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juushikaThe bulk of rereading Cherryh's Rider at the Gate was full of surreal self-doubt, like: why didn't I love this book the first time? why wasn't it the best of the best, top-tier bond animal trope, favorite Cherryh & favorite book for life? These questions got answers by the end:
[Mild spoilers for CJ Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, as well as an extensive conversation about the bond animal trope < that's a TV Tropes link if you'd like a refresher.]
1) There's a ghost of restraint in the worldbuilding which somewhat undermines the nighthorses. Compare, as example, Forty Thousand in Gehenna, which is about human settlers cohabiting with surprise!sapient lizard-like aliens. The calibans aren't precisely bond animals, but serve a similar narrative function and trope inversion, given their empathetic communication and the development of human/caliban symbiosis; in fact, it's almost the humans which are the bond animals, adopted into caliban culture, useful, othered, but special and a marker of being special. Forty Thousand in Gehenna has a massive speculative scope, investigating society-building across the span of generations; and while it's self-contained, functionally a one-off thought experiment, it also has repercussions in the larger Alliance-Union timeline. Rider at the Gate is comparably smaller, less speculative; the nighthorses are less distinctive (although superbly rendered), and the interaction between bond animal trope and worldbuilding less ambitious. These aren't inherent negatives, but they make for lesser Cherryh.
2) The plot, particularly the coincidence- and incidence-heavy finale, is underwhelming. (Excepting, of course, reveals re: the identity of the rogue.)
But, despite structural flaws, despite being overshadowed elsewhere, what it does good is very good—superbly good, id-grabbingly good.
Rider at the Gate is about a human-colonized alien planet where the native fauna is telepathic. The apex-predator nighthorses have taken a liking to human minds, and so form pair-bonds with human riders. These riders provide protection to human settlements in a settler/Western setting with limited technology. A number of riders become involved in the hunt for a mad nighthorse, called a rogue.
Let's look back on the calibans, which are initially viewed as non-sapient pests and are eventually revealed to have complex communication and societies which then inform the developing human society. Although sometimes dismissed, the caliban are never normalized; they're strange, different, separate from human society.
Nighthorses are almost too tame, too horse-like, too similar in body, in habit, in intelligence; they even have a symbiosis similar to real-world human/horse dynamics. Every deviance from this is intentional: they're omnivorous, they're aggressive, their self-conception is ephemeral and sometimes threatening when perceived by humans. And a rogue nighthorse is a natural disaster. The ambient—the telepathic "noise" of the planet—is always dangerous: predators use it to hunt; it can overwhelm humans or threaten their sanity, and society fears it. But the rogue is something more, something terrifying, something insidious and contagious.
Horses are great fodder for the bond animal trope precisely because horses are about as close as we get to it in the real world—horses are not-quite-pets, huge and scary, but have a long, essential relationship with human society. The escalation of the nighthorse from deceptively horselike to distinctly un-horse, bacon-eating, rogue-sending, falls along a spectrum of horses and horse-like bond animals and bond animal trope inversions, alongside the unquestioning purity in Lackey's Valdemar series and the trope-interrogating danger in Tepper's Grass.
And, as always, Cherryh excels at tropes/dynamics; she inverts and subverts them, and finds the small, secret crevices that hold their deepest appeals.
Consider: Cloud's possessiveness of his rider Danny alongside the co-dependency with a creature of profound power but sometimes-limited intelligence, and the moments that Danny realizes it:
Consider: The suffocating presence of the rogue in the ambient, blurring the boundaries between experience and perception. It echoes the onset of winter, both in Flicker "imagining <white,> only <white>," a desperate flood of sending meant to block out the more dangerous sendings of the rogue, and as a natural disaster which is incessantly, emphatically natural. The rogue is a freak event, but its also exemplifies not just the ambient but the nighthorse/rider bond. Its threat overhangs Danny's efforts to moderate his interactions with Cloud, and Guil's reliance on Burn during an otherwise solo journey, and even the less-successful subplot of Harper's maddened revenge. Nighthorses are essentially dangerous; communication is essentially dangerous, dangerous because it's powerful and intimate and it changes a person. That danger enriches every positive interaction.
Consider: The fluid communication and relationship dynamics of the Tarmin riders and the book we didn't get about their quiet days and family dynamics; about the profound intimacy of telepathic communication, and the way it intensifies conflict but also joy. The Tarmin riders don't have the mystique of the border riders, who take more dangerous jobs and have more ephemeral relationships. They have a home, a measure of safety, and explicitly and unromantically stand at the boundary between the mundane limitations of "normal" society and the otherness imposed on riders because of their relationship with nighthorses. But they're also evidence of the benefits. Their insular found family and telepathy-enforced polycule is profound wish-fulfillment—which is almost entirely unfulfilled by the text, seen only in absentia, as it's lost. Compare to Bradley's The Spell Sword/The Forbidden Tower, which are explicitly about forming a similar dynamic due to similar telepathic circumstances.
