juushika

Title: Finity's End (The Company Wars Book 7)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Published: 1997
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 515
Total Page Count: 500,805
Text Number: 1784
Read Because: continuing the series, pretty sure I read this through OpenLibrary but also own the paperback
Review: A stranded war orphan is taken in on his family ship just as it's organizing a major political agreement. A lot of the later Alliance-Union books have the same premise: outsider joins a new crew under strained or entirely nonconsenting circumstances; makes a life for themself there anyway. But the books themselves don't feel the least repetitive; each is a different breed of ship, a different adopted society. This one focuses on the children of a family ship and has two plotlines: the A-plot is the newest recruit's difficult induction into his peers, and the highest stakes are a stolen personal possession; the B-plot is Alliance-wide politics and the entire future of family ships. That dual structure solves the issues that many of these ship-based books have, where the bulk of the text is slow relationship and character development and the action is backloaded and largely disconnected from the character journey. It's better balanced throughout and the climax/resolution stays within the local, interpersonal realm because the larger politics are structurally disconnected.

This also offers some meaty worldbuilding around family ship structure, particularly the social effects of aging during jump. Sometimes Cherryh will intimate that the human cultures have become fundamentally alien from one another, see: the Company books positing a fundamental terrian/spacer divide that never feels entirely convincing because both PoVs are too similar and too comprehensible. But this - this is convincing: the fundamental level on which jump effects aging, and how attenuated aging impacts maturation, and how it differs from real-time aging, is substantiated in the whole dang plot, and it's chewy and emotionally satisfying.

Title: Regenesis (Cyteen Book 4)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Published: DAW, 2009
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 635
Total Page Count: 501,855
Text Number: 1786
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: A direct sequel to Cyteen, young Ari, now 18, has a lot of balls in the air: preparing to assume leadership, dealing with growing crises both personal and political, investigating the death of her predecessor, and planning the life of her successor. A busy plot. A lot of Cherryh's writing is terse, clipped, characters thinking themselves laterally to the end of the book while the reader scrambles to follow along; but not Cyteen, which has a much more "normal" voice, and not Regenesis, which is mostly characters rehashing the plot. It's exhaustive, excessive, and honestly charming; there's a lot of character development that occurs as different character assess and narrativize the same events.

For all that, the plot itself is ... fine. I'm more interested in the larger cast and the glimpses into Union worldbuilding and technology than I am the specific politics. A lot of Cherryh is about putting characters in compromised social situations which are the consequences of flawed societies and saying: you're here now, it sucks, live life anyway. Azi is that concept turned to eleven, those compromised social issues writ large, made into the fabric of society. And here we have azi, azi managers and programmers, the repercussions of Gehenna, and Ari's constant use of tape. It's messy, engaging speculative work with an adequate political structure.