David Gillon

Chanur's Legacy, C J Cherryh (re-read)

It's 10 years on from the Pride of Chanur trilogy, and Hilfy Chanur is pissed off with everyone judging her against her aunt's reputation - Aunt Pyanfar being President of Compact Space, the Mekt-Hakkikt of the Kif, the Personage of Personages of the Mahendo'sat, and so on. She's also personally pissed off at Pyanfar for kicking her off the Pride post-Trilogy, because Hilfy was far too interested for her own good in the Human stray, Tully. Py made Hilfy head of clan Chanur to keep her ground-bound, which she screwed up by picking a disastrous, if pretty, husband, which her aunt Rhean had to fix by bringing in a Hani male of the old school - the old school being a muscle-bound hulk who can kill any adult male who even looks like he might grow up to be a threat without needing to engage his brain, and leave it to his wives, sisters, daughters and nieces to run the clan.

Hilfy fled back to space by appointing herself captain of the clan's new ship the Legacy, which is the one thing she's truly qualified to do - not to fly it, she has her four cousins for that - but to run the interactions with the other species of Compact space: the ape-like Mahendo'sat, the piratical Kif (about whom she has an incipient case of PTSD), the fragile Stsho and the barely understandable, multi-brained methane breathers, the Tca with their pets/symbionts/partners? the Chi, and the incomprehensible Knnn (who don't show up this time around). So when the Stsho governor of Meetpoint Station invites her for tea and opportunities she's perfectly willing to engage, and comes away with a contract that seems too good to be true - all she has to do is transport the oji, a Stsho religious object of some sort, to the Stsho ambassador at a neighbouring station, and the payoff is so generous it will get the clan out of debt for the Legacy's construction. And will she do the governor a minor favour and take on a Hani crewmember abandoned by their ship after a fracas on the docks?

Hallan Meras is that abandoned crewmember, or more specifically crewman, being one of the handful of Hani to have taken up Pyanfar's dangerously radical concept of Hani males actually being quite capable of being spacers, not killing machines. Hallan is very young, very confused and it's never entirely clear how much the crew of his former ship were using him as a novelty sex-toy rather than an actual spacer (and for 'spacer' read general dogsbody). There's no way Hilfy is leaving a Hani of any gender alone on an alien station, but she's adamant that he's not staying, whatever her cousins might think. Not even if he is huge and pretty and far too innocent to ever be a successful killing machine.

And besides, she's beginning to think she might have a bigger problem, because the contract for delivery of the oji turns out to be 240 pages of small-point size Stsho legalese, 550 allowing for alternative translations, and 28,400 if you include the ship's computer's legal commentary, and the penalty clauses for delivering it to the wrong Stsho are ferocious (to which add the complication that Stsho don't just change gender under stress, they potentially change identity). Things get worse when they get to their destination, because the entire Stsho embassy has upped-sticks and fled, and following them on to the next station only finds most of them dead. At which point Hilfy begins to realise she may have dumped herself right in the middle of Py's gods-rotted politics, with a plot that involves not just the Stsho, but a Mahendo'sat agent who claims he's only here to help her, and an enigmatic Kiffish Hakkikt who keeps wanting to talk via Hallan. And meanwhile Hallan keeps tripping over his big feet and breaking things, and the youngest of her cousins is spending half her time dreaming about him, and the others do think that maybe she shouldn't be too quick to throw him off the ship....

Hilfy is a convincingly angry protagonist, judged against a paragon she can't hope to equal, yet capable and driven to succeed in her own right, but still tangled in the emotions of what happened on the Pride, while Hallan is the convincingly naive young man, all too eager to please, while trying to parse out whether the individual crew members tolerate him, like him, or are out to exploit him.
 
I'd forgotten how really good this is, but you do really need to have read the Pride of Chanur trilogy first to get the full depth of the story. It's Cherryh in her deep-dive into alien mores mode, which she does better than anyone, but it's also at least halfway to being one of her stories where our viewpoint character is caught in the orbit of the true protagonist, the twist here being that Pyanfar never actually appears outside of Hilfy's in-jumpspace dreams. And mixed in with that are the crew dynamics of an all-female crew suddenly finding themselves with a very pretty male aboard. 

Currently Reading: Hell's Bell, 2nd of Keri Arthur's Lizzy Grace series. In which inconvenient bodies keep coming between Lizzie and getting into bed with handsome werewolf ranger Aiden.

The Burning Page, Genevieve Coglan

First new book in several weeks as wi-fi has been on the blink so the Kindle hasn't been able to connect (wired-fi is fine, even from the same router) - I finally gave up trying to diagnose the problem and dug my old one out of storage to act as a wi-fi hub.

