Re: Time and place in the breakout novel

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:18:09 +0000, Neil Barnes
<nailed_barnacle@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:26:22 +0100, Irina Rempt wrote:

Gerry Quinn wrote:

In article <dvnvuf$2vdv$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
goldfarb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...

For at least a significant minority: nope. I bounce off of Cherryh's
prose at the sentence level. I don't have *time* to discover whether
the setting, characters and plot are strange or relentlessly mundane,
I'm lost by the end of the first page.

The same for me, at least her Cyteen stuff. Some of her other stuff
seems quite normal and readable but not very special either.

The only Cherryh I ever tried to read was _Downbelow Station_, when on
holiday; it's also the only book I've ever left at a holiday house
instead of taking it back home with me. Completely unreadable, with a bad
case of the Eight Deadly Words.

I fought all the way through, and still gave up and discarded the book. In
my defence, I did have Dengue Fever at the time.

My sympathy. I had more than one friend that loved the book. I found
it to be one of her boring ones. I managed to dig through the politics
and liked the natives, but somehow once the scene changed from Pell to
Downbelow, I lost interest. I was about as out of sympathy with her
Cyteen books.

Then again, my all time fav of hers is Serpent's Reach and next in
line is the Faded Sun series, followed closely by the Morgaine series.
In the first, the human protagonist is so altered by her starting
strange environment followed by being taken into the insect hive, that
she's not very human from page one. In the second, the characters may
have once been a human offshoot / mutation, but are very changed or
were alien all the way. In the Morgaine series, the people are mostly
human, but with backgrounds that are a lot like medieval European
crossed with old time Japanese and a dollop of high tech thrown in.

To anyone who wants to read and like Cherryh, I'd recommend starting
with the Morgaine trilogy.
--

r.bc: vixen
Speaker to squirrels, willow watcher, etc..
Often taunted by trout. Almost entirely harmless.
Really.
.

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