So I haven't done one of these lately; I stopped for awhile and read other things (you kinda have to; Cherryh's books are heavy). I bounced off Tripoint this spring after I'd already read a ton of Alliance-Union books, because it's dark even by the standards of that universe and I think I kinda hit a wall.

I really loved it on the second try, though. It's still extremely dark; it actually reminded me a lot of Rimrunners in various ways. But it's got that "people finding each other and pulling together in a dark place" aspect that Cherryh's books almost always have. It's also very tense; I found this one of the more engaging of her books, actually, once I got past the bleakness of the general premise and the early chapters, because the tension of the characters' uncertain and dangerous situation pulled me along.

This book is basically one enormous trigger rating for rape and various kinds of abuse. The plot itself hinges around a rape, and the victim's attempts to seek revenge (justice not really being an option; each ship is its own law) while being stonewalled by her relatives because her efforts to bring down another ship's captain are putting all of them at risk. There's also an explicitly described female-on-male rape scene and a whole variety of other kinds of intra-family, intra-society emotional and physical abuse.

One thing I really love about Cherryh's Merchanter books is that she doesn't portray the closed, insular society of the matriarchal merchanter families as a good thing - it's not a bad thing either, it just is, but she's really good at depicting the way that extremely small, closed societies with no outside oversight actually are, and I think of all the merchanter novels I've read, this might be the one that is the most unflinching about just how awful and cruel a merchanter ship can be for someone who doesn't fit in. The close-knit merchanter families have each other's backs right up until they don't, and I think these books (and this one in particular) are painfully believable in how twisted and complex life can get when your family is and will forever be your entire world, and if you lose your place in a merchanter family, there is nowhere else to go. At least nowhere else worth being.

I have occasionally been thinking, reading the Alliance-Union books, about what a claustrophobic place Cherryh's space future is. I really love that she depicts a universe without a central government not as a wide-open frontier, but as a bunch of microcosmic dictatorships, the size of a space station or a ship, where your options are actually incredibly limited depending on where you're born. You can't even easily travel between space stations, since there basically is nothing like passenger spaceflight in Alliance-Union. If you're born on a space station, you'll most likely never be anywhere else but that one space station for your entire life, unless you manage to hire onto a non-merchanter ship (which based on Rimrunners and Tripoint appear to be universally dysfunctional and horrible), or get impressed into the remnants of the Fleet, in which case you'll probably have a short and even more horrible life; if you're born on a merchanter ship, you'll probably spend your life mostly in deep space following a preset trade pattern between three or four space stations, with your life tangled up in the lives of a hundred cousins and opportunities for sex/romance limited to a couple weeks on a space station every year or so.

It's a fascinating universe and a plausible one, and one that I love to read about, but it's also one that makes Earth feel so wide open and full of possibilities and free, which is really something you don't get much from the exploring-the-cosmos brand of sci-fi.

I am curious, for anyone else who knows Cherryh's timeline/mythos better than I do, about (major worldbuilding spoiler for the end of Tripoint) the planet that the Mazziani have found and appear to be settling. Which planet is that? Does it appear elsewhere in the Alliance-Union books, or has she never developed that any further? Given the extreme lack of habitable planets in Alliance-Union space, I am very curious about this!