This is Book 3 of the Invisible Library, and I initially had problems remembering what had happened in Book 2, which several characters are suffering from the after-effects of, but it came back to me. Anyway, in a multiverse of parallel Earths, there is a cold(-ish) war between Order and Chaos, represented by the Dragons and the Fae respectively. Chaos grants the Fae magical powers, while the Dragons have some order-based powers. Individual worlds lie on a spectrum between order and chaos. Theoretically neutral in this conflict is the Invisible Library, which exists to preserve unique variants of books, which its agents acquire by any means necessary, helped by the Language, which can temporarily re-write reality. The Library in turn has its own bete-noire, Alberich, a librarian who went over to the dark side centuries ago.

Irene Winters is Librarian-in-Residence on a steampunkish world, and currently on probation in the aftermath of Book 2, when she disobeyed orders in order to rescue her apprentice Kai, who is a dragon prince, from a high chaos world, helped by Peregrine Vale, the Great Detective of her world's London. (Irene's name is no coincidence). She is also one of few Librarians to have taken on Alberich and lived. Her major problem at the start (apart from the crappy assignments she keeps getting given the probation) is that chaos disagreed with Vale, who is indulging in his morphine habit as a result. To further complicate things, she has picked up a Fae refugee, Zayanna, also as a result of her adventures in book 2.

Then things escalate. Irene and Kai return from a messy retrieval to find that someone has filled her house with poisonous giant spiders. That is dealt with easily enough, but Alberich is somehow interfering with the gates (usually doorways in libraries) that link different worlds to the world that is the Invisible Library, in some cases fatally. Summoned to a council of Librarians, Irene is assigned a high-risk retrieval (on the grounds the Library's power is based on books and they can't have too many rare books). On her return to London to pick up Kai, Irene finds herself kidnapped by werewolves, but she is a trained Librarian (she tends to say this a lot), and rises to the occasion. With Kai retrieved, and Vale temporarily interested in a case, they set out on her assignment,.

This takes them to a chaos-aspected world with a Russian dominated European empire, under the rule of the immortal Catherine the Great, and unfortunately the book is located in the Winter Palace. After an unfortunate incident with flying sleigh-port security (it turns out magical contraband sniffing bears really, really like dragons, even in human form), and busting out of the secret police HQ, Irene and Kai slip into a reception at the palace, which after various alarums and excursions leads to a confrontation with Alberich in the middle of the dance floor. Alberich it seems, is interested in one of Irene's retrievals, a copy of Grimm with an extra story that may reveal what the Library did with Alberich's child after expelling him, and which Irene read. With Alberich cast into the outer darkness by the full force of Russian state wizardry, it's back to the secret police cell for Irene and Kai, which doesn't really hold them any longer than the last time.

Irene makes an executive decision to call time on her mission, because 1) Alberich and 2) someone knew where she was going, but not what her precise mission was, which pretty much limits it to her circle of friends. And it doesn't help that there's another trap waiting for them on their return. Unfortunately I thought the story went off the rails here,

And it all culminates in a fight in a phantasmagorical library between two masters of the Language.

Despite the major plot issues, I really enjoyed this and read it in a single sitting. Irene is a sympathetic hero ,even if her male followers can be annoying at times.

Other Reading:

I'm still busy delving into the depths of Friedman's Naval AA, extracting info for use in my ongoing naval wargaming project, so no new non-fiction. WRT fiction I seem  to have accidentally started re-reads of Cherryh's Merchanters Luck, and Faery in Shadow, and Fortress in the Eye of Time. Yes, all of them. I may be lacking focus right now.

Gaming:

I’ve been a fan of Cherryh since the early 80s, but hadn’t really been reading much of hers lately. But when my rearranged home-office put Foreigner on the bookshelf next to my elbow, it was clearly time to take another look at what may be my favourite series of hers. I had eight if the first nine books to hand, two of which I turned out never to have read (probably because I didn’t have book seven). I’ve now re-read/read those three trilogies, and as I didn’t review them as I went, which was my initial intention, I decided to re-read again specifically for review purposes, which interestingly threw up some clear evidence that Cherryh was reworking her world-building as her ideas developed.

Foreigner is book 1 of the series, and spends its first 60 pages establishing backstory – how the starship Phoenix, carrying a human colony expedition, complete with orbital station, had an incident in jump space and came out so far from home that they couldn’t even map their position via pulsars. Desperate efforts brought them to a habitable world, which turned out to have its own steam age native species, the Atevi. The crew, or rather the all-powerful Pilot’s Guild*, wanted to deploy the station only to refit the ship and then move on, while the colonists, who were being used as expendable labour, forced the issue when they fabricated drop capsules and sent a mission to the planet’s surface.

