katenepveu – Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu’s Book Log

August 2, 2026August 3, 2026

Homer (tr. Emily Wilson), The Iliad and The Odyssey

At Readercon I was also on a panel about The Odyssey in 2026 (this was the week before the Nolan movie). I’d read Emily Wilson’s translation a little while ago, but figured I’d better reread it, but first reread The Iliad, which I had last read in college. Happily, Wilson had also put out a translation—and even more happily, its audiobook is narrated by Audra McDonald.

Wilson notes that The Iliad hasn’t had the same historical cultural prominence as The Aeneid; I suspect this is also true with regard to The Odyssey, though she doesn’t make that specific comparison. It’s not hard to see why. It’s very tightly focused, so there isn’t the same layered narrative with lots of adventures; the moral and ethical distance between the present and the past is foregrounded from the very beginning; there’s quite a lot of repetition (including word-for-word verbal messages in close succession; from a modern point of view, the one time when the message isn’t word-for-word doesn’t seem sufficient payoff); and it’s really startlingly violent. The battle scenes are generally, here are a few lines about this guy’s background, and now he’s going to be killed in a very specific and embodied way that is frequently visceral in both the literal and figurative sense; on to the next guy, lather rinse repeat. There is no question about the cost of war to the direct combatants: they are all individuals, and their bodies are all violated in horrible ways. (It helped a lot that I was listening to an audiobook while I was doing other things, like gardening.) However, while the cost of war to those not directly in combat is foundational to the plot, the poem isn’t interested in that.

What the poem is interested in, is the tragedy of Achilles. And because of the way that ties into the difficult stuff above, it’s perfectly understandable to look at him and say, I’m not here for this. I wasn’t exactly there for that on an emotional level, but I did appreciate on a craft level how everything fits together (aided, I strongly suspect, by Wilson’s efforts in both the text and the accompanying material at making it legible). I don’t know that I find it as interesting as The Odyssey, but I’m glad I went back to it.

Wilson’s translation is iambic pentameter but not line-by-line, and thus avoids the compression inherent in her Odyssey translation. It also has great endnotes. Because I was on a bit of a deadline to get to The Odyssey, I did not do a lot of cross-comparing with other editions.

Finally, Wilson’s introduction is very interesting and thoughtful, as I expected having read her Odyssey translation first, and it ends with an even more remarkable paragraph than that one:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Dang.

Turning to The Odyssey—

I read Wilson’s translation first in 2025. It had been on my mind for a while because SteelyKid had been very into Epic: The Musical, which I found remarkably different from its source. (I found it fun to tell people familiar with the poem that the second song is Odysseus angsting over killing Hector and Andromache’s infant son, in which he repeatedly says "I’m just a man.") I found Wilson’s translation extremely readable, and I also wondered if I’d read the whole thing in college after all, because there was so much that was different from both its popular reputation and my vague impressions. The monster set-pieces are so short, and the time after the return to Ithaca so long; it opens in media res and stays away from Odysseus for four whole books; and it is deeply ambivalent about whether Odysseus is acting correctly.

When I went back to it for Readercon prep, I’d meant to listen to a newer translation, by Daniel Mendelsohn, for the contrast. Unfortunately he reads the audiobook himself, and I am incredibly picky about audiobook narrators. So I listened to Claire Danes read the Wilson translation and read along with Mendelsohn, at least until about halfway through, when I ran out of time and had to finish listening to Wilson on the way to, and indeed at, the con.

Wilson’s translation, as I mentioned above, is line-by-line iambic pentameter, which, as Mendelsohn points out in his introduction, necessarily involves compression since the original Greek is a longer line. Mendelsohn’s is thus line-by-line in a six-beat meter. Putting aside questions of meter and poetic flow, since I simply cannot hear meter and thus cannot form an aesthetic preference between the two—there are occasions when I felt that Wilson’s shorter lines introduced some ambiguity or lost something. But there weren’t that many, at least in the first half that I was doing direct comparisons on.

