intothespin | Reading

I mentioned I've been reading a bunch of DCU/PJO crossovers, and mostly I like it when nobody is related to the Waynes and no Waynes are secretly demigods and it's just Percy et al in Gotham and rolling with their weirdness (or vice versa, I guess, but I haven't seen any like that yet), though I have enjoyed those other types. For me, the big key to making the crossover work, aside from the fact that I want it to so I'm primed for it (i.e., buy the premise, buy the joke), is how Wonder Woman is handled (and to a much lesser extent, Wonder Girl), even more so than Aquaman and Atlantis.

Like, for me as a reader, you can't pretend that the Batfamily is totally ignorant of the Greek pantheon or demigods if you've got Diana around. And I realize that some folks are basing their Batfamily stuff on other people's fic (I'm not making that call - some of them state it outright in their notes), which may not contain any info on Wonder Woman or the Amazons etc. but Wonder Woman is not an obscure superhero! Even if you ignore the retcon that she's a daughter of Zeus (and you should! Even the comics have walked that back, though I can see why it might be interesting to work into this kind of crossover), she was made of clay and had life breathed into her by Greek goddesses.

I mean, it complicates things to some degree, because where was she during all of Percy's adventures, but 1. she was in space/another universe etc., or 2. she'd been stripped of her powers for trying to help, or 3. she was back on Themyscira, and unaware, or, or, or... And those are just off the top of my head. Mostly I've seen Percy and friends angry that she didn't participate and that's a fine way to go, but like, I feel like something has to be said, even if just in passing, unless it's set very very early in Batman's career and he hasn't met her/she isn't public yet. And the ones I've found so far are not set in that timeframe, because the fun of the crossover is having all the kids interacting with each other and with Bruce.

Anyway, I'm always interested in how other people make crossovers work, because for me, skipping over most of the nitty-gritty of trying to make incompatible worlds/magical systems etc. work together is the way to go - choose one or two details to set the vibe and handwave the inconsistencies.

***

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Mets vs Reds on tv

sovay

The first weekend in May,

spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.

Current Music: Deep Sea Diver, "What Do I Know"

sovay

During one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.

Current Music: Alice Merton, "No Roots"

lightreads

Stone and Sky

4/5. New Rivers of London book. Rated for nostalgic fondness as much as for the book itself. This one takes Peter – and most of the main cast, including the kids – to a community on the North Sea to either vacation or solve a weird magical mystery, depending on whom you ask.

He is now giving Abigail POV chapters, which I will allow because I like Abigail, and also because this is a vast improvement over the American FBI agent (who he is still trying to make a thing, please stop). Anyway, it’s a pleasant mystery written to formula, complete with local cop that Peter befriends. There’s a lot of formula here, actually – Abigail builds a relationship that has a frankly astonishing amount of Peter/Bev DNA. Anyway, it’s a good time, and it is gesturing towards opening up another arc, which I am in favor of. I think he is intending to draw in some of the international elements he keeps so pointedly raising, but in what direction, I’m not sure yet.

umadoshi

On Bluesky, Wenella reports that "Dongjj Rescue, starring Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni, and Leo Wu, will be released in the US on Aug 22, 2025. The film will be released in mainland China on Aug 8." Time to start haunting the Cineplex site in hopes of Canadian showtimes!

I took today off in hopes of getting a bit more sleep (done, although not an impressive amount) and actually starting in on my next manga rewrite. I have just over a couple of hours before I need to venture out, so...we'll see how the latter goes in practice.

I can't remember if I've mentioned here that almost two months ago, I concluded that I'm going to sell my poor basically-unused etrike. ( In case I haven't, here's the gist )

Anyway, this comes to mind because for once I have a little venture that would, in fact, be perfect for taking the trike if I were at all in the habit of/comfortable with using it. Ah, well.

In related news, at least we're not under a heat warning anymore, unlike the last few days. (It's still currently 22°C and humid as hell, resulting in a 30°C humidex, and it's supposed to be a couple degrees warmer later this afternoon. But it's still an improvement.)

Current Mood: melancholy

oursin

I don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.

Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.

(Okay, it is part of the larger campaign which is about anti-trans actions and whingeing about not being allowed to ~~pray~~ harass women entering abortion clinics.)

But where is this that she is protesting?

Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.

Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.

Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.

Current Location: London Pride

james_davis_nicoll

In case you've been waiting for an update for the last seven years...

Checking in on Our Old Friend, Barnard’s Star

james_davis_nicoll

Terrible life choices gave Connie Lam a mountain of debt. The most recent poor decision left her as the lead suspect in a murder case.

Club Contango (Tracerverse, volume 2) by Eliane Boey

oursin

Happy birthday,

sciarra!

musesfool

I made this fancy lemonade with what I learned from

minoanmiss's tags is called oleo saccharum, which is sugar syrup made with the oils in the citrus peels. I had 8 lemons, and some leftover frozen strawberries and blueberries, so I let the berries defrost in the fridge overnight and then this morning I did all the juicing and the dicing and then let it sit for several hours (5, I think?) before straining the syrup and adding the juice etc. It's very good, though I need to try it with lemons only, I think, and maybe less sugar. Because I do like my lemonade on the tarter side.

Anyway! I dug out my potato masher and my citrus reamer with carafe for this, so it was nice to be able to use them. I do kind of wish I had a food mill but I've never been able to justify the expense to myself - I used a large fine mesh strainer and it worked fine.

