23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Honor and Adaptablility, February 17, 2005
This review is from: The Faded Sun Trilogy: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath (Paperback)
The mri are a proud warrior race; mercenaries for the regul for thousands of years. But when the regul went to war with humans, the mri lost. Now the regul have ceded the mri homeworld to the humans. With the mri numbers dangerously depleted, and humans coming to claim the planet Kesrith, they are left facing a dire situation. Two surviving mri, Niun and Melein, are thrown into a very unlikely, and very uneasy, association with a human soldier, Duncan. Together the three of them embark on a quest to explore the origins of the nomadic mri in hopes of saving the species from the regul and humans both.
Cherryh does an excellent job of creating aliens that don't act too "human" and function logically within the framework she constructs for them. The characters are definitely the highlight of this book - their motivations, feelings, and relationships are explored in depth. This makes for fairly slow pacing, especially in the beginning when the scene is being set. But there is enough action and political intrigue to keep things interesting and the pace picks up after the first third. Cherryh has several books where characters seem to endlessly toil through a desert setting, and this is definitely one of them. But if you make it through the slow set-up and occasional repetitiveness, it's a thought-provoking and compelling book. One of the main themes showcases human adaptability in the face of alien thought patterns.
The three books contained in the Faded Sun Trilogy (Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath) were originally published in the late 70s. They don't feel dated, and it's nice to have them all in one book, because I don't think they'd be good as stand-alone reading. Taken together, the trilogy is much stronger than the individual books.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Slow beginning, excellent middle, and confusing denouement, September 5, 2001
This review is from: The Faded Sun Trilogy: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath (Paperback)
The Faded Sun is the first book I've read by C. J. Cherryh, and I wouldn't be averse to picking up another of her books. At the beginning, however, I didn't feel that way. Faded Sun takes a long time to get going. The first two hundred or so pages are very dry and very boring. I was tempted to put the book aside at several points. The only reason I didn't was because the book had been highly recommended to me, and I wanted to see just what was so good about it.
Well, I'm glad I stuck with it, because suddenly it all came together. The slow beginning sets the stage for the explosive action to follow, and really puts events into perspective.
At first, I thought the book was a blatant Dune rip-off. There are several obvious correlations: a desert planet, a hero named Duncan, a mystical nomadic society, and giant sandworm-like creatures that eat everything. But you could say pecan pie and dumplings are also the same because they both have sugar, flour, and salt. What Cherryh does with these ingredients is turn out something completely different.
The book demonstrates the relationship between three distinct species: the humans, the mri, and the regul. Technically, it shows the relationship between four, with the dusei, as well, but the dusei are only semi-sentient, so they can't exactly tell their own side of the story. Unfortunately, the regul come across as the bad guys in the book. It would have been nice if they were portrayed a bit more sympathetically, but they really do seem to be a despicable kind of creature.
One problem I had with this three-way portrayal is the way it generally portrays each species as being rather homogeneous. The humans have their disagreements, but still seem to only have one culture. This could be because we were presented only with a rather militaristic group, but I'm not so sure this is why. The reminiscences of various humans on their past seems rather similar, despite their coming from different planets.
In any case, the book is a fascinating ride until the very end when it all seems to fall apart. Perhaps I was just overtired, but I had a difficult time understanding what exactly happens at the denouement. When I read the last sentence of the book, I turned the page, honestly expecting more, but it was over, rather like this review....
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Cherryh, January 12, 2000
This review is from: The Faded Sun Trilogy: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath (Paperback)
This book combines the series of Faded Sun books into one. Cherryh is at her best here, able to project what goes through the mind of a human character under incredible strain and pressure as captive of an alien (but somewhat human-like) race. In each of Cherryh's best works, it feels like you are touching a live wire in the protagonist's brain. If it grabs you, it is an emotional experience that gives you a real sense of the gulfs and leaps in communication between different species and the emotional lows and highs that go with it. Cherryh is not big on high tech, but tremendous on human (and non-human) dimensions. This is not space opera, but rather psychological thriller. Well worth the read.
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