And while Mendelsohn has much more useful endnotes [*], he is very weird about Helen in a way that means I simply do not trust him. In his introduction, he says that in Book 4 she "is as seductive and manipulative as ever." Excuse me? I mean, first of all, there is no such thing as a consistent portrait of Helen in the sources. To have formed a definite opinion about her character is therefore certainly a choice. Second, what, exactly, does she do in Book 4 that is seductive?!? (I’m going to pass over his comments about her in the endnotes because I do have other things to be doing tonight.) But more importantly, Wilson very carefully and thoroughly explains why she thinks Helen calling her face "doglike" should not be translated as Helen calling herself a "bitch." I don’t need Mendelsohn to agree with that, but I do at least think that he ought to at least address why his Helen still calls herself "a shameless bitch"—a phrase I found genuinely jarring. He does not, not even in an endnote.

[*] Amusingly, Wilson is doing another translation, still in iambic pentameter but not line-by-line and also with, as she said on Instant Classics’ book club, "quadruple the endnotes."

I have two other translations. Robert Fagles is what Chad had recently read. I read his introduction (a lot about the historical understandings of the origin of the text) and then found a preview of Ian McKellen’s reading of the audiobook. Unfortunately, Fagles has Zeus recount how they warned Aegisthus against killing Agamemnon thusly:

Far in advance we told him so ourselves,
dispatching the guide, the giant-killer Hermes.
‘Don’t murder the man,’ he said, ‘don’t court his wife.’

Which is when I reflexively hit "pause," because not even Ian McKellen could make me believe that.

And I did not read any of Peter Green’s translation because he has the oddest preoccupations. According to his introduction, "what must put the heaviest strain on the modern reader’s willing suspension of disbelief is Athēnē’s preternatural, instantaneous ability to transform Odysseus’ physical appearance." Yes. That is definitely the most difficult thing to believe in this story. And he’s really mad about the length of time that Odysseus and Menelaus are away from their homes, saying that the only reason is to let the next generation grow up enough to participate in the plot. I mean, correct? I’m sorry that that the timelines in earlier documents wouldn’t have accommodated the story that the poet wanted to tell?

I am, I admit, indebted to Green’s introduction for two things. First, he is the only one of the four to mention Agamemnon’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter as a reason that Clytemnestra would want to kill him—something I had been wondering about all through the endless reiterations of the cautionary tale of his death. Because Green’s the only one of the four, I was dubious about his accuracy, but it does seem to be the case that it was a known story at the time. The fact that Homer leaves that out is therefore really good to know. Second, Green refers to Athena’s function in the plot as "micromanagement," which is both funny and accurate, and which I thought of often while I was reading.

Anyway, though I can’t exactly recommend reading The Iliad, I do recommend The Odyssey, because it’s got a lot more in it and it’s fascinatingly unlike the way it’s thought of in popular culture (as is often the case with classics, of course). And ultimately the best translation is the one you enjoy reading. (But read Wilson.)

2 Comments

August 2, 2026

Turner, Megan Whalen: The Queen’s Thief series

In preparation for a Readercon panel I reread Megan Whalen Turner’s series The Queen’s Thief, including the last novel, which I didn’t really remember, and the post-series collection Moria’s Pen.

Apparently I wrote up the first four a while ago, so that saves me some time. I have to say that the fourth, Conspiracy, looks worse to me now because it is extremely weird about slavery.

The fifth, Thick of Thieves, simply does not have enough there there. Extremely little happens, and to the extent it’s supposed to be a look at the Medes, I don’t think it’s successful.

The six and final book, Return of the Thief, feels so much like a direct sequel to The King of Attolia that it reinforces my feelings about the fourth and fifth. I love the narrator, but as the book progresses, it ranges further and further afield from what he knows, which bugs me despite the lampshading in the prologue. I understand why a novel might decide that fidelity to a narrative framework is less important than smooth and unremarked switching between multiple POVs at moments of high tension, but you know me, that’s never going to be the choice that I would have preferred.

