Hammerfall

Rating:
Summary: Slow but satisfying SF
Review: 'Hammerfall' is a tremendously rewarding novel. I couldn't wait to get home from work so I could pick it up again. The main strengths of this novel are Ms. Cherryh's reknowned world-building skills and her believable characters...which is not to say it lacks a compelling plot.

The world of 'Hammerfall' is fascinating in its complexity. Ms. Cherryh has created a wonderful desert world peopled with God-like rulers and nomadic desert tribes. The camel-like beasts of burden are fascinating. The characters are richly imagined and deftly drawn. We, the readers, completely understand the main character's motivations and are able to sympathize with the tough decisions he has to make.

The plot is the weakest part of the novel. Essentially, the book is made up of three trips across a wide desert. Cherryh spices it up with the 'mad' visions sent to special characters and the constant threat of danger from the skies, but, as mentioned earlier, the magnificent tapestry of her fictional world make the book interesting reading even with a less-than-compelling plot.

Though the plot is slow, I believe that when this book is viewed as part of the overall series (of which there is at least one more book to come), it will fall neatly into place as the first volume of an exceptional and very worthwhile series. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Ok...but not her best
Review: As another reviewer said, this book isn't her best. While I still would recommend it, the book has a feel of a number 2 book in a trilogy, and would have been a great book had it been.

It felt like the whole book was the MIDDLE of a story, and the reader should have known the characters involved.

Having said that i DO hope there is a sequel, now that we have invested the time in the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Rewards the effort
Review: C. J. Cherryh's novels aren't always the easiest to read, but they generally reward the effort you put into them. Certainly HAMMERFALL falls into this category.

Marak is mad, haunted by voices. When the goddess of the planet learns that his madness is shared, she sends him, along with the other affected victims, in a search for the source of madness. What Marak finds is a threat to the planet itself, and everyone on it.

What works in this novel is Cherryh's worldbuilding--her descriptions of the brutal desert world that Marak calls home, the storms that sweep across the desert, and the vermin who threaten anything alive. In HAMMERFALL, it is definitely the journey, not the destination, that makes the reading a pleasure.

I enjoyed this novel very much.

(...)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: Cherryh is a master story teller, excelling at character development. I had never been disappointed and spent many a sleepless night reading her books.

Until Hammerfall. What a disappointment. While reading this book I had the impression that she used her leftover notes from the Faded Sun trilogy, stirred a bit, came up with the psyche war motiv and threw it in at the very end to justify the trek. It's still good reading for those who want to learn survival skills for the desert.

Rating:
Summary: Major disappointment
Review: Cherryh is my favorite author. I have read almost all of her books, some several times. I was looking forward to reading this book and saving it with the others. In my opinion, the book is boring with none of her usual tension or interpersonal relationships. The plot is not clear, the characters are not interesting and as this is the beginning of a series I will not buy the rest. It's going back.

Rating:
Summary: Cherryh at her plodding best
Review: Cherryh's books are known for their brilliance, suspense and magic moments, all of which are lacking in this very well written plodding story that takes the hero there and back and there and back again... and nano technology has been written up for, oh, 20 years, with more terrifying consequences than this book explores. I was surprised at the lack of detail at the end of the book and had to read it twice to make sure I didn't actually just put the story down unfinished.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and boring
Review: CJ Cherryh reminds me of the little girl who, 'when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.' Unfortunately, this is one of the horrid books.

Although Cherryh's writing style has become ever more polished and skillful with time, the quality of her characters and stories are not always as consistent. In this case they are positively bad. Approximately 80% of this book is taken up with interminable descriptions of primitive tribesmen crossing a desert. The amount of science fiction is minimal, and there are no new or interesting ideas. The characters are flat, bland, humorless, and cloyingly politically correct. The story is boring, linear, and predictable.

There is a major hole in the plot you can drive a caravan through: A huge starship belonging to a sophisticated civilization has landed on one side of a desert. The people on the starship need to send a very urgent message a few hundred miles to the other side of the desert. Inexplicably, instead of using advanced technology, they entrust this urgent message to a caravan of primitive tribesmen, who must travel for weeks to deliver it. They practically drive the tribesmen (and the reader!) insane with continual fatuous mental messages to hurry up. Finally it's revealed that the starship had small 'fliers' all along.

If a ten year old thought up a plot like this, I would laugh and gently point out the inconsistency. When a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author uses this as a central pillar of her story, I am left aghast by the magnitude of her self-indulgence and her contempt for the reader.

