Reading Recs: Diana Wynne Jones and C.J. Cherryh

[chomiji]

These are mostly for smillaraaq. Somewhere deep in the guts of the Meta Thread from Heck (f-locked, I am afraid), which started out innocently as a notice of a fic posting on my other account and now exceeds 300 posts, she mentioned that she had not read much (or did not recall much) Cherryh, and as CJC is about my favorite SF writer, I felt this needed to be remedied. And when I said so, she said she'd also appreciate recs for DWJ - who is one of my favorite fantasy authors. So, without further ado ... .

Diana Wynne Jones

• Apropos of some of the themes showing up in "Cupidity", I have to rec Fire and Hemlock, which is probably her most complex book. Curiously enough, rushthatspeaks has just written a marvelous essay on this book, but you should on no account read the essay until you are finished with the book.
   
• As smilla is a dog lover, I must rec Dogsbody - and hope that it will not break her heart.
   
• For something much lighter, and very cleverly silly, I recommend Archer's Goon.
   
• Because smilla is something of a gamer, because it has one of DWJ's best (albeit saddest) endings, and because it is a less-well-known book than it deserves, I recommend The Homeward Bounders.
   
• And because it is my favorite aside from those I have recommended, and because it involves a science fiction convention, the Lyke Wake Dirge, centaurs, and Babylon, I recommend Deep Secret

C.J. Cherryh

• As a standalone, as a cool book about martial arts in a fantasy oriental setting, and as CJC's best fantasy, I recommend The Paladin.
   
• As a tough, no-nonsense short series about what it's like to be a cog in the future industrial and military complexes, I recommend Heavy Time and its sequel Hellburner. This will also introduce the Company Wars, the subject of several additional novels.
   
• As either a standalone, or as an introduction to her Compact Space books, I recommend The Pride of Chanur, which is a good example of one of CJC's most famous and durable themes, the human being as the alien. It is also pretty much a space opera, and fun. And if you like it, there are 4 more books in the series. (And Pyanfar Chanur is one of my most enduring POV characters! Gods be feathered, I am that long-suffering Hani ship's captain ... !)
   
• And because smilla likes dark themes about the evils that people do, I recommend Cyteen, with the caveat that the introductory section can be slghtly sticky going as CJC sets up the political situation from the opposite POV of the Company Wars books. These are the Bad Guys of those books, and the book covers themes of identity, what it is to be human, what makes a person him or herself, and what it is like to be brilliant in a world of lesser minds, against a setting where cloning - ranging from production of custom children for the wealthy to supplying slave labor for a developing world (and including the production of attractive "companions" for those who can afford them) - is common. Unsettling and involving.

Enjoy!

Comments

[chomiji]

-MASSIVE- Spoilers for Dogsbody:

Main POV character has his consciousness transferred into a puppy. Puppies put into a sack to drown, experienced from pup's viewpoint (most - maybe all - are rescued from the river); day-to-day misery of life among incomprehensible humans from a dog's viewpoint: sadness includes being unable to protect abused and exploited young human mistress (not sexual exploitation, though); from girl's viewpoint, her dog has died at end of story, although his consciousness actually goes back where it belongs; his realization that they can no longer be together, because now he is a frighteningly powerful superhuman being and not her dog.

You'll have to decide for yourself, smilla ... . It's a pretty good book.

Yeah, Morgaine - I found those pretty lame. They're early. I like her early SF (Hunter of Worlds for example) better. Downbelow Station was the first of the Company Wars books to be written, although it's not first in terms of internal chronology. It introduces Signy Mallory, jump-carrier captain, the first (IMO) of CJC's truly successful tough older female characters; she shows up as a minor character (rather like Vimes in Monstrous Regiment) in a couple of other books.

And plainly the Chanur books didn't make the same sort of impression on you that they did on me! For me, the scene in Chanur's Homecoming where Py and Jik (the mahe spyship captain - not Goldtooth, but his partner) have a tense heart-to-heart, and she says "I love you like kin, Mahe, but I'd shoot you with my own hand ... " if he posed a threat to her species, and a few moments later, he comes back with "I love you like kin. Same. Got to tell you, you going to bleed. Same you win, same you lose, " because they're going to have to make some hard, hard choices, both of them - argh, the angst, the hard-won cross-species friendship up against preservation of one's own species ... .

[chomiji]

Yes, it is rather like your Nobilis character - Sirius is definitely a Power.

:-)   Pyanfar and Jik make an interesting friendship. And in fact Py is still very much married and devoted to her husband, Khym Manh, so it really is a virtual-sibling female-male type friendship, of the sort that is all too rare in fiction. And I'm just busting your chops about remembering the book, but it is one of those very, very important books to me.

[chomiji]

I did read it through, but quickly. I really need to run a game again. The last big campaign I ran had a super-powerful creature in disguise as part of the party, and it worked out OK ... I put severe limits on how he could use his powers early on.

[chomiji]

Well, it could certainly be fun, fitting her in. I'll have to think about it. Maybe once the radiation & crud are over with, I'll be able to focus on it. Tell you what, you have my full permission to remind me from time to time that you're interested.

[chomiji]

It might not be Nobilis; it might just be whatever version of my game I can come up with, possibly using the Hero system.

[chomiji]

I can promise that the system won't matter. I've run games in tournaments at conventions where no one knew the system I was using. You just need to know the general concept of how roleplaying games work.

[chomiji]

Naaah, we've always had some players that were not too system-savvy. Usually we'd have a couple of sessions helping people put their characters together before we started the campaign, and then during play, if you wanted to do something, you just say "OK - I want to search that closet. What do I do?" and we'd tell you what dice to roll and what on your sheet to add to it (or whatever the mechanics were).

[chomiji]

And I can't believe I'm forking the thread again, but ... yes, Witches of Karres is wonderful fluffy fun. But note how even through the filter of the social mores of the 1950s/1960s, Schmitz respects his female characters. Yeah, they have some ditsiness, but so do all the male characters. He was an unusual chap.

And for a really silly crossover among our various interests, check this:

That, my friend, is an illustration for the book by Hayao Miyazaki!!!

[chomiji]

Exactly right, Goth and Pausert. Goth was one of my childhood heroines, if you recall. If I ever figure out the animated .gif thing, I should do a rotating exhibit of my tough little role models. (I wish I could find a larger version of the Miyazaki pic, because most of the cover pix of Goth are unsatisfactory in the extreme, especially considering that there's quite a pithy description of her.)

[chomiji]

I'll need to dig out copies of the books and do some scanning. But thanks for the offer!