As for the way the plot resolved, I did not find it exactly consonant with the rest of the series, but it did resolve and I was glad of it.

Finally, I would not read the post-series collection Moria’s Pen, because the stories in it are pleasant but inessential … right up to the point where one drops a post-series event that would be monumental and says, "but that was generations ago and no-one knows what happened! moving on." Why. Why would you do this to me.

It was, by the way, very amusing to be reading this series while also in the middle of a deep dive into the Homeric epics, again for Readercon. For that, see the next post.

No Comments

July 3, 2026July 4, 2026

Tesh, Emily: The Incandescent

Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent did not quite work for me, for reasons that may not be entirely fair to it, but it’s still very interesting.

This is a magical boarding school book, but from the point of view of a teacher and administrator, not a student. It is strongly in conversation with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy (which I never wrote up, but which I find compulsively readable despite holding several serious grudges against it) and, through that, with Harry Potter etc. etc.

The very concept of magical boarding school but tired middle-aged teacher is absolutely perfect, and Tesh (who used to teach) does this part of it beautifully well. And you know that I love me an unreliable narrator, and Tesh is extremely good at that (I never wrote up her prior novel, Some Desperate Glory, but it’s a banger and I highly recommend it, not least on those grounds).

My problem was that the plot requires accepting two major propositions, and I felt that was one too many. As I said, this may be unfair: they were both of the same nature, and one was explicitly explained in the text in ways that made sense, so you’d think that I could take the other one as the price of admission. But the one that was explained in the text, I still spent a lot of time mentally yelling about even though it made sense, and I didn’t have any goodwill left over for the price-of-admission one.

Nevertheless, if the premise sounds appealing, give it a try.

Finally, a note for those who’ve read the book: "You are, in fact, self-actualising! Well done!" is the very best thing ever. For that alone, I don’t regret reading the book.

No Comments

July 3, 2026July 4, 2026

du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca

I had so much fun reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, for multiple reasons. First, there’s the prose, starting with the famous opening:

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkept, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leaned close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

If you don’t like that, you won’t like the book; it’s full of that kind of lush description, which I positively reveled in, but certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste.

The next thing I enjoyed is how unreliable and ambivalent the narrator is. In Chapter 2, she tells us, "We have no secrets now from one another. All things are shared." That is, however, sandwiched in between two statements that directly contradict this claim: first, "He is wonderfully patient and never complains, not even when he remembers… which happens, I think, rather more often than he would have me know," and second, "I had learned my lesson. […] in future keep the things that hurt to myself alone. They can be my secret indulgence." In the same chapter!

Then there’s the way I didn’t know what kind of story we were in until quite a long way into the book. I knew it was a Gothic, of course. But was it a supernatural kind of Gothic? A murdery one? Were the Jane Eyre vibes more than just vibes? I simply did not know, and it was delightful.

And when the plot became clear, there was still a lot of tension: though we know where the story ends up, because it’s a retrospective narration, how we were going to get there was far from evident.

Finally, the whole thing is amazingly melodramatic in a very tightly interwoven and deliberate yet absolutely unhinged way. The amount of caps-lock and wild gestures I would like to do about it! The way I wanted to pull random people off the street and say, "Can you believe this?!!??!"

In short: it’s very fun, you should read it.

Minor notes:

Chalk this up along with The Great Gatsby as books in which WWI seems like it ought to be much more of a presence than it is, at least textually.
It is extremely homoerotic. It’s very easy to read it as homophobic, but then again none of them are healthy, so I don’t know that it’s singling the arguably-queer characters out in this respect.
There is also a lot of gender in this book. That’s just an observation, I don’t have any conclusions about it.

No Comments

October 12, 2025

Marske, Freya: Cinder House

Freya Markse’s Cinder House came out last week and is a book I liked very much, thus writing it up while it’s timely and as an antidote to frustration posting!

