C Gockel Writes

Book Review: Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh

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Book Review: Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh

I picked up Downbelow Station a few years ago at the library and didn’t finish it. I picked it up from Amazon one day when it was on sale, and I loved it. It was, I realized, the font in the library edition. It was a BEAUTIFUL, delicate, serif font … and it was so faint where the weight narrowed on the curves it was hard to read, especially on the slightly yellowed paper of the older book. At least for my 50+ year old eyes. So three cheers for eReaders and the ability to change the font, the font size, and the background color. This book wasn’t one that I devoured, like some of the Foreigner series, but it was one I kept coming back to night after night. The characters were just so real I couldn’t abandon them.

The plot was exactly what it says on the tin: there is a breakdown in Earth’s expansion into space as the people in space—the people in stations, the people on worlds, and the people in the merchant and “navy” fleets that tie them all together—develop different cultures. A completely unnecessary and predictable war breaks out, and atrocities and heroism both happen. C.J. Cherryh isn’t afraid to let bad things happen to good people, and I wasn’t sure who was going to make it out alive, and didn’t count on the directions that certain characters took … but every move they took made sense.

There is action, but this is very much a drama of the psychological, political, and familial variety.

I do believe that sci-fi that takes place in space is motivated by humanity’s desire to expand outward to the stars, and it’s our way of psychologically preparing for it. We are a species that likes to roam, and maybe needs to. Downbelow Station is a beautiful addition to this preparedness—which is maybe why it won the Hugo. Highly recommended.

Besides Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia the ebook is on Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay

The audiobook is available on Audible. Everand features an audiobook with sound effects—I might get it!

Featured Sci-fi: The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh

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Featured Sci-fi: The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh

99¢ as of April 13, 2024
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay

I haven’t read this series, but I loved her Foreigner series. I’m picking this one up!

The first in a series of “lively tales of swashbuckling capitalism in space,” featuring a fascinating alien culture based on the social structure of lion prides (Locus)

Chaos breaks out when the captain of an all-female alien crew agrees to rescue a human male wanted by their enemy . . .

No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company of humans―a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown―and he was a prisoner of his discoverers and captors―the sadistic, treacherous kif―until his escape onto the hani ship, The Pride of Chanur.

Featured Sci-fi: Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh

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Featured Sci-fi: Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh

$1.99 as of January 13, 2024
Click for current price: Amazon US, Canada, Australia

Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay

(Available at regular price: Amazon United Kingdom, Germany)

The Hugo Award–winning author and SFWA Grand Master delivers the first Gene Wars novel and “a brand-new universe with brand-new rules” (The San Diego Union Tribune).

In this brilliant novel—possibly Cherryh’s masterwork—the fate of billions has come down to a confrontation between two profoundly alien cultures on a single desert planet.

Marak has suffered the madness his entire life. He is a prince and warrior, strong and shrewd and expert in the ways of the desert covering his planet. In the service of his father, he has dedicated his life to overthrowing the Ila, the mysterious eternal dictator of his world. For years he has successfully hidden the visions of a silver tower that plague him, but when his secret is discovered, Marak is betrayed by his own father and forced to march in an endless caravan with the rest of his world’s madmen to the Ila’s city of Oburan.

Instead of death, Marak finds in Oburan his destiny, and the promise of life—if he can survive an impossible mission given to him by the strange people in the towers.

According to these beings who look like him yet act differently than anyone he has ever known, Marak has a slim chance to save his world’s people from the wrath of Ila’s enemies. But to do so, he must convince them all—warring tribes, villagers, priests, young and old, as well as the Ila herself—to follow him on an epic trek across the burning desert before the hammer of the Ila’s foes falls from the heavens above.

“C. J. Cherryh remains at the top of her game.” —Tulsa World

A Classic Sci-fi Series! Foreigner (Foreigner Series Book 1) by C J Cherryh

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Featured Sci-fi: Foreigner (Foreigner Series Book 1) by C J Cherryh

$2.99 as of January 22, 2022
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay

The groundbreaking novel that launched Cherryh’s eponymous space opera series of first contact and its consequences … Editors note: I became an addict of this series. Now you can, too.

It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual loyalties not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship. It was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many light-years from home.

Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi society is marked for an assassin’s bullet. The work of an isolated lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of one human’s fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal and not a single word for love?