200 years later Phoenix is long gone, the station long abandoned, and Bren Cameron is Paidhi-Aiji, the sole human allowed off the human enclave on the island of Mospheira. Humans and the very humanoid Atevi (a head taller than a tall human, with jet black skin and hair and golden eyes) get on well together on the surface, but they just don’t understand each other, and that led to a war which could have wiped the humans out. The treaty that stopped the war permanently separated the two species and established the post of Paidhi – translator to the ruling Aiji of the Western Association, responsible for handing over human technology in an orderly fashion, the price for continued human existence, and for advising the Atevi government on how to avoid any economic or ecological disasters that might result.

Bren’s in his mid-twenties, and won his position as Paidhi because he’s the person most fluent in the Atevi language, which doesn’t come easily to humans. He’s only a couple of years into his position, rather similar to Tabini, the Aiji, who is rumoured to have assassinated the previous Aiji, his father, that being one of the points on which humans and Atevi fail to understand each other. The Assassin’s Guild serves the Atevi, or at least the Ragi Atevi of the Western Association, as police**, lawyers, and security for the Aijiin, the Atevi nobility. And as assassins for anyone who can hire them and demonstrate a serious enough grievance (though on the whole they would much rather people settled things amicably).

Bren thinks of himself as a technical translator, but he’s clearly much more than that, he sits in ministerial level meetings and has a power of veto, although that can be overridden by the full Atevi parliament. Bren gets on well with most Atevi, it’s a polite culture, and rather likes Tabini-Aiji. And that’s a problem, because Atevi brains aren’t wired to like people – ‘like is for salads’. Atevi brains are wired to follow their man’chi – duty - to their aiji. Follow the leader is wired into every animal species on the planet, but man’chi can be fuzzy around the edges, and the moment when an unrealised man’chi becomes clear is a staple of the Atevi’s machimi dramas. Only the Aijiin lack man’chi, and they compete and scheme ruthlessly with each other, and the use of assassins is considered a perfectly normal part of that competition – Bren reflects that the Atevi language has 14 words for betrayal, and one doubles for doing the obvious.

Before the first page of his story is out, Bren has shot and wounded an intruder creeping into his bedroom, using a pistol the Treaty forbids him from owning, a pistol Tabini just gave him and told him to keep close. Bren might sleep next door to the cook, but the hue and cry brings out the other two Atevi he can’t keep himself from liking; Banichi and Jago, two of Tabini’s senior assassins. Banichi’s older and occasionally given to wry humour, Jago is younger, female, and very earnest, as interested in understanding Bren as Bren is in understanding the Atevi. Banichi quickly takes charge of the pistol, supplying Bren with his own, and insisting that Bren is to tell everyone that Banichi shot the intruder. Jago, meanwhile, reports blood on the terrace, and that the intruder has escaped in the storm.

Before Bren quite knows what is happening, Tabini has filed Intent against persons unknown on his behalf, the prelude to unleashing his own Licensed Assassins, and has assigned Banichi and Jago to keep Bren safe. Which for the assassins means wiring his rooms with lethal countermeasures and replacing his familiar servants with two new ones, Tano and glum Algini***, whom Bren soon comes to realise are actually junior security.

Bren knows something is off, his mail has stopped arriving and Banichi is being less than frank about what is happening, or why, while Jago professes ignorance of quite what Banichi is up to. Bren isn’t certain whether to call the Mospheiran Foreign Office and warn them that he may be in trouble, he doesn’t want to be pulled out, but then Tabini decides he is safer off out of the Bu-javid, the Atevi seat of government/capital residence for the Aijiin, and before he quite knows what’s happening he’s bundled onto a plane, despatched to somewhere no human has been before – Malguri, seat of Ilisidi, the Aiji-Dowager.

Ilisidi isn’t Tabini’s mother, she’s his grandmother, and the other candidate for assassinating the previous Aiji, her son. Ilisidi is the arch-conservative of Atevi politics, passed over twice for the position of Aiji of the Western Association, because the other Aijiin feared for their lives under her rule. Bren first takes her for senile, but she is anything but, quickly proving even more challenging than Machiavellian Tabini.

