Customer Reviews

At the Edge of Space: Brothers of Earth / Hunter of Worlds

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3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

C. J. Cherryh's early science fiction novels are being reissued by DAW in omnibus editions. Some of the them--The Morgaine Saga and The Faded Sun--are extraordinary bargains, because the books included are classics. At the Edge of Space is also a good deal, because Hunter of Worlds, arguably Cherryh's best novel, is worth the price of the volume. Unfortunately it is bound with what may be her first novel, the amateurish Brothers of Earth.

Hunter of Worlds gives you the trademark elements of Cherryh's best work: two cultures with a balanced if unequal relationship are intruded upon by a hairy, vulgar thing called a "human." (He's not even empathic!) We see the action from the non-human perspective. The operatic grandness of the iduve--clannish space predators like wolf packs--contrasts with the delicate slave race (their name escapes me) mediating between human and iduve. Cultural clashes drive the action, and planets are the pawns of political intrigue.

Here is the best possible introduction to Cherryh. If you enjoy the politics of Hunter of Worlds, you will love the Richardsonian volumes of the Foreigner series. If you enjoy the richly imagined cultures and languages, and the conflicts that follow from them, you will enjoy the Chanur series and the Faded Sun books, in which multiple races collide over their culturally determined values. If, like me, you fall in love immediately with the extraordinary Chimele, then read the Morgaine Saga.

The two stories in this volume are totally independent of each other. In the forward, Cherryh tries to paper over this by saying in the vast reaches of human space, totally different things can be happening at the same time. In reality, these stories just have nothing to do with each other. Outside of being some of Cherryh's very earliest work, they have no business being in the same book. HOWEVER, from the point-of-view of price and of getting these books back in print, I think the publisher had a good idea in doing this. Each of the stories is interesting and about equally well done. If you haven't read these books, then this volume is a good way to get them both. Here are my individual ratings:

"Brothers of Earth" is Cherryh's first novel. It's an interesting book, but bears no resemblence to her later books. It's a fairly well written book that explores some interesting concepts. Unfortunately, the book doesn't really go anywhere. Specifically, the main character isn't pushing towards some kind of solution. He's essentially along for the ride. The end result is that things just happen and then the book ends. It's not a very satisfactory ending at all. If you're a die-hard Cherryh fan, I'd say you should read this book just because it's her first. It's not bad, but it's also not that good.

You can tell "Hunter of Worlds" is a very early C.J. Cherryh novel. The text is nowhere near as riveting as her later works. You can see where her later style comes from in this work, but it's really not fully present here. In general, it's an ok story. But, you never really buy into it fully. It's like you pick up in the middle of something and then put it away after something happens. You get an inkling of what the various races are like, how they behave, and what they're capable of, but it never really meshes into a consistent whole. You know that the races are different, but you really don't feel it in your bones about WHY they're different. I'm glad I read the book, but it's merely a shadow of Cherryh's later works.

At the Edge of Space (2003) is an omnibus edition including Brothers of Earth and Hunter of Worlds. These two early SF novels are in the Hanun Rebellion subseries of the Alliance-Union universe and take place at the periphery of human space.

In Brothers of Earth (1976), Kurt Morgan was a crewman on the Endymion, an Alliance ship, which had followed a Hanen ship away from the destruction of Aeolus. Both ships are now dispersed atoms, with Kurt the only survivor. His life capsule brought him down on an alien planet.

The nemet find him sleeping on the seashore by a large bonfire. They think that he is signaling for help, but he is merely careless of any possible natives. Since he is on Tamurlin land, Kurt might have met death at the hand of fellow humans; three centuries ago, the planet was ruled by the Hanen, but then the nemet rose up and drove the invaders into the wilderness.

Now Kurt is bound for the nemet port of Nephane. On the way, he begins to know Kta, the ship captain; they discuss many things and learn to get along with each other. All is well until they enter the port and it finally becomes clear to both human and nemet that the ruler of Nephane is Kurt's enemy.

Kurt goes over the side and tries to drown himself, but Kta and his crew save the human and talk him into staying alive. He is taken to Djan-methi, the Hanen ruler of Nephane. She knows who he is from his ID disk and he quickly learns that she is alone in Nephane. Aeolus had finally sent another party to the planet and she is the only survivor; in fact, she herself had killed a few of the other Hanen.

