Customer Reviews

The Faded Sun Trilogy: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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....

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.

I prefer books that I have to ponder, where there seems to be great depth underlying the words written. Example: Robert Graves' I Claudius. I relished this book, the first I ever read by Cherryh, but certainly not the last (I am deep into the Morgaine Saga at this moment, and just bought five more Cherryh books today.) The book is crafted, written, and paced very deliberately, which might frustrate an impatient reader. But when things happen, they really have impact, and a lot does happen in the 775 pages. I found the alien regul to be especially fascinating, and the interplay between human and regul stylishly handled and amusing (although this is primarily a serious book). I agree with the reviewer who said that reading the three books spread out over a few years would reduce their joint impact. I also felt that the effort lost a little steam in the final book (Kutath) and that in general, there were too many stretches of people wondering around in a worn out daze in the desert with the dusei emanating emotions by their side, or wandering off. But these are quibbles relative to the absolute brilliance of the book and Cherryh's dense, highly creative narrative style.

This is without a doubt one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read. Full of intriguing characters and twisting(though coherent) plots, "The Faded Sun" is simply a great read. Technically it isn't perfect, having quite a few gramatically awkward areas and a somewhat slow pace, but the underlying richness of it makes one quickly forget such trivial complaints. I most hardily recommend this title, and believe even those who aren't particular fans of the genre will find it rewarding.

P.S. If I had read it in its original form my review might have been different. I can hardly see it as a trilogy, and would, most likely, have found the sudden and unrewarding endings between titles irritating. Thankfully, I won't ever have to deal with that.

"The Faded Sun" trilogy suffers from the lamentable pitfalls of Cherryh's writing, but it also exemplifies what she is capable of at her best.

Cherryh's main weakness as a writer is redundancy, and the first book and a half suffer from this terribly. At her best, Cherryh lets the intricacies of her characters emerge in dialogue. At her worst, she spends the first few pages of every short chapter repeating the same descriptions of her main characters we found in each preceding chapter. (As I've written elsewhere, it smacks of a writer "warming up" without reading through the previous day's work.) This weakness especially affects this trilogy, because its brilliance -- as the other reviews describe -- is that Cherryh succeeds in maintaining a believable and complex interaction among four completely different species/cultures with a depth which challenges any other scifi or fantasy book ever written. The non human species are not just dressed up humans of foreign cultures, nor are they part of a symbolic mythology or allegorical structure. She has succeeded in making them believable, and, well, fascinating, occasionally inspiring, and not infrequently confounding. At the same time, her set up of these species is long-winded and repetitive.

The trilogy is approximately 800 pages long, and the first 400 pages are really interminably boring. Things start to take off around page 460, and from 460 until the end this is among the greatest science fiction books of all time. Instead of long paragraphs repeating descriptions of the species, characteristic of the first half, Cherryh allows dialogue and actions to demonstrate and cultures of her characters. If only she had done this sooner.

For those who have read the Morgaine 4-book series, the writing pattern is about the same. There, the first book set the characters up, quite repetitively, the second book slowed down to molasses, and right when you were about to give up, the third and fourth books took off with the characters and became engrossing. "The Faded Sun" follows that pattern, but due to its length, the slow warm up is that much harder to get through, but the payoff in the strong second half is that much more rewarding.

So I'm purusing the racks of the local used book store trying desperately to find something to read. After about a half an hour in the fantasy/sci-fi section, I come across a slightly ratty, well-read _The Faded Sun: KESRITH_ by C.J. Cherryh. Okay, I've read C.J. Cherryh before many years ago in anthologies and also the hauntingly eery _Rusalka_, and the cover sucked me right in... I love fantasy novels set in the desert, so I pick it up. And find it's a series, so on goes the hunt for the other two books... After looking around for another five minutes, I finally find the second book, after first finding the third one. Total cost of all three books...
I say all that to say it was sheer luck me getting this set or perhaps fate, who knows, but I have read them about six times now and it remains my all time favorite sci-fi series ever. Having said that, I prefer fantasy, but I'm not a total newbie of the sci-fi scene either. As I type this, I am about to embark on the journey for the seventh time.... this is one trilogy every fantasy/sci-fi fan should have one their shelf.

This book was an impulse buy for me. I prefer Sci-Fi humor or fantasy combined with Sci-Fi. I tend to stay away from hard core Sci-Fi for my own reasons... but this book really surprised me. Cherryh does an excellent job of describing emotions and thoughts, being an important part of the story. Careful forming of characters was done as well as the story itself, which was intriguing. Definate must buy on my list. Oh, and the cover art is really nice as well.

Don't make the mistake that I did-- Cherryh's classic trilogy about cultural isolation and risk is a set that should be read sooner rather than later.

As the human-regul war draws to a close, the question of what to do with the mri remains. They were the fanatical and deadly mercenaries used by the regul to attack the humans, and most people find them to be too dangerous to permit to flourish. However, when the mri face extinction, it is a human named Duncan who sets him self the task of preventing genocide.

Set in the Union-Alliance universe, The Faded Sun trilogy is among Cherryh's best work. It is also among her earliest novels, originally having been published in the late 1970s.

Why do I like Cherryh so much? The way that she can manage complexity without either losing the reader or dumbing down the plot makes her virtually unique. In the hands of a lesser writer, the mri would have been moon-dancing innocents unjustly targeted for death. Cherryh presents a complex situation with high stakes for everybody involved, but still manages to come down against isolationism and final solution.

Excellent, and highly recommended.

Cherryh is an incredible creatrix of alien cultures and worlds. Here she showcases her ability to toss aside humanocentric assumptions and come up with completely fresh ones. Watching these various sets of assumptions interact with those of humans is what makes the story so interesting.

This book also delivers a sobering thwap upside the head to the tendency to think of humans as the most intelligent and noble species likely to exist in the galaxy. _Faded Sun_ will convincingly challenge both suppositions. After you finish it, you may find yourself reflecting on how far we are from what we could be.

It would be a pity for any lover of SF to miss out on this volume.