space cuz there was a lot of telling instead of showing. THAT SAID, the writing was good, I liked the fact that no one was freaked out abt one of the characters being a trans dude, there was no cheating, etc. I'm giving this one a 3 out of 5.

* The Silent Places by Skyla Dawn Cameron (Mystery/Thriller) - As the anniversary of her husband's disappearance draws near, Imogen is still trying to survive all of the gossip and side-eyes thrown at her in the village of Red Fox. Everyone says she's killed her husband (but she didn't). And now there's someone sniffing around her story and her husband's. Imogen is worried cuz there are things she really, really does not want to be uncovered...

This was my first time reading this author and I gotta say WOWZA! Excellent writing, fantastic tension, and the kind of ending I'm STILL thinking abt. I also liked seeing POC and queer characters. FWIW, IDK why I can't give it a top rating, but I still gave this novel a 4 out of 5 and I'm planning to read more from this author.

Current fic tally

There's been a bit of progress in some ways (have picked up 134 fics, DNF'd 70). BUT, a lot of the fics I've been reading are 60k+ so it's slow going. Still having a good time, tho!

As for my profic reading, hmmm. June went on pause cuz of BORAMONTH + OT7 reunion, 4 different online concerts I had to wake up at 3-4 a.m. for, and lots of random livestreams. It's not like things have settled down per se, but I find myself getting back onto reading a bit more than before.

Up next...

Was finally able to borrow The Thursday Murder Club after, like, 10 weeks on hold. Have also borrowed a hot Adriana Herrera novella, am re-reading something regarding movies, and there are a handful of other things I've got my eye on. Good times altogether.

runpunkrun

I was like, can I make this work for

fancake's "Working Together" theme? And I decided I could not.

So I'm going to slap it in here for now because it's too good not to share immediately:

RADIOACTIVE by Murderbot [vid] (30 words) by pollyrepeat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murderbot (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (Murderbot Diaries), Fanvids, Video Format: Streaming, Embedded Video
Summary:

A vid or fanvid is a video edit, often set to music, produced by fans, known as "vidders."

No spoilers for Murderbot, and all the spoilers, I guess, for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

runpunkrun

Perihelion's people notice it's been acting strangely since it returned from its last solo mission. A short story set after Artificial Condition.

My favorite thing about this series is Murderbot and ART and their favorite humans. My least favorite thing is all the descriptions of walking around. This has both. I would have liked it a lot better if it had spent half as much time describing the path they took through the spaceport facility and twice as much time exploring Iris and Peri's relationship because that's the important stuff, right? I wanted to learn more about their relationship and the ways Peri changed after meeting Murderbot and what Iris thinks about those changes. Here I was thinking ART was always like this, but it seems Murderbot might have had more of an effect on ART then it could have known.

Instead: Transit schedules. :(

Read it for free at Reactor.

coffeeandink

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

coffeeandink

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short storie; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Helll novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

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scaramouche - Death and Other Details
china_shop - Why and how to blow the dust off a WIP
runpunkrun - #661, Bashō
scaramouche - Book Log: Journey to the Centre of the Earth
china_shop - New comm: @fan_writers
sholio - Summer of Horror and other fun things
runpunkrun - @fan_writers
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ranalore - all the moving parts holding me here
sholio - Temperature Flash fic reveals
china_shop - Wishlist -- all the prompts!
china_shop - Productivity
rachelmanija - Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, by Kelly Ramsey
tinny - 6 things I love
glitteryv - New month, new book post!
runpunkrun - Rec: RADIOACTIVE by Murderbot [vid], by pollyrepeat
runpunkrun - Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
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that night of softly falling rain

Reading

Death and Other Details

Why and how to blow the dust off a WIP

#661, Bashō

Book Log: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

New comm: @fan_writers

Summer of Horror and other fun things

@fan_writers

Fannish June

TV ongoing

TV new

all the moving parts holding me here

Temperature Flash fic reveals

Wishlist -- all the prompts!

Productivity

Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, by Kelly Ramsey

6 things I love

New month, new book post!

Rec: RADIOACTIVE by Murderbot [vid], by pollyrepeat

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

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