Consider: Brionne. She's a Valdemar protagonist, a little girl displeased with her lot in life who dreams of being special, of being chosen; who becomes special, who is chosen. Except that 1) she's effectively duped, she was the easiest victim, she made herself a victim and 2) her bond with the rogue is bad, obviously, but also denied. Bond animals grant their human companions legitimacy and power, but Brionne gains power on account of being the easiest victim and uses that power in heartbreakingly destructive ways. She's denied the basic arc of the trope while participating intimately in what makes the trope intriguing—she's the logical progression of taking the trope too far: a bond too intimate, a power too great, and a bond animal which isn't a subservient power fantasy but instead overwhelms the will of their human companion and subsumes it into something greater, something influenced by that bond but bigger than it, and more dangerous.
So it's not a flawless book, but: a lot of what makes the bond animal trope so good is the unexplored subtext. The perpetual Yuletide Valdermar fic question of: what are the power dynamics between human and companion? can we explore this "companion can break the bond if they consider their human 'unworthy'" thing? The question of what a "bad" bond animal might look like, and what its badness says about its human companion. The tension between being special and being other, about different types of power and the way societies need and reject them. That most essential question: why, other than human-centrism and power fantasy, is the human always the one in control?
The trope has a lot of "subtext" which is frequently textual, like the role of sex in McCaffrey's Pern—and those things another significant part of what makes the trope so good. But Cherryh's consistent strength is the textual exploration of subtext—of teasing out what people won't say in a relationship or society, and making it carry the emotional weight of the text; or asking all the unanswered questions of a trope, as she does in Rider at the Gate. She fails to answer them—often refuses to answer them—but that's a productive denial: making the question explicit but leaving the reader to imagine the answer allows her to ask more questions, to do more with the trope; and it mirrors the denial of the trope's wish fulfillment and power fantasy. We don't get to live out a peaceful Tarmin winter with a polyamorous family and their telepathic horses any more than Brionne has her desires fulfilled when she bonds with the rogue. Making the bond animal trope feel difficult or dangerous or scary or unfulfilling or bad ultimately makes a really good trope feel more.
[Mild spoilers for CJ Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, as well as an extensive conversation about the bond animal trope < that's a TV Tropes link if you'd like a refresher.]
1) There's a ghost of restraint in the worldbuilding which somewhat undermines the nighthorses. Compare, as example, Forty Thousand in Gehenna, which is about human settlers cohabiting with surprise!sapient lizard-like aliens. The calibans aren't precisely bond animals, but serve a similar narrative function and trope inversion, given their empathetic communication and the development of human/caliban symbiosis; in fact, it's almost the humans which are the bond animals, adopted into caliban culture, useful, othered, but special and a marker of being special. Forty Thousand in Gehenna has a massive speculative scope, investigating society-building across the span of generations; and while it's self-contained, functionally a one-off thought experiment, it also has repercussions in the larger Alliance-Union timeline. Rider at the Gate is comparably smaller, less speculative; the nighthorses are less distinctive (although superbly rendered), and the interaction between bond animal trope and worldbuilding less ambitious. These aren't inherent negatives, but they make for lesser Cherryh.
2) The plot, particularly the coincidence- and incidence-heavy finale, is underwhelming. (Excepting, of course, reveals re: the identity of the rogue.)
But, despite structural flaws, despite being overshadowed elsewhere, what it does good is very good—superbly good, id-grabbingly good.
Rider at the Gate is about a human-colonized alien planet where the native fauna is telepathic. The apex-predator nighthorses have taken a liking to human minds, and so form pair-bonds with human riders. These riders provide protection to human settlements in a settler/Western setting with limited technology. A number of riders become involved in the hunt for a mad nighthorse, called a rogue.
Let's look back on the calibans, which are initially viewed as non-sapient pests and are eventually revealed to have complex communication and societies which then inform the developing human society. Although sometimes dismissed, the caliban are never normalized; they're strange, different, separate from human society.
Nighthorses are almost too tame, too horse-like, too similar in body, in habit, in intelligence; they even have a symbiosis similar to real-world human/horse dynamics. Every deviance from this is intentional: they're omnivorous, they're aggressive, their self-conception is ephemeral and sometimes threatening when perceived by humans. And a rogue nighthorse is a natural disaster. The ambient—the telepathic "noise" of the planet—is always dangerous: predators use it to hunt; it can overwhelm humans or threaten their sanity, and society fears it. But the rogue is something more, something terrifying, something insidious and contagious.
