I bought this book in 2005, and it’s been sitting in my “to be read” bookcase ever since. I’m not at all sure why — I’ve read 41 other books by Cherryh — but only four since 2014 (which is when I started tracking what I read).
Oh, yeah… it starts with a 25 page (!) recap of the previous book in the two-part series. I loathe reading recaps, so perhaps I started on that and then went “perhaps I’ll wait a bit”.
This book displays all of Cherryh’s bad writing habits. She loves having people ruminate on what’s going to happen, and usually those ruminations really come to nothing. Then she adds some fake drama on top.
Above, we have a space station administrator who’s been ruminating for several pages on why a space ship from Earth is coming (as usual with Cherryh, he has no information, so all the rumination is pointless), and then his wife calls him to bitch and moan about how their daughter has gotten her hair bleached (!) and how that’s so important (!) that he has to drop all his space station administrationship stuff and tell the daughter off. Or something.
Cherryh is a wheel spinning master — I remember reading a trilogy of hers, and the third book had something like “The space ship took off” as the recap of the second book in the trilogy. And that was a totally adequate summary of that 300 page book — almost nothing happened; just people thinking about what could be happening later, and fake drama like the above.
It’s exhausting, and this time around I couldn’t take more than 90 pages of it before I bailed.
You know? You think you don’t change much as you grow older, but 25 years ago, I would have enjoyed reading this book, most likely. And the book certainly hasn’t changed, so I have — I’ve gotten more impatient, and more crotchety.
Heh, if I’d kept reading for 110 more pages, the story would have begun, allegedly.
The reviews are generally positive, but I’m going to trust this one:
Forge of Heaven (2004) by C. J. Cherryh (buy new, buy used, 3.9 on Goodreads)