Djan has a Sufaki lover and seems to favor the conquered natives; she takes Kurt as a temporary lover and then releases him to Kta and the House of Elas. Kurt becomes house-friend of Elas, meets Mim (a clani of the house), and later marries her. He tries to ignore various provocations by the Sufaki who follow T'Tefur, Djan's former lover, but later he is kidnapped and beaten and then Mim is taken and abused. When he goes to Djan after escaping, she refuses to believe his story.

In Hunter of Worlds (1977), the iduve raised the kallian and the amaut from primitive societies to the metrosi (spacefaring civilization). For the past five hundred years, however, the iduve have wandered far from Kej, their home star, only to return to local space within the past seven years.

While the iduve were away, the amaut drifted elsewhere and humans moved into metrosi space. When the amaut returned, they drove the humans off their former worlds and evacuated a mere portion to human space. Some few humans remained, but were reduced to almost mindless slaves under the amaut.

The Orithain craft Ashanome has come to Kartos Station looking for two persons, a human indentured slave on the amaut ship Konut and a kallian. Noi kame -- shipbred kallians -- take Daniel Fitzhugh off the Konut. Other noi kame search the station files and select Aiela Lyailleue, a young ship commander, as the kallian choice. Both have chiabres implanted within their brains to allow them to exchange thoughts. Aiela is awakened first to adjust to the thoughts of the shipbred Isande, a servant of the Orithain. After two days of practice, Isande is sedated and Daniel is awakened to begin exchanging thoughts with Aiela. Now all three are asuthe, interconnected through Aiela's brain.

Chimele, Orithain of the people of Ashanome, is searching for Tejef, the rejected son of her father and an outcast from her nasul. Under the ruling of the Orithanhe, the only authority higher than the Orithaini, Tejef was given a Kej year and three days to run. Then Ashanome was given twice that interval to find him and do whatever they wished with him.

Daniel was originally taken by the amaut from human space. The iduve had learned about such excursions and sought a knowledgeable informant. From Daniel's statements, they deduced the presence of Tejef and then extorted from the Orithain of the Chaganokh, a minor iduve nasul, the name of the planet where Tejef left their ship.

Standing off Priamos, Ashanome sends Daniel down to infiltrate the human mercenaries working for Tejef. Landing some of their own troops on the planet, they apply pressure on Tejef's operation. Then Daniel comes across a ten year old human refugee and abandons his assumed role to rescue her.

These novels are very characteristic of many later works by this author. The storylines are much like the Chanur stories: a lone human is stranded among aliens with strange customs and has to learn new ways. The ultimate story with this theme is probably Cuckoo's Egg, where the human is brought into the alien environment as an infant.

Highly recommended for Cherryh fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of personal experiences within exotic cultures.

-Arthur W. Jordin

I'll have to agree with the people who have pointed that, if not for the fact that these books were both written by Cherryh and were published near each other, they wouldn't be included in the same omnibus. It's not even that the books have little to do with each other, while other DAW omnibi like the Chanur and Faded Sea series put together series of novels, that's not exactly a hard and fast rule. It's two novels for the price of one, which I don't think any of us can complain about.

What makes it interesting is that the quality of the two novels varies so wildly that the shift from one to the other is jarring.

This isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds. The first novel "Brothers of Earth" isn't actually bad, it just feels rather skeletal compared to Cherryh's later work. Her biggest and most successful theme over the years has been the insertion of humans into alien cultures. This winds up working out for her in two ways. For one, it shows off her skill at detailing alien civilizations that have completely different frames of mind from anything we can concieve and, secondly, it allows her to examine human nature from the point of view of someone who doesn't understand humans at all.

You can see both ideas at work here, although not completely fully formed yet. Kurt Morgan winds up on an alien world and in the care of another human from a different civilization. Unfortunately, she makes him the property of one of the alien houses that make up the social structure. Doubly unfortunate, the civilization is about to undergo a civil war and having a human running loose isn't actually helping matters at all. Which leaves Kurt in a bad situation, he's starting to grasp how things work with his new friends, while at the same time things are falling apart around him, and the only person he can turn to for help doesn't really like him all that much.

