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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Jase: The perfect foil for Bren, April 16, 2002
I am a huge fan of C.J. Cherryh's science fiction works; she is my favorite author despite my not being a science fiction reader. Next to Cyteen and Finity's End, this series is my favorite of Cherryh's science fiction work. That said, the first time I picked up Inheritor, I had recently finished reading the first books in the series. As other reviewers note, Bren's point of view and overanalysis can be claustrophobic. His agonizing over small details is obsessive and the habit builds, one detail on top of the next, until it begins to seem almost humorous, and at the same time worthy of the reader's pity (for Bren, not the author). When yet another book in the series started along the same thread, I couldn't take much more. I put it down after the first two chapters, and took a break from the series. I still retained a fondness for Bren, though, and recently I read Cherryh's newest in the series, Defender. I decided to go back to Inheritor and see what I had missed (particularly after one of Cherryh's writing colleagues, Jane Fancher, encouraged me to do so), and to my surprise, when I had finished it I found it to be my favorite novel in the Bren series. First, this novel was the deepest of all the Bren novels in terms of human interaction. Jase doesn't drop from the skies, marvelously close to Bren's age, and fit right into the expected "friendly companion" role. They disagree. They miscommunicate. Bren isn't always dealing with a full set of informational cards when he tries to interpret Jase; Jase can't fathom Bren's atevi-habits, even when spoon-fed these mannerisms in plain language. It's one thing to understand something from the mind, another to understand it in the gut. Which leads to the most outstanding feature of the book... Jase's role as perfect foil for Bren. Jase brings out that which Bren worries over in himself, and shows Bren's knowledge and experience off to advantage. As another reviewer points out, we only see this world through Bren's eyes. An author at Cherryh's level would be hard put to use that tired device, "Bren looked into the mirror and noticed he had blond hair, and that his face seldom had any expression." (Having a constant poker face in this society ensures one's survival, a fact made plain in previous novels in the series.) Instead, during an argument with Bren, Jase brings subtleties like Bren's lack of facial expressions into the light for the reader to notice more closely: Jase understandably can't read Bren well without facial expressions to go on, and understandably Jase doesn't believe that a person without facial expressions really cares about him or his adjustment difficulties. A side note: One oddity which had me bemused upon reading the first book of the series, and which continued into subsequent books including Inheritor, later won me over. This oddity is the astonishing similarity, technology-wise, of this alien world to today's Earth. Imagine! So far away in the galaxy that no one on the planet knows where they are in relation to Earth, so far into the future that man is folding space as easily as a t-shirt, on a distant planet... they are using windshield wipers. These windshield wipers are on the windshields of cars just like ours, and the rain that falls is just like the rain falling outside my window now. Later, though, I began to appreciate this tendency of Cherryh's (it appears in Cyteen as well) deeply. Why? Because when one reads other science fiction novels, one spends a great deal of concentration just trying to figure out what the heck that device is in the character's hand, and in what kind of facility is the character standing? Much of one's focus is, by necessity, on decoding just the basic surroundings and tools of the era. By using technology, tools, and settings familiar to us, Cherryh puts the spotlight squarely on the characters and the subtlety of their thoughts and interactions -- what she does best, and exactly where the spotlight should be.
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by C. J. Cherryh
by C. J. Cherryh
by C. J. Cherryh
by C. J. Cherryh
by C. J. Cherryh
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