btuftin reviewed Alliance Space by C.J. Cherryh
Review of 'Alliance Space' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This is an omnibus edition of two novels only tied together by happening in the same universe. If you want a proper review of either you should go to the individual novels and find them there, although I will briefly review both.
I just checked my list and including these two I've read over 30 novels by Cherryh, which should tell you something about what I think of her authorship. The Alliance-Union universe where these two novels are set is neck and neck with the Foreigner universe when it comes to which one is my favorite. Wait, is the second possibly a subset of the first? (Checks wikipedia!) Phew! It is not. But the first is the setting of a number of more or less unrelated series, some of which are pretty great, and the latter is the setting for a long single series, which, as far as I am …
This is an omnibus edition of two novels only tied together by happening in the same universe. If you want a proper review of either you should go to the individual novels and find them there, although I will briefly review both.
I just checked my list and including these two I've read over 30 novels by Cherryh, which should tell you something about what I think of her authorship. The Alliance-Union universe where these two novels are set is neck and neck with the Foreigner universe when it comes to which one is my favorite. Wait, is the second possibly a subset of the first? (Checks wikipedia!) Phew! It is not. But the first is the setting of a number of more or less unrelated series, some of which are pretty great, and the latter is the setting for a long single series, which, as far as I am concerned, has gotten less interesting over time. Not a relevant topic here though.
I'd read Merchanter's Luck before, but remembered very little of it and figured I'd might as well reread it to freshen up my knowledge of the setting. It is a nice and short novel. It doesn't require having read any others in that universe, but it probably helps a little .
I hadn't read Forty Thousand In Gehenna, which definitely doesn't require having read any others, but was looking forward to it. It involves one of my favorite Cherryh ... topics(?), truly alien aliens. Truly alien aliens make some of the other Alliance-Union novels great too (I'm looking forward to reading some in the Channur series that I didn't read 25 years ago with the others) and to some extent the Foreigner universe, where a new truly alien alien is what might eventually drag me back to the rest of that series.
What is so great is that although we eventually learn a lot about the truly alien aliens in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe, there is always something held back. Some things that, in a realistic fashion, the characters can't grasp, or at least can't explain to others and to us, because it just doesn't fit within a human thought framework.