This is a novella retelling of Cinderella in which Ella is a ghost embodied in her house, and is forced to labor for her stepmother and stepsisters because damage to the house pains her. To me, it was exactly the right length, which is a common difficulty with novellas. I can see that people might want more of various things, but I thought the book did an excellent job of conveying what was happening outside of Ella’s point of view; so while I wouldn’t have minded reading those conversations etc., it would have made it a much different book, and I’m happy to hope that people write them for Yuletide. And like Marske’s other books, the prose, characterization, and romance are all great.

With regard to the romance, I’m going to put something behind clickable text because it’s the kind of spoiler that is also an enticement.

This is a spoiler for the resolution of the romance portion of the book:

I absolutely delighted in the way that the book refuses for an instant to entertain a love triangle between Ella, the prince, and the princess he’s entering into an arranged marriage with. Nope! Straight to polyamory, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I don’t want to say too much else about the book because it is short and I liked the experience of it unfolding, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s got a great angry protagonist and that it’s interested in exploring gender and abuse. If you like fairy tale retellings and/or Gothics and/or Marske’s other works, definitely check it out.

No Comments

October 12, 2025October 13, 2025

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby

I did not, actually, read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby immediately after Swordspoint, but I promised to end this batch of updates on a positive note, so I’m moving this post out of chronological order.

Yes, somehow I got through an American education without having ever read The Great Gatsby. I’d been meaning to, especially after Readercon this year. When our local theater sent me an email saying that a ballet adaptation of Gatsby was coming last month, I decided to give myself a hard deadline by buying tickets.

Unfortunately, I hated every single minute of reading this book—which I did twice, as I do for many books, and especially ones I want to be sure I’m giving a fair shake. Everyone in it is horrible; it’s crashingly obvious in a really tedious way; the plot makes no sense whatsoever; and the narrator is deeply oblivious to his own faults and never changes. (You know I love an unreliable narrator! But it turns out that I need the unreliability to matter; I’m not even sure that the book realizes that Nick is unreliable.) I do recognize that people find the prose beautiful, but it did not click for me.

It was an interesting experience because, like Les Misérables and Moby-Dick, I somehow did not know the ending going in. I knew that it was about rich people, class differences, and the narrator being a fish out of water; and—because of two of the many books that have been released since it went into the public domain—one character could be interpreted as maybe not white and the narrator could be interpreted as maybe queer. Which definitely flagged for me every time Jordan’s skin is described as brown (many) and that extremely remarkable ellipsis: "… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands."

Finally, the reason I said up front that I didn’t read this right after Swordspoint is that its "these people are bad, the end" reminded me of that book, possibly because Kushner had said she liked Gatsby at Readercon. To be clear, however, Swordspoint has a morally coherent view of why its bad people are bad, which is not something I would say about Gatsby.

No Comments

October 12, 2025October 12, 2025

Kushner, Ellen: Swordspoint

So, naturally, after reading Swordcrossed, I reread Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, which I hadn’t liked very much when I read it back in the day because the swordsman’s boyfriend was so annoying.

I did like it better this time around, partly because the annoying boyfriend (Alec) actually takes up much less page space than he did in my memory. And I found him, and Richard’s relationship with him, less annoying because I saw better what their deal was.

However, I still found it kind of a weird shaggy book. There’s the Alec/Richard thread, and then there’s power-hungry nobles being manipulative, the upshot of which, as far as I could tell, is that being power-hungry is bad and exercising power over other people is bad, the end. Though we get points-of-view from various other characters involved in the manipulations (hence less Alec than I remembered), the resolution of it nevertheless felt incomplete. I think it would be, belatedly, an example of a work that did not cohere for me. But it was useful rereading it.

