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It took me ages to get through this. It had been 20+ years since I read the first three Chanur books, and the first novel in this omnibus never gripped me. I expect I just didn't remember enough of the previous book. But while I wouldn't call the second book in this volume a standalone novel, it depends too heavily on the others for that, it is a new story with mainly new characters. And it's an exciting story.

I remembered the Chanur novels as having amazing worldbuilding, and Chanur's Legacy brought that feeling back. Cherryh's alien's aren't humans with slight differences on appearance, they have more or less genuinely alien psychologies due to a non-human mix of nature and nurture. Some of them more so than others. I wonder how much even Cherryh really knows about the mysterious Knnn or the Tc'a.

I highly recommend anyone to read some Cherryh. If SF is not your cup of tea, start with some of her fantasy instead.

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.

I was I was more in the habit of recording my progress, because I think it took me almost all of this month to get through the first 50% of this book, then the next 20% took a couple of days and I read the rest today.
Now pandemic fatigue is probably partially to blame for this, I've been reading slow all year, but I think there's a pattern in my reading of Jemisin's book where it takes me a long time to get into them, and longer and longer with each book. I keep going because I trust the author, not because the book pulls me in.
Because once they pull me in they are magnificent, and this one is no different. It is an amazing, innovative, unusual book that works on many levels and works well. The only level I can't tell if works or not is in being a book about New York, and maybe that also deserves some of the blame for my slow progress. This books is super about NY, NY. And although I've been there once I'm not a fan of that city, or any city really. But I'm still picking up the next book in this trilogy whenever it hits the shelves.

If you want to read something unusual and old, this might be for you. But the odds are somewhat slim. This is a very peculiar book. The story aspect is very, very slim, and a lot of it is philosophical musings presented in the form of dialog with little effort made to make it anything other than an obvious way of presenting the author's thoughts "indirectly" and some of the musings may seem quite daft unless you remember that it was written before phlogiston theory and spontaneous generation was disproved.

It eventually becomes very meta when the author herself joins as a central character and is given advice on the benefits of creating entire worlds in your mind, and it contains an embarrassing amount of flattery of the British royals and the author's husband, but I still enjoyed the experience of engaging with proto-fantasy, proto-scifi written by a British noble from the age of Charles II.