Malguri is a house of contrasts, part historical monument (the toilet arrangements fill Bren with horror), staffed by quietly efficient servants who live to serve the house and its guests, and part residence of one of the most powerful Atevi living, but one who rejects Tabini’s modernism to live a traditional, kabui**** life, surrounded by her ‘young men’, who all wear Assassin’s black and answer to Cenedi, her somewhat older version of Banichi. Ilisidi is tiny, frail – she walks with a cane, and as hard as steel. Regardless of her physical limitations she remains a champion equestrienne, riding the mecheiti, the Atevi horse equivalent - part camel, part wild boar, and with the temper of both.

Bren’s first encounter with Ilisidi goes somewhat amiss, when he is accidentally poisoned (Cenedi swears it was accidental – and the use of alkaloids in Atevi cuisine makes it a minefield for humans, so he may even be telling the truth), but after that the days settle into a pattern. Breakfast on the terrace with Ilisidi with a main course of challenging questions about Mospheira’s real agenda leads inevitably to a challenge of a different kind as Ilisidi insists Bren join her for a cross-country ride cum hunt on the mecheiti herd she keeps, with the mecheiti and their hierarchy and competition within it serving as an insight into Atevi society for Bren. Which leads to an afternoon spent soaking out the aches and pains in a hot bath, followed by an evening of reading and security alarums and excursions, which Banichi swears are mostly down to Malguri’s ancient infrastructure.

But the threat remains, and a visit by tourists ends with a Licensed Assassin dead on the gravel in front of the main door - a shocking breach of protocol as no one has filed Intent on Bren - and to Bren beginning to doubt even Banichi and Jago, although Jago swears she will never betray him.

And then Cenedi invites Bren for a cup of tea.

Cherryh has a very definite fictional style. She rarely writes stories from the viewpoint of the true protagonists of her novels, instead we see the story through the eyes of someone caught in their orbit, rarely fully informed as to plans and situations, and often of an entirely different culture, with a slow lead in and a sudden, sharp climax. With Foreigner, and the other books of the Foreigner series, she has created an entire society shaped to suit her style, as man’chi clash and true loyalties manifest at the critical moment – novel as machimi drama.

* It’s not outright stated, but the presence of the Pilot’s Guild implies that the expedition originated from Cherryh’s Alliance/Union Merchanter background.

** Foreigner has a few references to an actual police force, but that isn’t carried through into the rest of the series, which makes it clear that with the exception of village constables the Assassins are the functional law-enforcement.

*** There are some elements of Tano and Algini’s portrayal here that are slightly at odds with facts that emerge in the third trilogy. But on the other hand, everyone is lying to Bren anyway.

**** Imagine kosher and feng-shui had a love child

I've spent a quite ridiculous amount of time playing Ark: Survival Evolved since installing it on Saturday. And I've now progressed from the sad status of two-legged dinosaur kibble through hunter-gathering and have reached the technological heights of farming. I'm not quite ready for actual veggie farming, so I've taken the easy option and started farming dodos.

The island where Ark takes place, particularly the beaches, is rife with dodos. They may be the basis of the food chain (I'm not sure quite how realistically modelled Ark's food chain is, as one of the notes from previous explorers you find from time to time pointed out, food chains where the carnivores outnumber the herbivores two to one just don't work under our rules of physics). You quickly come to understand why the actual dodo became extinct - you can hit them over the head and all they'll do is squawk piteously and try to waddle away, hit them a few more times and they fall over ready to be harvested.

The whole game works on a harvesting/crafting mechanic - gather wood, berries, flints, or bits of dead animal, and use them to build yourself a shelter, or better tools, or as your next meal - it's basically Bear Grylls in action. My initial home base was a thatched hut, then it became a thatched hut with a wooden panic room inside (that blasted dilophosaurus that killed me seconds into the game was a very persistent problem), and now it's a large wooden bungalow with a forge and the start of a farm. You can take it all the way up to SFnal hardware, but I'm far more interested in the lower tech survival option. In fact there's an official mod with precisely that function and I'll probably go that way if I restart.

Initially I was surviving on cooked dodo (and coelocanth and trilobite), but you can also tame dinosaurs (and other creatures), and the dodo is supposed to be one of the easiest beasts to tame. Some beasts can be tamed just by feeding them, but the dodo is too stupid for that, so it's time to brute-force things, in this case by hitting it over the head with a blunt object until it falls over unconscious. Then you can stuff it full of berries and wait for it to wake up. As it surfaces from unconsciousness it will eat the berries, and when it wakes up you have a friend for life (though that life may be short-lived as it has, quite literally, the survival instincts of a dodo). This is how taming works for the majority of creatures on the island, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be rather more fraught for cases along the lines of 'first subdue your T-rex'.