Finally, I need to note that back in the day, everyone always quoted the book’s second paragraph, and it is so telling that they never quoted the next:

Let the fairy tale begin on a winter’s morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff. And it therefore follows that evil lurks behind each broken window, scheming malice and enchantment; while behind the latched shutters the good are sleeping their just sleeps at this early hour in Riverside. Soon they will arise to go about their business; and one, maybe, will be as lovely as the day, armed, as are the good, for a predestined triumph…

But there is no one behind the broken windows; only eddies of snow drift across bare floorboards. The owners of the coats of arms have long since abandoned all claims to the houses they crest, and moved up to the Hill, where they can look down on all the city. No king rules them any more, for good or ill. From the Hill, Riverside is a tiny splotch between two riverbanks, an unsavory quarter in a prosperous city. The people who live there now like to think of themselves as evil, but they’re really no worse than anyone else. And already this morning more than one drop of blood has been shed.

(I’ve never read either of the sequels; on looking at them and reading some of the short fiction set in the same world, I’ve decided that I’m not going to read The Fall of the Kings, because I don’t actually want a heavily mythic story of magic in this setting. I do plan to eventually read The Privilege of the Sword, however.)

2 Comments

October 12, 2025October 12, 2025

Marske, Freya: Swordcrossed

I feel bad about dusting off the booklog just to work off my frustrations, so here’s some relatively quick notes about other books, which will ultimately end on something both positive and—for a change—timely.

First: a standalone from Freya Marske, Swordcrossed. This is a romance novel that is fantasy solely by virtue of being in a secondary world. One of the guys on the cover is the oldest child of a family of wool merchants; the business is not doing well, so he’s going to marry a very nice rich woman. The other guy is the duellist he hires to be his best man, to handle any challenges at the wedding … and also pressures into giving him sword lessons on the side, because the duellist scammed him the night before. Sparks fly, etc.

I enjoyed this very much. None of the emotional beats surprised me, but they didn’t need to, because they were arrived at in very satisfying fashion; and a few of the plot beats did, which was fun. The details of the worldbuilding were well-done, including the religion, and there were lots of cahoots; I reread the last few chapters for the fun of seeing it all fall into place.

Anyway, I finished this and thought, "oh, it’s no-magic fantasy like Swordspoint," and then somehow took several hours to realize that it was almost certainly directly in conversation with Swordspoint because of, you know, the swordfights?! And the central m/m relationship? So that was what I read next.

No Comments

October 11, 2025October 11, 2025

Clarke, August: Metal from Heaven

August Clarke’s Metal from Heaven opens like this:

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions. In the chasms wheat spikes and poppies will grow. Rarely is the future so immediate and tangible. Bless our triumph! How small you seem. How small you were. Remember?

And this is one of the things I liked about it, and one of the things I found so frustrating that I had to scrape out a little time to write it up.

So this is secondary world fantasy set during an industrial revolution. Our narrator, Marney Honeycutt, saw her entire community massacred because they tried to unionize over conditions at the ichorite factory. Ichorite, the titular metal, gives some of the people who handle it seizures and hallucinations. Marney is one of these lustertouched; she, however, is also able to manipulate ichorite, which she discovers when she flees the city and falls in with lesbian communist bandits.

Marney comes to adulthood among the lesbian communist bandits’ community. Her goal in life is to kill the industrialist who ordered the massacre; to get close to him, and also to protect the community, she ends up masquerading as an aristocrat to participate in a competition that the industrialist’s daughter is running to find herself a wife.

(The dating competition, which is basically a reality TV show except without the TV show part, doesn’t start until about 45% in. However, it is in the jacket copy, so I’ve decided it’s not a spoiler and regardless useful to know—partly because I was startled as heck when I came to it. (If I’d read the jacket copy, which I often don’t, I’d forgotten that part.))

Going back to the opening. I love first-person direct address narration, of course, and while the prose isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, I quite enjoyed it. And the end wraps back around to this opening in a way I found genuinely beautiful.

However, I can only characterize the overall story of the book as, "what if the violent overthrow of capitalism and industrialism ("cities sundered" etc.), except only the bad people die?"

