Post by Paul S PersonPost by James NicollPost by Paul S PersonPost by Chris BuckleyPost by Paul S PersonPost by James NicollBrothers of Earth (Hanan Rebellion, volume 1) by C J Cherryh
Castaway Kurt Morgan will live the rest of his life among the humanoid
nemet. The rest of Morgan's life might not be long. Nemet know humans
as would-be conquerors and brutes. Why trust Morgan?
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/when-the-rains-came-tumbling-down
Although /some/ of her series make sense and might even be
intentionally set in the same future, I suspect that others are the
result of the publisher's wanting every book to be in a Series.
I don't recall /ever/ believing that /Brothers of Earth/ and /Hunter
of Worlds/ had anything in common except the author.
A lot of mine were SFBC editions, some quite early. Indeed, my first
CJ Cherryh was a genuine series: The Faded Sun. After that, anything
she wrote was a mandatory purchase/read.
Being this tight with SFBC may or may not have affected availability.
I agree, I never saw any relationship between her first two novels and
I don't think she did either at the time. I met Cherryh at the only
SF convention I ever attended, just after _Hunter of Worlds_ was
published. She talked about her upcoming series and a common
technological background that she wanted to work with, but not that
everything was the same universe.
Cherryh is probably my favorite author, with many more of her books on
my Favorite bookcase than any other author (though neither of the
first two is there). I think I have all of her books except her
translations. Even with that background, though, I wonder how James
is going to get through this project. I really don't see that the 22
books of the _Foreigner_ series is worth the effort of
reading/rereading and writing a review for each book. A
bit of a waste of James' talents. The series as a whole may be worth
several reviews, but the theme doesn't change throughout, just
incremental developments. Still, James is managing to review Japanese
manga with much the same problem, so perhaps...
The _Foreigner_ series is, basically, a soap opera. There is no
conclusion possible (except to just stop). Well, short of having the
Humans show up and vaporize the planet, anyway.
But even without them, there are a /lot/ of novels. An interesting
idea might be to trace the concept of the Azi from, say, /Serpent's
Reach/ to /Regenesis/. There are quite a few books, listed in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azi_(clone)]. This page exhibits a lot
of doubt as to whether or not it should exist, but just ignore that
and keep scrolling down.
I am going to mostly stick to chrono order, which is a bit interesting
where the Azi are concerned. In Cyteen, the idea seems to have been
that the azi were a temporary measure, a peculiar institution that
would surely whither away as the economy and population matured. But
Serpents Reach, which predates Cyteen by a decade, makes it clear
that's never going to happen. Slaves to order are just too convenient.
Which is the sort of thing I had in mind: the slow revelation that the
Azi are, in fact, fully human, just controlled by Tapes.
/Serpent's Reach/ instead focuses on genetic engineering, with the
slaves have shorter lives than the "normal humans", but both being
engineered. Only the People in Charge are actual humans with an
indeterminate lifespan.
In /Port Eternity/ they are playthings of the Rich and Self-Indulgent
-- doomed to be put down at 30 (not just die from genetic
programming), when they are no longer beautiful. But then something
strange happens.
And so on, until /Cyteen/ finally reveals the Awful Truth: that they
are as human as anyone else; it is the Tapes that make the difference.
/Forty Thousand in Gehenna/ had a major clue that that was the case,
BTW.
James, Paul, a reminder that you need to be very careful when discussing
the history of the azi and including _Serpent's Reach_. As you perhaps
know, the blurbs from the XenBureau that appear before the text of
_Serpent's Reach_ are crude fakes and not reliable at all.
Like all reasonable fakes, they contain a lot of truthful information.
But there are a lot of inconsistencies with reality, with the dates
being the most glaring example - they're off by hundreds of years!
Another Union colony predating FTL??? It's even internally
inconsistent, it being stated the colony government has been stable
for hundreds of years while the planet was discovered less than 100
years previously.
It is theorized that Alliance espionage folks concocted the fake
blurbs to reinforce an original claim to the Hydri Reach system for the
Alliance, which they obviously didn't have. How the Alliance spies
managed to get their fake blocs of text to precede the actual text of
Cherryh's manuscript as it moved between her and her publisher is
unknown, but it was quite an accomplishment!
Luckily Cherryh clarified the situation in the ending material of
_Angel with the Sword_ (1985). In the course of giving the background for
the shared world of Merovingen, she gave a timeline which filled in
some of the background for the Mri wars and then _Serpent's Reach_.
The Mri wars started in 2703. The Mri managed to capture the capital
of the Alliance in 2730. That was Haven, where the forces founded by
Signy Mallory moved it after taking over Pell and the Alliance earlier.
The war ended in 2743 after Haven was retaken, with the Konstantine
constitution government being restored 6 years later.
The Hydri Reach system was first discovered in 2623 according to the
timeline, though it's not clear when word made it back to
Union/Alliance since that crew was eaten. The events of _Serpent's
Reach_ began in 3141 with the fall of the Meth-Marans.
I noticed a minor inconsistency still remains. Raen tells an azi that the
azi have existed there for 700 years: I don't see how that fits any time line,
since it puts colony establishment in the mid 2400's. Perhaps she was wrong.
In any case, when talking about azi history, the establishment of the
permanent azi of Hydri come from a time 200-400 years after _Cyteen_.
So the "temporary" status of azi in the early years including _Cyteen_
had gradually changed into a permanent feature; they were too useful.
Although I might note that it is perhaps wrong to attribute the
permanence of azi in Hydri to Union as a whole. Cherryh has said in this
time frame Union was extremely fragmented. The central Union
government was interested only in what went into or out of star
systems - what went on inside was up to the system. Since Hydri
probably started as an illegal Union offshoot settlement (later ceded
to the Alliance), the colony probably could get away with anything.
Chris