In other news, I watched the most recent season of GBBO and I LOVED EVERYONE IN THE TENT, but especially Dylan! Nelly! Gill! and Georgie! ( spoilers, I guess ) And Allison is so great. I hope she sticks with the show for a long time.

*

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

rachelmanija

Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.

rivkat

James C. Scott, ( James Scott, resisting dominance )

Agustin Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary: ( not as detailed as I wanted )

Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History: ( Malthus and corn (and corn laws) )

Jane Marie, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans: ( The bad kind of MLM )
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: ( in praise of excess )

Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion: ( a big day and its commemoration )

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: ( shockingly, it's complicated )

Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think: ( they try things )

Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, & Matt Hills: ( live theater as a fandom source )

Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves: ( he's not wrong or exempt )

Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010: ( foresight that didn't help )

KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing: ( functionality is all )

oursin

“They were lost to their passion and their lust” - it's actually Buddhist monks in Thailand, but this is not a scenario unknown in the annals of Christian monasticism in Europe, hmmmmm?

The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy. Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.

I am somewhat boggled at this:

Monks in Thailand receive monthly food allowances of between 2,500-34,200 baht (£57-785), depending on their rank, but temples and monks also receive donations. The latter can prove especially lucrative for monks of higher stature, who might be given tens of thousands of baht, or even more, by wealthy individuals.

Though perhaps not, again reflecting on historical parallels.

But this is just Damn Weird:

A group of seminarians studying at Denver’s St. John Vianney Theological Seminary were taken on the trip in January 2024 by then-vice rector of the seminary, Fr. John Nepil, during which they were woken in the middle of the night and invited individually to swear a “blood oath” in a ceremony involving a dagger and a man in a yeti costume. During the bizarre ceremony, video of which was sent to The Pillar by multiple sources in the archdiocese, seminarians were told to scream as if in pain before returning with a bloodied cloth wrapped around their hand and their mouths taped shut, to a room where others waited for their turn to be brought in.

Bizarre, huh? This is described as 'a prank':

[T]he idea of this prank came from the man hosting the seminarians and the seminary staff on the ski trip, whom he confirmed was the person in the yeti costume. “This Catholic man is well known in the town and is regularly asked to appear at events in this costume,” Nepil said. “He has done this specific prank many times with family, friends, and other guests who stay at his ski cabin. At no time was there any risk of physical harm, but in hindsight, and even though the host wanted to do this, it should have never happened.”

But productive of massive upheaval and confusion, including the subsequent involvement of an exorcist.

(Is the yeti actually a fursona, we ask.)

Current Music: The Bogglemen, Gimme That Ol' Time Boggle

james_davis_nicoll

The Young People react to Tanith Lee's retelling of a classic fairy tale.

Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists: Red As Blood by Tanith Lee

james_davis_nicoll

A teenager's social engineering skills are harnessed for good.

Unwillingly to Earth by Pauline Ashwell

oursin

Happy birthday,

flandevainilla and

snippy!

sovay

Exiled for the second night running on account of the bustedassedness of our air conditioning, I have been self-medicating with college radio, old movies, and pulp novels. WUMB netted me Cordelia's Dad's "Granite Mills" (1998) and WHRB Thanks for Coming's "Friends Forever" (2020). Killer Shark (1950) is pretty much the other way round from its title with its setting of the mid-century shark fishery in the Gulf of California, but its call-it-courage adventure makes a cute B-showcase for Roddy McDowall just aged out of his child stardom, all his scene-stealer's tilts and flickers in place even if he was directed to give his best shot at sounding like an all-American teen. Night Nurse (1931) remains one of my favorite and endlessly watchable pre-Codes: steel-true Stanwyck, Blondell cracking gum and wise, and Ben Lyon as the sweetest bootlegger in the business, the kind of romantic hero who lets the heroine take the lead while he takes her at her word. Nancy Rutledge's Blood on the Cat (1945) does contain a most excellent black cat, tester of gravity, router of dogs, unendangered throughout the novel despite its human body count. The number of monarch caterpillars is now something like sixteen.

Current Music: Thanks for Coming, "Friends Forever"

james_davis_nicoll

First responders were called to King Street West and Pine Street around noon Wednesday for an incident involving a pedestrian and LRT train.

Police said the pedestrian was taken to a hospital outside the region.

coffeeandink

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 )

coffeeandink

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 two 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 Nebula 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]

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intothespin

December 2012

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Page Summary

musesfool - all arms and legs
sovay - Offer not valid in Lemuria
sovay - I build a home and wait for someone to tear it down
lightreads - Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch
umadoshi - Z1L movie-release news | An etrike update I may not have mentioned | Weather
oursin - I'd heard about this, but good grief, it's actually in BLOOMSBURY!!!
james_davis_nicoll - Checking in on Our Old Friend, Barnard’s Star
james_davis_nicoll - Club Contango (Tracerverse, volume 2) by Eliane Boey
oursin - (no subject)
musesfool - after the money's gone
rachelmanija - Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, by Kelly Ramsey
rivkat - Nonfiction
oursin - Religion, boggling
james_davis_nicoll - Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists: Red As Blood by Tanith Lee
james_davis_nicoll - Unwillingly to Earth by Pauline Ashwell
oursin - (no subject)
sovay - So we don't talk for months and then you ask me where the wind is blowing
james_davis_nicoll - Ion-Pedestrian collision
coffeeandink - C.J. Cherryh bibliography
coffeeandink - The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

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