Unfortunately, this does not make sense even within the text of the book: the problems it acknowledges, it handwaves away in single sentences. And it ignores many more.

I admit that I’m allergic to speculative fiction that set up extremely clear analogies to real-world injustices, and then solve those injustices through means that only work because it’s speculative fiction. Here, it was impossible not to think of ichorite as oil throughout most of the book, and then the analogy broke down because it’s fantasy—which it’s allowed to be! There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that! I just don’t like it.

So my reaction to the overall story is certainly colored by that. And it’s possible that I would be more charitable to the plot holes and handwaving about only the bad people dying if there were fewer overall plot holes and handwaving. There are a lot of things in this book that do not make any sense, and the cumulative effect was ultimately too much for me. Unfortunately, I suspect not.

Besides the prose and the plot, the other thing I noted about this book is that it’s 95% lesbians by volume. Specifically, butch and femme lesbians; the book’s very interested in how that involves gender as well as sexuality. That’s all great. There is a point, however, where a character breaks down gender in a speech that felt like a mouthpiece for the narrative:

“We have five genders recognized within the Splendid Fraternal Federation of the Crimson Archipelago. You have two. Precision becomes difficult.”

Where to even begin. “Five?”

“Mhm. There’s penetrating men, that’s [character], penetrated men, that’s me, the same division for women, and then those for whom penetration isn’t applicable, which is all children, all priests, a fair number of others disinterested for whatever reason. Penetrators are closer in gender to each other than they are to those penetrated and vice versa.”

Regardless of whether this character was actually speaking truth about this world, the remark did underline for me that the book has many lesbians, a few gay men, a handful of heterosexuals; no trans people and no bisexuals. The "about the author" uses they/he pronouns for Clarke, so I think it reasonable to assume that this focus was deliberate, not the result of unfamiliarity with the spectrum of human gender and sexuality. And like with the fantasy nature of ichorite, this is a thing a book is allowed to do! However, as a queer woman, I was not expecting to feel so alienated from a book so intensely focused on queer women.

(Edit: it’s been pointed out to me that there’s a strong possibility that one character is bisexual.)

(Also, in the aftermath of a fantasy Roman-or-Etruscan Empire, there are only white people. A single character has a "brown" face; she is from a "far-off" country "across the water.")

Finally, this book feel so emphatically post-Broken Earth trilogy that I was shocked not to see it in the acknowledgments; and further shocked that I couldn’t think of other works that were similarly post-Broken Earth. Suggestions welcomed! (I was also surprised that it’s been so long since Harrow the Ninth came out that it could appear in the acknowledgments of a book published last year. The inexorable linear progress of time, sigh.)

No Comments

June 16, 2024June 16, 2024

Cherryh, C.J.: Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; Regenesis

For no apparent reason, a month or two ago I found myself picking up Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, which I’d read in college, found gripping and completely incomprehensible, and never reread. This sent me on a Cherryh spree that I pulled myself out of only because I had (and still have) a lot of reading to do for Readercon.

Anyway, for the sake of time I’m not going to put a lot of effort into summarizing the books I read, which were Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; and Regenesis: two of these are Hugo Award winners, Cherryh is a major author, there’s lots of reviews and summaries out there.

Cyteen made a lot more sense this time around, though I did immediately have to reread it to determine whether it was just me, or whether a couple of key characters were in fact genuinely inscrutable or got their characterization too late in the game. (I think it was the latter.) I understand why people bounce off (1) the opening in-universe textbook excerpt and (2) the first third of the novel, but I loved both of them and wouldn’t suggest anyone skip them. The first of those is perhaps the more unusual: I do love an in-universe document generally, but I think I must click with Cherryh’s prose particularly well, to say "hell yeah, here we go" upon opening a novel to:

Verbal Text from:
THE HUMANE REVOLUTION
“The Company Wars”: #1
Reseune Educational Publications: 4668-1368-1
approved for 80+

Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with the petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations—a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.

