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Read all the Cherryh: Forty Thousand in Gehenna
Well, that sure was a 1970s/80s sci-fi novel ...
I was reading this one simultaneously with Finity's End, but ended up switching over to the other one because I was enjoying it a lot more. This book is very bleak in places, even more so than you'd expect for the premise (a colony on an unexplored world loses touch with the homeworld; the book then follows multiple generations who grow up and die and change, as well as the very alien aliens they share the planet with) -- therefore, due to the generation-saga nature of it, just when you get to know one set of characters, they die, while most of what they used to know is lost. Also, you know how a lot of sci-fi is fundamentally "problem solving" in nature? This book is basically the opposite of that -- the entire plot hinges around the characters being absolutely terrible at solving problems. (Although in very human ways.) I was also generally baffled by the overall incuriousness of the colonists and the people who eventually reestablish contact; you have a whole entire PLANET you know nothing about and you just kind of ... sit there, not looking at it? (This generally seems to be a thing in the Alliance-Union 'verse re: planets, which I'm becoming aware of from reading a bunch of these books back to back. People, not just as individuals but as a society, are oddly incurious about them.)
ALIEN PLANETS, PEOPLE ...!
All of that being said, I got a lot more engaged with the book in the last third, when it follows the same group of characters long enough to get attached, and has some interesting points to make about civilization vs. barbarism. Which are spoilery.
I particularly liked the point that cultures are effectively a "word" (or more like a paragraph) written on the world's surface, about what it means to be human; each culture is a unique book about the world, a unique interpretation of what the world is. Of course, in Gehenna, with aliens who literally write the nature of the world around them constantly, it's literal as well as metaphorical, with the war between Cloud and Styx conceptualized as, essentially, two groups with very different ideas of what it means to be human trying to rewrite the world in the pattern of their essential truth.
On a less esoteric level, I enjoyed the dueling anthropologists' views of Gehenna, told in the form of increasingly combative reports and memos back home, and was amused by the meta-narrative point of the sexist anthropologist who has consistently tried to smear his female colleague as too emotional and too involved (while literally "going native" himself) eventually getting stabbed in the back, literally, with spears.
The book in general is not at all subtle, in the end, about whether we're supposed to be sympathizing with the matrilineal, relatively civilized Cloud people or the brutal, sexist Styx-ers. Still, I found it interesting that "civilization", as a concept, is conceptualized not in terms of technology, but generally the way of relating to the world; it's not that the Cloud group is more advanced, it's that they have rules. Their methods of succession are still violent and cruel by our standards, but they don't live in a constant scrabble for power like the Styx group does, and they're content with what they have; they don't kill to expand. That is, the Styxers aren't "barbarians" because they wear leather and hunt with spears and ride dinosaurs; the other side does that too. They're barbarians because they murder and assault sentient creatures, and treat women as prizes rather than people.
Also intriguing is that the "good guys" (inasmuch as there were good guys) do win, but by adopting and improving upon the brutality of the opposition.
Like many of her novels, it was a book that was cynical about institutions, but basically optimistic about people, in the end. Elia makes friends with McGee; McGee helps the Cloud side win the war, and tentatively finds them a way to move forward without being in conflict with the people from the stars; and in the end, many years later, we see the Gehennese, both human and caliban, begin to move outward onto the galactic stage.
I also liked that, as with many of her books, powerful, mature women take center stage and drive much of the plot in the last part of the book. McGee is evidently at least middle aged, and while Elia is younger, she is a mother of four and a powerful leader of her people. Gensey and Jin (one from an "advanced" culture -- Alliance -- and one from the barbaric Styxers) both disregard them for no other reason than because they are women ... and, consequently, lose.
I was reading this one simultaneously with Finity's End, but ended up switching over to the other one because I was enjoying it a lot more. This book is very bleak in places, even more so than you'd expect for the premise (a colony on an unexplored world loses touch with the homeworld; the book then follows multiple generations who grow up and die and change, as well as the very alien aliens they share the planet with) -- therefore, due to the generation-saga nature of it, just when you get to know one set of characters, they die, while most of what they used to know is lost. Also, you know how a lot of sci-fi is fundamentally "problem solving" in nature? This book is basically the opposite of that -- the entire plot hinges around the characters being absolutely terrible at solving problems. (Although in very human ways.) I was also generally baffled by the overall incuriousness of the colonists and the people who eventually reestablish contact; you have a whole entire PLANET you know nothing about and you just kind of ... sit there, not looking at it? (This generally seems to be a thing in the Alliance-Union 'verse re: planets, which I'm becoming aware of from reading a bunch of these books back to back. People, not just as individuals but as a society, are oddly incurious about them.)
ALIEN PLANETS, PEOPLE ...!
All of that being said, I got a lot more engaged with the book in the last third, when it follows the same group of characters long enough to get attached, and has some interesting points to make about civilization vs. barbarism. Which are spoilery.
I particularly liked the point that cultures are effectively a "word" (or more like a paragraph) written on the world's surface, about what it means to be human; each culture is a unique book about the world, a unique interpretation of what the world is. Of course, in Gehenna, with aliens who literally write the nature of the world around them constantly, it's literal as well as metaphorical, with the war between Cloud and Styx conceptualized as, essentially, two groups with very different ideas of what it means to be human trying to rewrite the world in the pattern of their essential truth.
On a less esoteric level, I enjoyed the dueling anthropologists' views of Gehenna, told in the form of increasingly combative reports and memos back home, and was amused by the meta-narrative point of the sexist anthropologist who has consistently tried to smear his female colleague as too emotional and too involved (while literally "going native" himself) eventually getting stabbed in the back, literally, with spears.
The book in general is not at all subtle, in the end, about whether we're supposed to be sympathizing with the matrilineal, relatively civilized Cloud people or the brutal, sexist Styx-ers. Still, I found it interesting that "civilization", as a concept, is conceptualized not in terms of technology, but generally the way of relating to the world; it's not that the Cloud group is more advanced, it's that they have rules. Their methods of succession are still violent and cruel by our standards, but they don't live in a constant scrabble for power like the Styx group does, and they're content with what they have; they don't kill to expand. That is, the Styxers aren't "barbarians" because they wear leather and hunt with spears and ride dinosaurs; the other side does that too. They're barbarians because they murder and assault sentient creatures, and treat women as prizes rather than people.
Also intriguing is that the "good guys" (inasmuch as there were good guys) do win, but by adopting and improving upon the brutality of the opposition.
Like many of her novels, it was a book that was cynical about institutions, but basically optimistic about people, in the end. Elia makes friends with McGee; McGee helps the Cloud side win the war, and tentatively finds them a way to move forward without being in conflict with the people from the stars; and in the end, many years later, we see the Gehennese, both human and caliban, begin to move outward onto the galactic stage.
I also liked that, as with many of her books, powerful, mature women take center stage and drive much of the plot in the last part of the book. McGee is evidently at least middle aged, and while Elia is younger, she is a mother of four and a powerful leader of her people. Gensey and Jin (one from an "advanced" culture -- Alliance -- and one from the barbaric Styxers) both disregard them for no other reason than because they are women ... and, consequently, lose.