You can see where Cherryh is clearly working out how to construct an alien culture that only vaguely resembles our society and yet make it internally consistent, but for the most part they just come across as very strange humans with a different set of ideals and values. The plot lacks the detailed political manuevering that is a hallmark of her better novels, as everyone is trying to negotiate from different levels of opportunity and all of that hamstrung by the fact that nobody really knows what the other guy wants. Instead, things more or less just happen, the aliens never become truly fascinating except in an academic sense and Kurt is more or less along for the ride. The writing lacks her immersively sense of detail as well. It's well written and far more thought out than what passes for SF at times, but compared to what she could do later it seems more like a writer having a great idea in her head but not having the necessary skills to quite get it down on paper yet. In short, it reads like a first novel from someone who would become very good later.

Which is what makes "Hunters of Worlds" a shock. Only being published a year later, it proves that Cherryh had been engaged in a serious rethink about all of this worked, and the result is a quantum leap over the first book. Everything works here, from the alien race to the mechanisms of their society to the threat at large and how everyone is forced to deal with it in their own fashion, even though nobody really understands anyone else. The Iduve mind-link with their servants, sometimes not willingly (often not willingly) and that's the situation the alien Aiela finds himself in when he gets selected to be linked up. One of his new partners is a slave that has been doing this for a while and is able to help him navigate the strange culture he finds himself in. The other is a human, and he's not enjoying any of this at all.

The whole feel of this novel is one of supreme confidence, Cherryh has her ideas worked out and thus can lay out the plot secure in the notion that the readers will figure it all out as they go along. Unlike the aliens in the first story, the iduve feel truly alien and every scene where they appear is given an eerie, uneasy tension because no matter how well you understand them you aren't quite sure what they're going to do next. They're operating under their own rules and they aren't applicable human terms for this. Even matters like their concept of revenge don't quite translate fully, because they don't understand human emotion at all. Cherryh comments that once you grasp that they're predators, the language makes a lot more sense and in some respects it does. She doesn't help matters by dropping in the alien words liberally, forcing you to either work out the context (what I wound up doing) or keeping a bookmark at the glossary toward the end. But it makes for a far more immersive experience, where the reader is kept on the back foot as much as everyone else in the book is.

Then she doubles the complexity by making our main viewpoint character an alien as well, so not only do you have to puzzle out the iduve's point of view, but take into account that it's being filtered through his point of view as well. And he doesn't understand humans at all either. Coupled with the fact that the iduve aren't the most compassionate of species, it lends a crackling tension to even the simplest conversations, as Aiela mouths off and his captor, Chimele, does her best to understand where the other is coming from, even if they don't really have anything in common. He's playing with fire and assuming that the flames are going by the same rulebook as he is. They aren't. The stakes are much higher in this story as well, as Chimele is chasing after a relative that has taken refuge on another world. And if she can't get him off the world and captured again, she will basically have to destroy the planet to save face.

If anything, the book starts to fall apart a bit and drag toward the end of these sequences, as it attempts to turn into an action book and spends more time planetside, trying to keep the two ends of the plot moving at once. But her prose has taken a giant leap forward as well, becoming far more detailed and there's an honest sense of a lot of parts of a society moving all at the same time, different races interacting and coexisting, instead of the iduve simply operating in a vaccuum. It adds a far more fascinating texture and while it's not her best novel, it points the way toward the greater truimphs that were to come later.

Basically anything Alliance-Union related is worth reading by her, and while missing out on "Brothers of Earth" may not change anyone's life, skipping "Hunter of Worlds" misses not only a key component to the style that would eventually produce her masterpieces, but also an excellent novel in its own right.

this book is a collected edition of two fo Cherryh's earlier works. Some of the elements that appear in her later series are evident here, and although these are not her best they aer reasonably good stories and should be a part of the collection of any serious fan.

C.J. Cherryh's first two written novels are bound together in one omnibus edition here.
For a long time these two stories were among my least favorite stories from my favorite writer. Recently I read them together in this edition, and thoroughly enjoyed them.
The Brothers of Earth story, is a pretty straightforward moral lesson on the futility of war.
The Hunter of Worlds Story is one I just hadn't gotten until this last read. If you love Ms. Cherryh's culture building stories, here is the key to this story. We are told that the Iduve are above us on the evolutionary ladder like we are above amoebas. But what did they evolve from??? When you read this story, Imagine what a super evolved shark culture would be like.
Great, Great writing.