Tripoint

Tripoint is Cherryh in Space Opera mode, though in this case it’s closer to Space Pirate Movie. She has two modes: Fantasy in which she writes very long sentences which go all over the place before reaching a conclusion, and Space Opera. Short sentences. Sometimes no verb. This novel goes seven lines before it reaches a sentence with a proper verb in it. This may be designed to be snappy and convey the arid, brutal environment of the men and women who work deep space in Cherryh’s universe, but it takes some getting used to. Tripoint is a novel in the Merchanter series, which included the acclaimed Downbelow Station. It is the story of Tom Hawkins (note the name redolent of pirate novels) who is the unwanted son of the Merchanter officer Marie Hawkins and of Austin Bowe, who if he isn’t quite a pirate certainly behaves like one. Tom jumps ship and finds that most mothers don’t regularly beat their sons up when they feel like it, only to be shanghaied by his equally strange father, rescued by a few of those lowlifes with hearts of gold who have survived in the chinks of the Merchanter space machine. Away from the glazed fixity of Bowe’s private war (he just didn’t stop fighting when everybody else did, turning privateer for his own ends) humanity endures, with burrowing aliens who centuries ago built statues to watch the stars, looking for a better answer.

Life aboard a pirate ship was certainly no bowl of cherries but the motley crew Bowe assembles is of an almost Pythonesque lunacy and fondness of violence. It’s as though Cherryh had adopted Chandler’s old dictum of ‘if stuck, have a man come through the door with a gun’ to ‘if nothing else to do, have someone hit someone else for no particularly good reason.’

Rolf Moyr’s cover art shows, in inexplicable green and purple, orbital space, spiky spaceships. Not a human in sight. A touch of the David A Hardys perhaps but I couldn’t see him using those colours; certainly not Jim Burns, who would be looking for people. The cover suggests simply that the machines are more important, and that while more modern writers may see spaceships as being precisely as important to SF as horses are to the Western, no more and no less, the Merchanter universe is locked into a hard, metallic void where little grows.

For gung-ho pirate novel in space it’s pretty readable. But there isn’t a lot of comfort, nor resolution other than the evanescent possibility of undiscovered space, and no doubt another Merchanter novel. Cherryh has, after all, written quite a few space novels, and in this much time there must be some whose natural form is not so much the 400-page toebreaker as the small but perfectly formed short story. Robert Reed (to pick a name not entirely at random) does this very well indeed; condensing what might take others novels to present us with a world and its people. In its way this is another riff on the packed Universe Cherryh invented years ago, and those who have read everything else in it will presumably need to read this too. For others who haven’t come across the sequence, it may read a little oldfashioned with its machinery-led stories and horrid certainties, even in the case of characters like Tom Hawkins who aren’t certain of anything other than that their present life is a crock and that anything, even jumping ship and running for his life, has to be better. We’re on Varley’s steel beach, no direction home, and all bets are off.