Inheritor

Rating:
Summary: one world where HUMANS are the alien threat
Review: An accelerated pace and 3 months have passed since the end of "Invader".

Jase has settled in, the emissary from the orbiting space ship "Phoenix" which, like the bird of legend, returned from the unknown & unexplored reaches of deep space.

For a little history:
Cherryh sets her world with imposing aliens(Atevi) who are united by a single ruler, the aijii, under whom lords & council govern. Humans, lost on a space colonization mission, have settled on the Atevi world and exist in an uneasy truce, co-operating & trading only through one diplomat; Bren Cameron.

As the only contact between two species, Cameron is constantly protected by an extraordinary security force but his family is not so fortunate.
In a turbulent political climate on the human governed island, Camerons' family is endangered by radical factions & Yolanda Mercheson, the ships emissary has been threatened.

Against this background he must somehow train (Jase)the new Atevi ship-human diplomat in the tangled Ragi tongue, which has no word for trust, or love or even like. Yes, human and Atevi are biologically different, and a man alone in an alien culture must constantly rethink his most basic suppositions.

Jase & Cameron have made little headway after the initial friendliness of their contact & arrangements, but luckily Cameron's Atevi security have become his family.

Against the backdrop of the stars, and one alien homeplanet where HUMANS are the alien threat, the `space opera' plays out.

Well written, fast paced & enjoyable, an increasingly involving series. .

Kotori [e-mail]


Rating:
Summary: Aliens
Review: C.J.Cherryh is really seriously good at depicting aliens. One or two other writers might make then more credible, but then they are impossible to sympathise with. And lots of writers can make them more sympathetic, but then they are just humans in disguise. Cherryh is almost alone in striking a perfect balance.

Rating:
Summary: And we remain hungry for more, more, more!
Review: Cherryh has managed to create in this trilogy a fascinating yet thoroughly alien race - just close enough to human to be familiar, yet different enough to tantalize. The concepts of honorable assasination, different emotion "hardwiring" and the only word in the languange for like/love equating to a preference for a particular salad certainly keep one just enough off-balance that you can't stop reading - because you just want to find out just how Bren will make that true connection with the atevi, and one lovely woman in particular. Even if she is 7 feet tall, has pointed ears, yellow eyes and is a trained assassin! A must read for those who truly appreciate the creation of an alien race who are not just humans who dress differently or have an extra limb or eye. Hopefully there will be more forthcoming in this series.

Rating:
Summary: A fine book! I'm looking forward to the next in the series.
Review: Cherryh makes us care about the characters -- something all authors try for and few achieve.

We know much about Bren's feelings for his atevi companions; perhaps in the next volume Cherryh will explore how they, especially Jago, feel about him.

I think Cherryh does something I've seen only one other author (McCaffrey) do: Sucessfully mix Gothic romance and SF

Rating:
Summary: Jase: The perfect foil for Bren
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Jase: The perfect foil for Bren
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best human/alien serie written
Review: I have enjoyed Cherryh's work for a number of years and this book continues an excellent series. Once again a crises looms in the Human-Atevi relations. I love the careful, detailed way the story traces the hero's piecing together of the clues amid the alien politics and honor system of the Atevi. Cherryh's books follow a slow, step-by-step buildup which is sometimes a bit of work to read but is always worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and complex, classic Cherryh!
Review: I loved this book - this is her best series yet, and I am eagerly awaiting those next three books that her webpage hints at. This one elaborated on the brilliant world of the atevi, had magnificently interwoven plots and sub-plots, and some fascinating characters. There was only one thing I was disappointed in ...... there was very little of Damiri, Tabini's influential consort, who looked promising in Invader. Damiri aside, this is an elegant, suspenseful, beautifully-written book, the type that is very, very, very hard to put down. An absolute must-read for all fans of intelligent sci-fi.

Rating:
Summary: Pacier than a first read would suggest.
Review: In a period of a little over six months Bren Cameron has been catapulted from a fairly relaxed routine of Paidhi (interpreter), researcher, and intermediary to one in which atevi and human resources are geared toward an accelerated space programme. A space programme that had been little more than an exercise in atevi-human co-operation until the spaceship Phoenix had suddenly appeared and docked at the long ago abandoned space-station high in orbit above the atevi's planet. Ordinarily only one human is allowed onto the atevi mainland. But now there are three. Bren Cameron; Bren's stand-in, Deanna Hanks, who has joined factions opposed to Tabini and his allies; and Jason Graham, the Phoenix's representative, Bren's student and direct responsibility. Bren Cameron now has plenty to occupy his mind: possible assassination, inter-atevi aggression, inter-human aggression, atevi-human aggression, attempted sabotage of the space programme, and keeping his new charge, Jason Graham, from making any, to himself, life threatening faux pas. As well as all this, Bren Cameron wonders why the Phoenix has returned in the first place...

The first time around this book seems to be much slower paced than Foreigner and Invader because it tends to dwell on scenes that are necessary for the development of the plot more than would seem reasonable. But when read again, the whole thing fairly zips along, which was surprising.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible focus
Review: Like the first two novels the story centres upon the one human ambassador in alien territory. As a novel Cherryth concentrates all of her attention on one principal character, Bren, in such a way that we see the world and the events which affect him through his eyes only. Nothing happens if Bren does not see it. As the majority of all other characters are the alien atevi, all your attention is focused on Bren in a claustrophobic manner, which after a while pulls you into the story and wholly on Bren's side. You may find this tiring, as the focus never shifts from Bren. As always with Cherryth's characters and alien world's, events, people and places are described in detail and are completely believable, particularly the alien society and culture. After three novels (apparently three more are planned) and I must confess that the plot and the drama have not moved on very much, the things picked up remarkably at the end of inheritor. Those familiar with Cherryth's work will appreciate the details and intensity of the character study and the complete focus on one character only. Those not so familiar, may not enjoy narrow range of possibilities which this represents. On the whole a very which and enjoyable series, which explores the tensions and difficulties which human first contact with an alien culture might experience. If you haven't read Cherryth' s. work before then I would recommend starting with the classic science fiction novel 'Downbelow Station'.