What happened to the believable characters and the powerful, original, fast-moving story of Downbelow Station? The layer upon layer of political intrigue of Cyteen? The unbearably poignant loneliness of Merchanter's Luck? The philosophical questions raised by Voyager in Night? The complex, delightful three-dimensional characters and zany humor of Hellburner and Tripoint? The nail-biting tension of the first Chanur book? Even the early Morgaine stories have a dynamism and humor that Hammerfall lacks.

This book is all style and no content. If you enjoy minutely detailed and repetitive accounts of tribesmen crossing deserts, you may enjoy this book. Otherwise don't bother - rather read one of the good books by this author listed above. Please, CJ, don't waste your own time writing inane and disappointing drivel like this, when you can do so much better. The hammer should have fallen on this book before it was written.

Rating:
Summary: Cherryh surpasses herself
Review: Every time I think this lady's unique brand of character developement, intricate world building and plots where you only know as much as the POV character, have reached their brilliant limit, she surpasses herself. This is (so far) NOT a novel about nanotech. Nano provides the magic to make it SF instead of Fantasy. The key is the characters. She takes people you know nothing about, drops them into the situation and makes you care so deeply the pages cannot fly fast enough. In a world of tedium and predictable formula plots, she's a one of a kind. Are there loose ends? Of course. There are in life. God may know everything. People live with their own limits on knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: An excelent book.
Review: Following an unsuccessful campaign against the ondat, the Ila, flees to a distant planet where she creates a new imperium through her knowledge of nano-technology.

Five hundred years later the woman, Luz, arrives, having persuaded the ondat - who have tracked the Ila, down - that her use of nano-technology will split the Ila's creation from her, giving the ondat the revenge they have been seeking, without the need for devastating force. The ondat give Luz thirty years to prove her plan.

But thirty years is not quite enough for Luz, and the ondat, not wishing to wait any further, unleash their attack on the Ila's planet by bombarding it with ever more deadly meteorite hits, to culminate in one planet shattering strike - the hammer.

At this late stage, the madman, Marak, is Luz and the Ila's only best hope to avoid the ondat's revenge.

This book makes sense provided it's thoroughly read without skipping sections, which is very tempting to do in the desert trekking sequences. Skipping will make you miss important explanatory details, and so the book will be very unsatisfactory as some others have claimed, and I found it to be, if I did so.

I would have liked to have seen the first three chapters made into one, with their details conveyed as retrospective viewpoint from the time that Marak is preparing to leave Oburan to head eastwards at Ila' behest. I feel it would have balanced the details of the opening trek towards Oburan, Marak's meeting with Ila, and been a neater segue to the outgoing journey.

There was a very vague sense of how much time was passing on the first outward journey. It only becoming clear in the section where the Ila was in transit, that 30 - 50 days was the time between Oburan and the Tower. No big deal perhaps, but I found it distracting. Lines like 'on a certain day' not helping.

Some elaboration of Luz's technological capabilities would have been good, so that I wasn't wondering why she hadn't some more speedy way of conveying Marak and his colleagues back to marshall the Ila and her followers. An ATV, or some kind of air-transport to discreetly drop them off a short distance from Oburan. After all, masters of interstellar flight, nano-technology, and air-conditioned tents, etc, would reasonably be expected to have such resources to hand, given such a large ship, and where 30- 50 days is a such big factor with respect to the story's timeframe.

This is touched on in the last chapter at a time of about twenty years later, in which Marak recollects the need for 'masks and machines' to make travel feasible in the early post-hammerfall climate. The fliers seem to be a feature of this time as well and are not necessarily part of the pre-hammerfall period. These fliers seem more akin to tiny observation aircraft, not intended to carry any burden.

Anyway, read it thoroughly and their shouldn't be a problem.

I would recommend that readers of Hammerfall read Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider, since they share some key details. Also get the Morgaine set, now out as one complete book. And read the Foreigner series, CJC's - to my mind anyway- best blending of technologically advanced and developing, dissimilar cultures. CJC's spacer books such as Tripoint, Downbelow Station, and Cyteen, etc, are worth looking at, too. I found the barren desert environment of Hammerfall to be evocative of the space transits between space stations.

I enjoyed reading Hammerfall and am looking forward to the next one.

Rating:
Summary: This is not a bad book
Review: From the reviews I'd read for this book I went in not expecting to find it very enjoyable, but I was pleasently surprized. This is not a bad book. It may not be on a level with Cherryh's best work, but it is a good read. Cherryh is know for her complex plots, and well drawn aliens, this book does not have either but it does not miss them. It is a simple straight forward story with a simple almost everyman hero. It pulls you into it's world and makes you care what happens next. It was a nice change of pace from the huge complex multi volume sagas that seem to be dominating the genera lately.