Customer Reviews

Serpent's Reach

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Serpent's Reach has been cut off from contact with the rest of humanity for seven hundred years, and in that time, the settlers of these worlds have engineered fantastic technology with the help of the alien Majat. Against this backdrop, one noblewoman's family is slaughtered and she vows revenge on the perpetrators.

I've heard that CJ Cherryh does a fantastic job of creating believable aliens, and I found this to be true in my first-ever CJ Cherryh read. Not only the very alien Majat, but also the almost-human Kontrin and their genetic creations, the Betas and the Azi, have cultures, ideas, and attitudes that distinguish them from we garden variety Homo sapiens.

This is pretty "hard" science fiction, with frequent breaks needed to page back through what you just read to try and soak everything in. There is very little of the old literary trick of having an ignorant character around all the time so that difficult concepts can be explained in dialogue (like Star Trek) or even of outright exposition by the author. Much is left to the interpretation of the reader. If you like that style of writing (I do!), Serpent's Reach is excellent reading. After finishing, I went out and bought a couple more Cherryh books set in the Alliance-Union universe.

There are many reasons I love Serpent's Reach. 1) It is the first book by C.J. Cherryh that I bought (as I was judging it by the cover). 2. The Majat are a insect-like alien race and I like both insects and alien races, so for me it is a real treat. 3. C.J. Cherryh's might SEEM to start out slow, but she is really creating a setting and a foundation for a perfect story.

If you liked this book, I would suggest C.J. Cherryh's 'Pride of Chanur' which is a stand alone book that is followed by FOUR other books (A three book series and another stand alone). Alien cats, but not just your run-of-the-mill alien cats.

This is a great stand-alone work by Cherryh about an alien culture and a group of humans that has been genetically modified, with help from the aliens, to live incredibly long lives. As usual, Cherryh paints a very believable future society.

One point should be made about this book being stand-alone. If you read Cherryh's web site, she lists this book as part of the Alliance/Union universe, but the timeline given in the book contradicts this. There ARE some elements in this book that are in the Alliance/Union series (such as the cloned humans called "azi"). However, the colonization of the first planet in this book happens at approximately the same time as most of the events in the "Company Wars" of the Alliance/Union series, which makes it hard to believe that these books are really in the same "universe". I believe the author attempted to fit some of her books written before "Downbelow Station" into the Alliance/Union chronology, but with this one especially, it's something of a stretch. However, it doesn't hurt the book. You will enjoy it just as much, but consider it a stand-alone book.

This novel is in my "permanent" connection. Serpeant's Reach is a powerful story of betrayal, revenge and survival told by a master writer. The society she creates is rich, detailed and alien, but still recognizably human.

Raen is the sole survivor of the betrayal and extermination of her entire extended family. She maneuvers her revenge with the aid of a non-human species, the Majat. After the ensuing chaos she is allowed autonomy within the confines of powerful, near-immortal, multiplanet aristocracy whose main interests are alliances and assassinations. She becomes an expert survivor, evading assassins and trying to prevent the destruction of the Majat-Kontrin peace. This is a great story.

This is one Cherryh's finest stand alone books. A must for any reader of her work. The story centers around Raen, a young woman brought up in a very alien society, where the humans of a far distant and isolated colony have developed a strange beguiling society in unison with the ant-like insect inhabitants of the Reach. The story gallops along at a fast pace, taking us along for the ride as we see the child Raen's whole family betrayed at the beginning, to the ultimate revenge she exacts aided by the insects who begin to wage their own war amongst themselves, which ends with startling results for everyone. Simply superb!

I just wished there was a follow up to this marvallous read. How about it Ms Cherryh?

Alexandra Wolfe -- Tętu & Wolfe Literary Agents

PS: Could someone please spell-check the Review for this book from ALA Booklist, the characters name is RAEN not Paen!

After reading Downbelow Station (highly recommended), I ventured into Serpent's Reach. Exceptional story telling and witt. At times I would just have to smile and admire the depth and complexity of this amazing plot. Cherryh does a great job of letting us in on the way a different species thinks, feels and communicates. Her ability to do this is second to none. My only complaint about this story (spoiler alert) is that Raen really doesn't save the day. As a matter of fact she makes things worse. Everything around her is disruppted, destroyed or dies. I was anticipating some remarkable twist that would make all things right, but it never came.