Horses are great fodder for the bond animal trope precisely because horses are about as close as we get to it in the real world—horses are not-quite-pets, huge and scary, but have a long, essential relationship with human society. The escalation of the nighthorse from deceptively horselike to distinctly un-horse, bacon-eating, rogue-sending, falls along a spectrum of horses and horse-like bond animals and bond animal trope inversions, alongside the unquestioning purity in Lackey's Valdemar series and the trope-interrogating danger in Tepper's Grass.
And, as always, Cherryh excels at tropes/dynamics; she inverts and subverts them, and finds the small, secret crevices that hold their deepest appeals.
Consider: Cloud's possessiveness of his rider Danny alongside the co-dependency with a creature of profound power but sometimes-limited intelligence, and the moments that Danny realizes it:
Cloud hated the town. Cloud hated his family. Cloud hated townsmen. Cloud hated people around them. Cloud wanted just him. Alone.
That was scary. That was real scary, when he realized that small truth.
Consider: The suffocating presence of the rogue in the ambient, blurring the boundaries between experience and perception. It echoes the onset of winter, both in Flicker "imagining <white,> only <white>," a desperate flood of sending meant to block out the more dangerous sendings of the rogue, and as a natural disaster which is incessantly, emphatically natural. The rogue is a freak event, but its also exemplifies not just the ambient but the nighthorse/rider bond. Its threat overhangs Danny's efforts to moderate his interactions with Cloud, and Guil's reliance on Burn during an otherwise solo journey, and even the less-successful subplot of Harper's maddened revenge. Nighthorses are essentially dangerous; communication is essentially dangerous, dangerous because it's powerful and intimate and it changes a person. That danger enriches every positive interaction.
Consider: The fluid communication and relationship dynamics of the Tarmin riders and the book we didn't get about their quiet days and family dynamics; about the profound intimacy of telepathic communication, and the way it intensifies conflict but also joy. The Tarmin riders don't have the mystique of the border riders, who take more dangerous jobs and have more ephemeral relationships. They have a home, a measure of safety, and explicitly and unromantically stand at the boundary between the mundane limitations of "normal" society and the otherness imposed on riders because of their relationship with nighthorses. But they're also evidence of the benefits. Their insular found family and telepathy-enforced polycule is profound wish-fulfillment—which is almost entirely unfulfilled by the text, seen only in absentia, as it's lost. Compare to Bradley's The Spell Sword/The Forbidden Tower, which are explicitly about forming a similar dynamic due to similar telepathic circumstances.
Consider: Brionne. She's a Valdemar protagonist, a little girl displeased with her lot in life who dreams of being special, of being chosen; who becomes special, who is chosen. Except that 1) she's effectively duped, she was the easiest victim, she made herself a victim and 2) her bond with the rogue is bad, obviously, but also denied. Bond animals grant their human companions legitimacy and power, but Brionne gains power on account of being the easiest victim and uses that power in heartbreakingly destructive ways. She's denied the basic arc of the trope while participating intimately in what makes the trope intriguing—she's the logical progression of taking the trope too far: a bond too intimate, a power too great, and a bond animal which isn't a subservient power fantasy but instead overwhelms the will of their human companion and subsumes it into something greater, something influenced by that bond but bigger than it, and more dangerous.
So it's not a flawless book, but: a lot of what makes the bond animal trope so good is the unexplored subtext. The perpetual Yuletide Valdermar fic question of: what are the power dynamics between human and companion? can we explore this "companion can break the bond if they consider their human 'unworthy'" thing? The question of what a "bad" bond animal might look like, and what its badness says about its human companion. The tension between being special and being other, about different types of power and the way societies need and reject them. That most essential question: why, other than human-centrism and power fantasy, is the human always the one in control?
The trope has a lot of "subtext" which is frequently textual, like the role of sex in McCaffrey's Pern—and those things another significant part of what makes the trope so good. But Cherryh's consistent strength is the textual exploration of subtext—of teasing out what people won't say in a relationship or society, and making it carry the emotional weight of the text; or asking all the unanswered questions of a trope, as she does in Rider at the Gate. She fails to answer them—often refuses to answer them—but that's a productive denial: making the question explicit but leaving the reader to imagine the answer allows her to ask more questions, to do more with the trope; and it mirrors the denial of the trope's wish fulfillment and power fantasy. We don't get to live out a peaceful Tarmin winter with a polyamorous family and their telepathic horses any more than Brionne has her desires fulfilled when she bonds with the rogue. Making the bond animal trope feel difficult or dangerous or scary or unfulfilling or bad ultimately makes a really good trope feel more.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 08:47 pm (UTC)And wow, GRASS was creepy. I kept wishing I could stop reading it, but then I read some more...it was back when it was relatively new, and I got it from the library, so I was determined not to have to check it out again.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 02:25 pm (UTC)It's also why I picked up Grass, and I loved it there! Other Tepper hasn't worked for me, but the intentional creepiness of that book was very much what I was hoping for given its use of the trope.