Reading

Entry tags:

sinners,
stories

Beta wanted: Sinners

Anybody want to beta 400 words of light-as-air Sinners genfic?

Current Mood: annoyed

argh

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Current Mood: stressed

Oooo exciting!

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Four Assorted Sociopolitical Articles

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Entry tags:

For people who miss the Olden Days of writing meta discussions?

Via

troyswann, this new comm:

fan_writers comm - for meta about writing

A grey-scale banner showing a handwritten page with edits on one side, and hands typing on a laptop on the other. The centre text reads '@fan_writers.dreamwidth.org - talking about writing'.

Current Mood: anxious

Something I think about more than I should

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Current Mood: hopeful

Light in the darkness

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Current Mood: determined

Facepalm

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FIC: Open Water (Star Trek, K/S)

Open Water (6287 words) by Laura JV
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock, Amanda Grayson & Spock, Sarek & Spock (Star Trek)
Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock (Star Trek), Amanda Grayson, Sarek (Star Trek), Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Vulcan Characters (Star Trek)
Additional Tags: Episode: s02e05 Amok Time (Star Trek: The Original Series), Episode: s01e14 Court Martial (Star Trek: The Original Series), Episode: s02e19 The Immunity Syndrome, Episode: s02e15 Journey to Babel, Family Issues
Summary:

The Intrepid is an offer, and a threat, and eventually a lifeline, but Spock cannot be other than he is.

Current Mood: and it's a miracle
Current Music: Waitin' for the dog in the rain, in the rain

Entry tags:

The sidekick with no fear - DCU/Welcome to Night Vale drabble

The sidekick with no fear (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DCU (Comics), Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent & James "Jimmy" Olsen
Characters: James "Jimmy" Olsen, Clark Kent
Additional Tags: Drabble, Crack
Summary:

Jimmy's not from around here either.

*

Inspired by this Tumblr post.

Current Mood: amused

Ode to the First Mitochondria

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Current Mood: both delighted and enraged

Science Fair at the Capitol

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[vid]: Lose Yourself Murderbot (Murderbot)

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Current Mood: yelling with a friend
Current Music: Unlikely-sounding invisible things don't exist

Entry tags:

politics: usa

US Politics: The Late Show is cancelled (literally)

Stephen Colbert is the only thing I have watched on CBS for a very, very long time, and even him, via clips.

Except for the time we were in NYC and went to a taping, which was good fun.

Paramount: How dare this man we hired to speak truth to power speak our truth to our power!

Trump: BWAH HA HA HA

Fans who grew up on the Colbert Report and are growing inured to canceled shows: ...okay, so who's going to hire the most popular guy in late night TV now?

I find it upsetting that one of the loudest voices pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is losing his position, not because Colbert is flawless but because what the fuck, censoring satire much? Being able to laugh at the assholes in charge is a survival mechanism.

Self-soothing with John Finnemore.

Current Mood: uncomfortably perceived
Current Music: And my friends are your friends and your friends are my friends

Entry tags:

life in the future

I don't like the modern internet

No shit, there I was, updating my LinkedIn profile -- you know, the one under my wallet name -- for the first time in (mumbledy), for professional reasons that do not involve looking for a job.

LinkedIn: You want to connect with

marcelo and

mary!

Me: ... I really, deeply wish you did not know that. Also, and this is important, neither of those people lives on my continent, and I have never so much as spoken on the phone with them. How do you know I know them, since I met them via writing porn about DC Comics characters 20 years ago? How can I make you un-know it? What arcane nonsense lurks in the data-mining?

Don't worry -- if I only know you through fandom, I ain't connecting via Linkedfreakin'In unless you give me the okay, because WHAT.

Fiction has to make sense

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Current Mood: determined

Gen Z Dating Woes

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Current Music: CN Lester, 'Joan of Arc'

Entry tags:

culture consumed

Things

Books
Read Cliff Jerrison's short story 'Question 3', which is (as the author himself writes), "an ongoing mood".

Finished Freya Marske's A Power Unbound. Quoting my own reply to

sovay in a comment on an earlier post, after finishing the trilogy: "it tries to do some interesting things with the nature of power and privilege, with reference to land ownership, aristocracy, cultural heritage, but I'm not sure how well it stuck the landing. I get the feeling the author was wrestling a bit with the politics of the system she'd set up, the implications of those politics, and the fact that she had to wrap up an Edwardian period fantasy romance trilogy with a happy ending."

The ending I got was fine for a romance novel, which is what this is. But I wanted more exploration of what the denouement really changed for everyone, and what I wanted would have been incompatible with that romance novel ending.

Started reading R.A. MacAvoy's The Lens of the World. I'm about 3% through and found it a lot rapier than I was expecting, although considering that it was published in 1990 I should have braced myself.

Comics
Tense about current events in Dumbing of Age and Questionable Content, for different reasons. Re QC, what I haven't seen mentioned yet in text is that the worst Anh's father can do to her is not simply cut off her allowance. [after the cut, spoilers and also psychiatric abuse triggers]

( more )

Fandom
Beta-read the latest chapter of

Drel_Murn's 'Wheel and turn'. First time I've betaed in a while.

Games
Unlocked Ascension 5 for all four Slay the Spire characters. The last of them was the Silent, tonight, with a lot of luck, Donu and Deca, and Corpse Explosion my belorpse explosion.

Tech
Finally got a secondhand laptop to replace the one which died. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get it in a condition in which I'll be comfortable using it.

Unfortunately, I made the decision that I'd try switching to Wayland, which necessitated exploring a lot of different utilities, and... yeah.

The most ridiculous shark I encountered, however, was not a Wayland problem but rather a font installation problem. In that when I installed font-awesome (a font package that is mainly symbols, often used for decorative purposes, e.g. pseudo-icons in one's status bar) none of the few fonts I had thus far installed had configured themselves as a default font family. font-awesome... did.

So all of a sudden my app launcher, my terminal windows, and some websites (including the Arch wiki) were displaying in font-awesome.

Some features font-awesome has:
- ligatures which convert the string "OSI" to the Open Source Initiative logo, "windows" to the Windows logo, and of course "at" to an @.

Some features font-awesome does not have:
- visible colons, virgules, or periods
Did I mention this was happening in my terminal?

The solution was just to install another font that considers itself a default font family (e.g. DejaVu) and clear the font cache. I managed to find a post by someone on Reddit who had the same problem, same font, same window manager, in a different operating system (Void.)

Links

UK signal boost: this post by kaberett about PIP/UC reform (the House of Lords is debating it next Tuesday)

Five Lego walkers versus seven different obstacles. They are all very good robots and doing their best.

New Ann Leckie book on the way! Set in the Radch!

Nature
Saw a red fox crossing the road last week.

Entry tags:

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

Entry tags:

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Since the mid-70s, she has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won three Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh relied on her college major and Master's degree in Classics to write about Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short storie; some of the short fiction was incorporated into the two novel collaborations with Morris and Cherryh's solo Heroes in Helll novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Hugo Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then-present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]