And while the first third is a horror show because it’s got Ari I in full swing, that’s why it’s important—a book that’s about recreating Ari I needs to have that perspective in it.

Anyway, this doesn’t hold up quite as well upon a close second read because of the characterization stuff I mentioned before, but it is very close to brilliant, I think: it’s remarkably wide in scope and ambitious as well as being intensely claustrophobic, which is a good trick. The density, hothouse atmosphere, unreliability, and deeply fucked up abusive relationships all remind me of the Locked Tomb, if that’s useful, though its narrative voice is nowhere near as distinctive.

Of course one of the things about Cyteen is that Ari I is extremely wrong about at least one thing that the reader can determine: true brilliance does not mean that literally every other person in the universe is incapable of understanding you. This is both deeply anti-scientific of her [*] and typical of her arrogance—an arrogance that is enabled and encouraged by Union society, to be fair. Between knowing that she’s demonstrably fallible, and the way Cyteen is haunted by whatever happened on the planet Gehenna, 40,000 in Gehenna was the obvious thing for me to pick up next.

[*] Chad literally wrote a whole book about this!

And 40,000 is just a really great book, more successful than Cyteen in my opinion. It was actually written before Cyteen, and I’d love to know what it was like reading them in that order! But it’s hard to talk about because I’m not sure what constitutes a spoiler for it. There is what you get in Cyteen, which is that Union landed 40,000 colonists, mostly azi, on a planet and deliberately abandoned them there in order to deny the planet to Alliance. During Cyteen, it becomes a political crisis because Alliance has now found the planet and determined that the colonists had "devolved into a primitive lifestyle." I guess I can say that the book spans about two hundred years, with time jumps of varying lengths, and that in places it gives me Steerswoman vibes (or the other way around given the timing, though I don’t know if Kirstein has talked about Cherryh as an influence). I think my only critique is that there’s some gender stuff that feels maybe a smidge on the nose? But on the whole it’s an impressive and enjoyable book and a great showcase of Cherryh’s range, especially back-to-back with Cyteen.

Next I read Downbelow Station, which is set during the Alliance-Union war and is told from the POVs of various Alliance characters. Cherryh says, in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition, that in order to keep the book’s size down she "took out all the transitional and descriptive bits in a final edit." Don Wollheim sent it right back to her to put them back in, Betsy Wollheim added in the scene headings, and "DAW created a new size category to make it possible to publish the book uncut"—does anyone know what that means? Anyway, good editing, Wollheims; so much of the tension of the book comes from seeing this entire fragile space station from so many perspectives and really understanding what’s at stake.

This book is a little more morally simplistic than the others here, which mostly was a relief, honestly—characters who both mean well and have some ability to do well! Unfortunately, it does result in a somewhat stereotypical "primitive friendly native" depiction of the hisa, the species indigenous to the planet that Downbelow orbits. I’m told they get developed more in Finity’s End, and I very much wanted to dive into that and the rest of the Company Wars books after finishing Downbelow.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, Readercon calls, so I turned to Regenesis as a way of easing myself out of this Cherryh binge. This is the many-years-later sequel to Cyteen, which I expected to be disappointing based on the unanimous reactions of my friends, and I was correct. Its solution to "who murdered Ari I?" is so uninteresting that I reject that reality and substitute my own (actually Jo Walton’s final suggestion in this post). On the personal level it’s mostly Ari II trampling every boundary she sees, in ways that I’m uncomfortably unsure whether the narrative disapproves of, and on the plot level it’s all internal Union political maneuvering and no sociogenesis. I genuinely cannot recommend it no matter how much one wants to know what happens after Cyteen. (And on the strength of four whole books, I’m prepared to boldly declare that 40,000 is what happens, in all the ways that matter.)

Ending on Regenesis did have me tempted to read just one more! to finish on a stronger note, but I managed to not eat that potato chip, and I look forward to getting back to these books soon-ish!

I’ve put up a spoiler post mostly for gossiping about the characters.

2 Comments