The Faded Sun Trilogy | |||||||||||||
C.J. Cherryh | |||||||||||||
DAW Books, 775 pages | |||||||||||||
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A review by Charlene Brusso
The Faded Sun trilogy opens in the uneasy aftermath of a galaxy-spanning war hard-fought between humans
and humanoid mri mercenaries, hired by the decidedly inhuman regul.
Regul scorn physical combat; they are, in fact, incapable of fighting or even walking once they reach adulthood and gain
the mass which overwhelms their limbs and forces them to resort to moving via personal floating "sleds." To the regul,
with their eidetic memories and downright horror of the abstract, humans are atavistic, possibly insane -- but
potentially lucrative trade partners, for those regul with the stomach for it.
First, however, the new human governments must be settled into place on former regul worlds, including arid,
alkaline Kesrith -- in spite of the fact that the regul long ago ceded the planet to the nomadic mri as
a new homeworld. That hardly seems to matter now, however, since there are only about 500 mri left alive out of
all the troops they began with. As the regul prepare to hand Kesrith's administration to the in-coming human governor,
George Stavros, and his assistant, former Surface Tactical Forces Lt. Duncan Sten, aboard science vessel Flower,
the final fate of the remaining 13 mri on Kesrith is up for grabs.
Niun and his sister Melein are the last of all the mri children of the Kesrith edun. As direct descendants of the
She'pan, leader of the edun, they have been kept close to home -- a fact Niun resents bitterly. A warrior, kel'en of
Kel caste, Niun should have gone to fight with the others of his generation, should have had a chance to test himself,
to earn honour and even death in battle. No matter that the regul ruthlessly wasted their mri forces, sending them
repeatedly into hopeless pitched battles where all mri concepts of honourable combat were rendered
meaningless.
Niun isn't the only one feeling betrayed; Stavros' assistant, Duncan Sten, has similar
concerns.
When a ship arrives with more than 400 mri -- survivors of the war, all that truly remains in regul space -- and
Niun's She'pan sends him to speak with them, regul suspicions turn deadly. A chance meeting between Niun and Duncan
in the spaceport sets it off. The regul destroy the mri ship. Then they destroy Niun's home, the last remaining
edun on Kesrith. Niun, and miraculously Melein, are the only survivors of what Duncan sees as out-and-out genocide,
and Duncan is determined to keep them alive as long as Stavros will give him the chance. Even if it means further
estranging himself from his own kind, even if the mri hate him for interfering, for keeping them alive when by rights
they should have died with the rest of their kin.
Cherryh's masterful skill at drawing the reader smoothly into alien mindsets and cultures is impressive. Using
what is sometimes called an "intense" third person point-of-view, her writing achieves a depth and intimacy between
reader and characters that few can match. Here too is the early treatment of what has become a consistent theme in
so much of the author's work: the impossibility of understanding a culture without truly understanding its
language. To understand the mri, one must understand shon'ai, the Game of the People, the passing-game. The Kel
play shon'ai with knives while other mri play with wands or stones. To be mri is to play the Game, its
player-to-player, hand-to-hand passing rhythm "as old as time and as familiar as childhood." To play the game
is to cast oneself -- one's fate -- forth from the hand, to let go, to make the leap forward freely, and without fear.
Charlene's sixth grade teacher told her she would burn her eyes out before she was 30 if she kept reading and writing so much. Fortunately he was wrong. Her work has also appeared in Aboriginal SF, Amazing Stories, Dark Regions, MZB's Fantasy Magazine, and other genre magazines. |
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