There is something about the works of a favorite author that becomes an indelible part of your life. You remember the first time you pulled one of their books from the shelf. You scour your library’s shelves and your local bookstore for everything they’ve written, and search used book stores and sites for any that are out of print. You follow them online, and deep dive into their works with other fans. You make them a lifetime companion—even though you may not have ever actually met them.
This is how I feel about the works of C.J. Cherryh, who recently announced that she was hanging up her pen (at least, as far as writing fiction is concerned).
Where do I begin? To boil it down to a single sentence: Cherryh is a skilled, imaginative, and talented writer, with the type of clean, crisp prose that draws you in and makes you want to keep reading. We can start with the bare facts about her career: Cherryh (the final silent ‘h’ was apparently added so she wouldn’t sound like a romance writer) has been publishing speculative fiction since 1976. Incredibly prolific, she has turned out over 80 novels and several collections’ worth of short stories, novelettes, and novellas. She’s been nominated for a variety of awards, won Hugos for her novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen, and for her short story “Cassandra,” along with a Locus Award for Cyteen.
But what I personally love about her work is that, over the years, she has created a vast, complex universe of stories that encompass whole space-faring civilizations, interstellar wars, political upheavals, and personal challenges. At the same time, she has peopled those novels with humans and a plethora of believable non-humans—hani, kif, mri, atevi, and others—all of which have fascinating and complex cultures. In other words, she manages to combine the action of space opera with a keen awareness that the ships and space stations and planets are inhabited by individuals, all with their own thoughts, dreams, and fallibilities. In the same tale, she can veer from describing battles involving huge ships and space stations to a human couple’s concern for each other’s welfare or the wonder of a previously world-bound non-human individual upon seeing a star for the first time.
In other words, Cherryh’s talent for worldbuilding—or, rather, universe-building—is incredible. And once each universe is built, she has the ability to expand on it in any number of directions.
For example, her Alliance-Union universe was introduced in Downbelow Station, which tells the story of a far-future space-traveling human society and the conflict between a quickly irrelevant Earth, a military force turned pirate, an expanding culture based on mind control and genetic manipulation (called Union), and a loose association of family-owned merchant ships (the Alliance). From there, she expanded that universe to take in lost and lonely independent operators (Merchanter’s Luck), the inner workings of the Union (Cyteen), and alien societies operating outside known space (the Chanur novels).
Her Foreigner series, which contains 22 novels divided into seven trilogies (plus one last book), takes place on a world where human refugees from a lost human ship founded a society alongside the ruling species known as the atevi. It follows the adventures of Bren Cameron, a human who is trained as a translator and slowly finds himself integrated into and becoming an important part of atevi society. Through those 22 novels, you follow Bren, his associates (atevi do not understand the concept of “friends”) and family as they experience political and personal upheavals, both on the planet and in space.
And that’s only two of her series.
Yet another reason I am a fan of Cherryh’s writing is her skill with point of view. Most of her novels—at least, of those I’ve read—avoid the third-person omniscient point of view and put us into the heads of those who are actually part of the events. In Downbelow Station, for example, we experience the POVs of a wide variety of players, including the hardened captain of a military vessel, the worried leader of a space station orbiting an Earth-like planet, his jealous antagonist who slowly finds out that he’s made the wrong choices, and a Downer—a member of the planet’s native species—who understands more than she is given credit for. And somehow, we are never confused about whose thoughts we are listening to, and where they are in the events being played out. All of these widely differing personalities and outlooks combine to create a fascinating tale.
I clearly remember the day that I first picked up one of her novels. It was 1990, two years after the book was published. The tech magazine I had been happily working for had suddenly shut down, leaving me unemployed and untethered. I went to a local used book store to find something to distract me, and came home with Merchanter’s Luck. I grabbed some coffee, dropped onto my couch, and started reading about Sandy Kreja, a young man living in a future space-faring society who is desperately trying to survive as the last living member of his family and to hold onto the ship that has always been his home. He is traumatized and makes some bad decisions, but in the end finds a new family and a new beginning.
I finished the book around 2 am. That escape into the world of Cherryh’s troubled, uncertain, but determined-to-survive protagonists enabled me to take a breath, look around me, and push ahead. Moreover, I had found an author who would provide me with years of incredible science fiction and fantasy travels.
I’ve continued to follow her eagerly over the years as she continued to add to her body of work. But I have to admit—it’s a lot. Cherryh’s ability to track all her invented worlds, cultures, and characters is absolutely mind-boggling. Every time a new book in a series came out, I had to go back and reread the previous novel in order to catch up on who was doing what to whom.
So a couple of years ago, when I got the chance to interview Cherryh and her wife (and co-writer) Jane Fancher for the NYRSF Reading Series, one of the first things I asked was how she kept track of the vast and complex web she had weaved just in her series of Foreigner books. Her answer? “It’s a place I go in my head. If I’m in a particular place, I know what’s over the horizon.”
What’s in her personal horizon now is retirement. Or, at least, stepping back from her fiction. On April 25th of this year, Cherryh posted the following announcement on Facebook:
Dear readers and friends. The unhappy fact is—the numerous bouts of anaesthetic I’ve had have made it pretty well impossible for me to write. I drop stitches. Not many. No problems with daily life or doing creative stuff or enjoying life in general. But the ability to control narrative is just not what it was, and it’s just not going to be there. I’ve accepted that, painful as it is. I thank all of you who’ve stood by me patiently. The body of work is what it is, and I am lastingly grateful to my publisher, Betsy Wollheim, who has given me every extension of time and resource. And of course to Jane, who is all things.
If anyone deserves a break, it’s C.J. Cherryh. She is responsible for a body of work that would fill its own library. Certainly, I still have a lot of reading to catch up on. And I fully intend to.
In fact, although I try to take in as many different authors as I can, I know that eventually I’ll always come back to Cherryh’s books. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread the Chanur series, reveling in its wonderfully fun female-centric feline society and the attempts of its ship-captain protagonist to figure out what makes those strange humans tick. I still have several of the Foreigner books to finish—I need to find out what political tangles Bren will deal with next, and how the young atevi Cajeiri slowly prepares to enter a dangerous adulthood. And there are a bunch of short stories I need to dive into…
I’m looking forward to it.
Thank you, CJ. It’s been great.
As it happens, I am as of today 19 books into a Cherryh review project that will run until the end of 2027. It was prompted by someone referencing her as obscure.
My sense of foreboding inclines me to think that Ms. Cherryh will have a legacy similar to Mr. Poul Anderson, another prolific writer of great reach and well-populated universes and future histories.
I am six reviews into a Poul Anderson 100th anniversary project.
That said, Anderson has been consistently in print even after he died. I am more worried about Cherryh getting the Jo Clayton/Tanith Lee treatment.
Her sci-fi universes are incredible, but I would also give some appreciation for her fantasy works. Her Fortress series is one of my absolute favorite fantasy series and just as with the sci-fi does some innovative twists with PoV.
Gate of Ivrel was one of my earliest exposures to her work and I still have the Faded Sun Sci-Fi Book Club edition. I hope she enjoys her retirement. She’s left us an incredible body of work.
I’m glad Cherryh is hanging it up. I adore her Foreigner series, but Fancher wrote much of the last one, and it shows. (I don’t care much for Fancher’s writing.). The one thing I am unhappy about is, it looks as though the Foreigner series was edging toward re-establishing contact with Earth. That won’t happen now, and it would have been very interesting if Cherryh was the one writing it.