Reviews of Downbelow Station

This file contains reviews by

Dan'l Danehey-Oakes

by Dan'l Danehey-Oakes (djdaneh@pbhyc.pacbell.com)

Date: 3 Dec 93 01:19:23 GMT

There ought to be a law, or at least some kind of rule, preferably one put up in big neon letters in the offices of editors of major science fiction lines, which would require them to force authors NOT to begin any novel with an expository lump ten pages or more in length, a perfect case in point being C.J. Cherryh's Hugo-winning 1981 novel Downbelow Station, of which I snarfed a book club edition way back when it first came out, which copy I tried several times, unsuccessfully, to read, first when I got it, and then when it was nominated for the Hugo, and again when it won the Hugo, but I frankly hadn't looked at it again from then until a few weeks ago, when CJC and Jane Fancher blew into "The Other Change of Hobbit," and I picked up a paperback copy on a whim -- my hardcover being inaccessible for the nonce -- casually mentioning my nonsuccess at reading it and generally feeling like a fool for buying a second copy, a feeling reinforced by my wife, who told me that if I was buying a second copy of the same book I damn well better read it; so I forced myself to get through the seemingly-interminable "the story so far" first chapter which insists on recapping the entire history of humans in space from shortly after my grandchildren will be born until the mid-24th century (and without a single mention of the USS Enterprise, I might add, so what kind of 23d century could Cherryh possibly be have in mind, anyway?) when the events of Downbelow take place, then continued on into chapter two where the book actually starts, and you know what, it's actually a pretty damn good book, one which, if not unputdownable, at least was sufficiently involving to keep me from reading very much else (I typically have five to ten books going at once) until I finished it, convinced by this and the "Chanur" books that CJC is quite possibly the finest writer of straight-ahead space opera going today (the only other possible contender being Samuel R. Delany, and while many of his books are indeed space-operatic in nature, it's pretty damn hard to call any of them except maybe possibly kinda sorta NOVA straight-ahead space opera), and immediately cussed myself out for not having picked up a copy of Serpent's Reach.
Which only goes to show, doesn't it?
Spoilers and detailed commentary follow the break, followed by the usual bibliographic blah.

Cherryh's approach to space opera is refreshing. She doesn't focus on the heroics, but on the political side of events, and particularly on the effects of all this world-smashing and such upon all the people who have to live their lives on the worlds being smashed and such.
Her greatest weakness, on the other hand, is the creation of really alien aliens.
The "Chanur" books, for all their niftiness, do not succeed in convincing me that the Hani are anything but humans in cat suits; the same for the Kif and the other oxygen-breathers of Compact space. . . and this is particularly true of the hisa of Downbelow Station.
Each of Cherryh's alien races has a few quirks which make them "different" from humans, but are otherwise humans in funny suits. These quirks amount to the "funny hat" or "spit-and-clap-your-hands" school of characterization, blown up to the species level. You are probably familiar with this from bad pulp fiction; a character is given a funny hat to wear, or a few mannerisms, or a special word or phrase that he (it's always he; the women in this type of fiction are even less differentiated) uses far more than any real person ever uses a catch- phrase. "Well, I'll be superamalgamated!" "Jumping Galaxies!" "Great Horny- Toads!" and so on.
So similarly with Cherryh's hisa, hani, and other aliens: they are given a few behavioral "tags" by which a given species can be recognized, and are otherwise human. Hell, humans from different cultures on Earth have a wider range of thought and behavior than this; a hisa or a hani could easily be a human from an obscure Earth culture.
Now, I want to make it clear that this is not a Cherryh-specific problem; it's common to most modern space opera, and a lot of non-space-operatic SF, too. STAR TREK is perhaps the worst offender, though the STAR WARS flicks come pretty close and would be worse if there were more of them, I'm sure.
These products also universally fall prey to the idea that an entire world is somehow homogeneous; this is where you get your Empires where everyone speaks a single language and behaves more-or-less alike; this is where you get your desert planets and your forest planets and your planets of diplomats and for all I know a planet full of elves making toys. Space opera generally fails to grasp the concept that a world is a big complex place, a species is not generally homogenous, and a stellar empire will be much more complex and much more heterogeneous.
And the non-alien "alien" is a particularly distressing flaw in a writer who is otherwise so good at creating a complex, textured future world. . . and even more so in a writer who seems (see for example the "matrix"-thinking methane- breathers of Compact space) to be aware that aliens ought to be alien in their thought patterns.
Now, Cherryh -- to return specifically to Downbelow Station -- has set herself a significant problem; she sets several chapters in the point-of-view of her hisa characters. She's limited to the English language, which is clearly designed to express human concepts, in conveying their POV to the readers.
But it can be done. The classic example, of course, is Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three," which features the point-of-view of an alien who is about as alien as you could ask, and does so in perfectly reasonable English.
The hisa, by contrast, are -- again -- humans in funny suits. Physically, they are larger versions of Piper's "fuzzies"; mentally/culturally/sociologically, they're a fairly generic culture of primitive pacifists confronted with a war- like technological society. Perhaps they're a bit more pacifistic than any real human culture. . . but not so much so that anything in their behavior requires them to be alien.
There's a classic rule that if the story could have been told without its stfnal elements, it probably shouldn't have been written as SF in the first place. The same, I suggest is true of aliens: if they could just as well have been human, they probably should have been.