Once you've tamed your dinosaur (or oversized pigeon with the survival instincts of a tranquilized lemming) you can manipulate their behaviour in various ways, including one which is essentially 'mate now'. And that's where farming comes in. Intially I just tried having them follow me around, but when one of my first tames got into a squabble with a compsognathus (aka a compy, aka a 2-foot tall annoying little shit of a dinosaur) and lost, I realised that wasn't going to work, especially as the follow option doesn't initiate the mating behaviour. So I needed a farm, and now my nice little bungalow built around the banyan tree (poor initial site planning), has a dodo-coop tagged on the back. I've got about ten dodos in there (unfortunately rather too many males) and they spend most of their time wandering around with a little heart symbol over their heads meaning they're looking for lurve. And shortly after that you'll find a dodo egg on the floor (also dodo crap, which you can turn into fertiliser). You do also get fertilised eggs, but so far I've only found dead infants, apparently you need to pretty much feed newborns on the spot, as they're too stupid to feed themselves like the adults. If I get rid of most of the males, and add a few more females then I'll be pretty much self-sufficient food wise.

On reflection, tacking the coop on the back of the house was a bad idea, dodos gobble. Dodos in lurve gobble continuously. The other sound I'm having problems with is related to my infestation of triceratops (there are at least three around my little bay). All the larger creatures seem to have an earthshaking mechanic in your close proximity (I'm not a fan of camera wobble at the best of times), and that's got a very low-frequency sound coming out of the sub-woofer that quite literally makes me feel ill. I ended up building fences across the beach on both sides of my house in order to keep them far enough away I'm not bothered by that. I need to have a look and see if there is an option or mod that turns it off entirely. My next thing to try is probably taming one of the triceratops, I already have a triceratops saddle curtesy of the goodie-filled supply pods that drop out of the sky, but I suspect it isn't going to be quite as easy to knock unconscious as the dodo. Once I have a ride I'll be much better placed for wandering the jungle in safety, and having a pack mule will make gathering supplies for building much more efficient - I'm already using a raft to cut down back and forth journeying). Ultimately I can see this going two ways: a nice, calming game I can dip into whenever I want to, or so damned addictive I end up deleting it from my computer for my own good.

In other news, I've successfully recovered my desk chair, though I've yet to tidy up all of the corners as I ran out of glue. On the plus side it actually looks nearly as good as it did originally, which considering I ended up wrapping one sheet of faux-leather over a shape complex enough they used at least 9 pieces in the original is surprising. It'll look even better when finished. On the negative side I need to repair one of the arms - the cushioned pad has a wooden base with a metal nut glued to it, I overtightened the bolt and popped the nut off, so time to get the super-glue out. And the arms also turn out to have two subtly different length bolts to everything else on the chair, so that arm will have to remain sidelined while I go through the other dozen bolts one at a time to find where I used the longer ones in error.

I did a pub quiz with friends on Tuesday night, and we won handily. As someone stepped in whenever I tried to buy a round (and I'm reliant on other people for the getting, so poorly placed to argue), I ended the night £12:50 in profit. The others do that quiz regularly, and say it's usually not that much, they just had a particularly good turn out on Tuesday. I'm sort of stepping into a dead friend's shoes to bring their numbers up;  I was invited to start doing it a couple of years ago and I did it a few times, but if we all happened to show up then there would be too many for a team and someone would have to be left out, so I decided to stop going. That's sadly no longer an issue. OTOH it was good to see everyone in happier circumstances (last time we met was the funeral) and I also bumped into my old German teacher, who I hadn't seen in ages, plus we won, of course.

Recent reading: Cherryh's Destroyer, Pretender and (currently just getting started with), Deliverer, the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. Bren Cameron, aka the Lord of the Heavens, aka the Paidhi-Aiji (translator to the Aiji, and the one human truly fluent in Atevi), together with the aged Aiji-Dowager Ilisidi and her great grandson, completely seven, absolutely not eight year old Cajeiri (it's a numbers thing) return home to the Atevi homeworld after two years away to find there was a coup eight months ago, the shuttle fleet is grounded, the space-station surviving by a whisker and the Aiji (Cajeiri's father, Tabini) is missing, potentially dead. Cue Bren spending two books wondering 'Is it my fault? It's my fault, really, isn't it?'; tiny, frail Ilisidi turning into the force of nature that scared everyone so much she was twice passed-over for Aiji; Cajeiri having to show he has the stuff to be Aiji in his own right; and Bren's bodyguards Banichi and Jago metaphorically rubbing their hands together in glee that they're back to the kind of problems that they, as senior members of the Assassin's Guild, know exactly how to deal with.