A story of a very inbred culture of humans isolated in an alien culture of communal, insectlike aliens. The human culture is an offshoot of the Union side of her Union-Alliance stories, which becomes even more alien, and less Earthlike, as it developes within the Serpent's Reach. A story of revenge in an unusual setting. The character of Sul is alien, and yet fascinating.

This is my first Cherryh book. She creates a fascinating world of alliances between alien ant-like creatures and royal houses of humans. She creates a story within the symbiotic relationship between the humans and the ants. Almost like watching a Nature special on an alien planet. Once of my favorites.

It's probably safe to say that there isn't anyone better at writing aliens than Cherryh.

Sure, some people manage to pull it off at least once, but Cherryh seems to have the knack of doing it again and again. Frankly, it's easy to make aliens that seem like people with bigger eyes or ears or a funny way of talking, or make your aliens so oblique that they're more setpieces for the characters to react to than anything else . . . Cherryh makes aliens that are actually alien in feel, but are still able to interact with the main characters and keep the plot moving. Sometimes the aliens are the main characters, and its the actual people who seem out of place. I really don't think she gets enough credit for it.

In this novel, one of her many Alliance-Union novels, she gives us the setting of Serpent's Reach. A part of the galaxy that is inhabited by a weird set of hive-mind insect aliens, its colonized by a band of humans . . . at which point the other races freak and proceed to not let anyone in or out, leaving the colonists that are in there to develop their own culture and relationship with the local marat.

So of course over the years the humans have developed into families that are constantly scheming and aligning with each other. But when one family gets wiped out, the lone surviving member of the family decides to take some action and bring everyone else down.

On its face, this is probably one of the harder Cherryh books to get into, the opening scenes with the family still alive seemed slow to me. Cherryh isn't really huge on exposition, so you can have to pick up the details of the culture as you go along, which can be difficult as everyone in the story more or less treats this all as utterly normal. But things pick up fantastically as soon as the family gets wiped out and Raen starts to put together her apparently ultra-complicated plan for revenge, which at first seems to involve mostly wandering around from place to place and doing her best not to get killed.

But what makes the book fascinating is how Cherryh creates this very isolated culture with its tiers (the Kontrins are in charge and basically immortal until someone shoots them, the regular Betas, and the slave-like clone azi), creates an entirely separate fascinating culture of the marat (a set of four hives, each one is linked in the head and thus not really able to wrap their mandibles around the thought of people dying), and then proceeds to ram the two together with a catalyst event to see what happens.

This can make for some rough going at times, because as I said earlier, Cherryh isn't really big on explaining things as she goes along, so some mental math is required to figure out who is who (I was still a bit lost on the differences between the two companies) or what exactly Raen is up to, but the end result moves, never stopping once the pieces are put into motion. Her ability to create rather gripping political battles out of a set of politics that she made up entirely is pretty unmatched, and in their own way are just as interesting as the battles that keep cropping up. As a race, the marat borrow a lot from insects, but no matter how often they appear in the book they never stop appearing utterly strange and unrelentingly dangerous.

It's a book of slow-burning pleasures, agreed, but the intersection of the marat, azi, Kontrin, and betas in their little chamber pot of a star system is way better than the description of the book would indicate (it's far from a typical revenge saga, with most of the principles hardly meeting) and its a testament to her skill that she can make a far-future setting with weird insect aliens seem completely real, so that the triumphs and torments that they go through are well-felt, and utterly earned.

What would a world be like if Ants were the evolved creatures?
What would their cultures be like? What would their values be? How could they interact with Humans? You will never look at a trail of Ants the same way again! What would happen if Humans could live for hundreds of years, how wealthy and powerful could they become?
These are the introductery concepts of this amazing story that explores betrayal, revenge, isolation in a new and fascinating way. This short book is plenty to work over for anyone. I just wish that Ms. Cherryh could manage to come back to this story some time and explore more of this fascinating tale.