What, then, does their presence contribute to Downbelow Station? Their primary story functions are:

To be frightened a lot
To lead humans through places they are familiar with but humans aren't
To be innocent victims that make all the violence look bad
To be something 'precious' that the (human) good guys don't want to see destroyed

(1) and (3) are variations on a theme. Cherryh's human characters are generally so hard-bitten that the horrific nature of what they're doing to each other tends to get lost in the shuffle. She needs innocents to keep this alive -- and, as I said above, the effect of all this world-smashing on the "little guy" is one of her strongest suits.
The hisa are the ultimate "little guy." But making them cute and furry is a manipulative tactic, akin to Orson Scott Card's cynical use of children in his novels, giving unearned credence to their innocence and emotional buy-in, equally unearned, to their peril. A harder but more honest solution to the problem would have been to establish some human characters -- not total innocents like children or hisa, but "good folk," colonists who have nothing to do with the battle of Company and Union. Such people could also have filled function (2) fairly well.
Function (4) is another manipulative tactic. To have the "good guys" go around beating their breasts about how this wonderful uniqueness must not be lost does very little for the plot but a great deal for establishing that they are in fact the good guys. In fact, you can pretty much deal the characters in Downbelow Station into two piles, labeled "good guys" and "bad guys," solely upon the basis of their attitudes toward the hisa. The only real exceptions are the characters deep into Union who have no opportunity to express any attitude toward the hisa -- and they, oddly enough, are also the only characters who by novel's end are still morally ambiguous, i.e., not clearly definable as "good guys" or "bad guys."
The problem with this tactic is, of course, that the hisa are not in fact anything particularly unique. Their innocence may be unique in the "sophisticated" future universe of Downbelow Station (has anyone ever noticed that Cherryh's novels have this in common with the "cyberpunk" movement that came to prominence at around the same time she became a superstar?), but it's hardly a characteristic inaccessible to humans.
Returning to Cherryh's strong points: plotting. After the initial expository lump, she manages to pull off the double-hat-trick of plotting: everything that happens seems inevitable once you find out about it, but you expect almost none of it. The only significant plot twist that failed to come as a surprise to me, at least, was Signy Mallory's ultimate defection, and even that came about in a way and at a time that was both logical and surprising.
Cherryh also does something guaranteed to frustrate some readers -- almost all of her world-smashing takes place off-stage. The action of Downbelow Station encompasses several significant space battles; of these, only one takes place on-stage. This takes guts to attempt and increased tautness in suspense elsewhere to pull off -- and Cherryh pulls it off marvellously.
Looking back from the distance of a dozen years, I can honestly say that Downbelow Station was indeed Hugo material. It may not be one of the great SF novels of all time, but it is a major achievement from a talented writer, and certainly one of the better SF novels of the 1980s.

Copyright 1993 Dan'l Danehy-Oakes