Stats
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
1981 Hugo
Award Winner
Got it
from: Public Library
426 Pages
A few
centuries from now, commerce has spread throughout space. It has spread so wide and become so robust
that Earth no longer controls the unfathomably large market. In response to Earth Company’s failing hold
on interstellar commerce and technology Company and Union Fleets begin
warring. That war scatters refugees
throughout space, and particularly to Pell Station, known as “Downbelow Station”. This leaves us at the tail end of a hard
fought war with thousands of quarantined refugees, Pell natives, Merchanters
and of course, Company and Union ships all vying for the same space in a
rapidly crowding space station.
Proviso
This book
is absolutely not to be read through speedily and yet, that is exactly what
I’ve done. The result is that my stupid
and inconsistent compliance with my own stupid and inconsistent rules has
probably ruined my first read of what could have been a really great read. Okay, maybe not ruined, but it has kept me
from an appropriately thorough read of one of the densest books to date. My faster-than-light read through a packed
universe left me with only glimpses and I struggled to fully comprehend nuanced
relationships and the weaving of tangled political intrigue. As a result, I’m not sure this will function
much like my normal reviews, but instead as an attempt to make sense of my
first and briefest of impressions of this SF treasure.
As it
were, my first read (yeah, this is going to have to be considered my first…of many) has left me
conflicted. Partly exciting, partly confusing
and entirely too dense for a 7-day read, Downbelow Station truly has
all the elements I would expect in my favorite science fiction. I loved the interplay between not only the
Company and Union ships, but also the Merchanters and “Downers”, in fact I
think they were the two groups that most interested me. I loved how much raw information there is to
take in. I’m not sure that makes much
sense, but there is constantly a sense of the possibility of absorbing even
more subtlety and detail from the story.
In this way, I was sometimes reminded of the Star
Wars universe of novels. While
the Galatic Empire and Rebels fight for control of the galaxy, there are also
so many smaller worlds and aliens and bounty hunters and smugglers who are all
jockeying for their piece of the pie and also their position in the
fallout. The greatest assets of Downbelow to me were exactly that
wealth of perspectives and the depth and detail of which it is up to the reader
to determine how much they can handle.
Yet, as
much as all these elements roused considerable delight, they also caused me
great consternation. Some of my trouble
surely came from my inattentiveness during the last week (I was dead tired every day) and my too-fast
pace, nevertheless I will discuss some of those concerns in the hope that some
of you who have also delighted in the heft of Downbelow’s
pages, can guide me as I approach my second read…sometime in the future.
Nevertheless…
One of the
elements I was most conflicted about was the sentient species on Pell. It’s hard to create an alien that I don’t
like. I’m a sucker for them – from Kzin
to Heinlein’s Martians, to the totally unknown of Pohl’s Gateway,
but at first, I thought Cherryh would break the trend. Especially in the first half to three
quarters of the book, the aliens, heck the entire cast, struck me as insipid if
not just straight-up ill-conceived.
My first
impression of the Aliens was that they were essentially humans (I had failed to
pick up on their hairiness, though that doesn’t add a whole lot anyway) with a
funny way of speaking and who were severely out-paced, technologically and
culturally by the humans. I guess I just
felt like they should seem more interesting and I would have loved them to be,
but I didn’t have anything to grab onto except maybe their speech pattern of
dropping of a pronoun on occasion, which really just highlighted how lame they
began in this story.
However,
after 400+ pages, my concern was mitigated by the Downer’s performance and
cultural quirks. I began to see that
there was more to the species and appreciated the placement of Downers on Pell
Station. I thought there was a lot of
potential there, and though I’m not sure I was satisfied with the eventual development
of the Downers, it at least went some way to redeeming an element that threatened
to really disappoint me.
Upon
reflection, my take is not necessarily that the characters and specifically the
Downers were all that bad, but that Cherryh’s style is to emphasize the vast
web of interrelationships rather than the juicy details about a person that I
normally look for. Instead she just saves
that for a bulky sections of exposition.
I think
where I still take issue with Downbelow Station is in some
of the dialogue and curious grammatical techniques that seemed to me, utterly
ineffective and surprisingly drab.
Awkward…
If I were
forced to sum up my experience of Downbelow Station in one word
it would unequivocally be: awkward. It’s awkward for its characters, whose speech
seemed colorless and out of touch sometimes.
Consider a section from final pages of Chapter 3 Section I in which Angelo
Konstantin learns of merchanters having places in the deep of space to hide
from impending danger and his wife says:
“You’d leave?”
He shook his head. “Never.
Never. But there’s still a chance
of talking the boys into it, isn’t there?
We persuaded one to Downbelow; work on your youngest; work on Elene…she’s
your best hope. She has friends out
there; she knows, and she could persuade Damon.” He pressed her hand. Alicia Lukas-Konstantin needed Pell, needed the
machinery, equipment a ship could not easily maintain. She was wedded to Pell and the machines. Any transfer of her entourage of metal and
experts would be public, doomsday headlined on vid. She had reminded him of that. I am
Pell, she had laughed, not laughing.
She had been, once, beside him.
He was not leaving. In no wise
did he consider that, without her, abandoning what his family had built over
the years, what they had built, together.
“It’s not close,” he said again.
But he feared it was.
Pg
133
This was a
good example of both how insipid these characters can be and also how gut-wrenchingly
dull their dialogue. They are talking
about sending their children away and the fate of Pell and not only is there absolutely no feeling whatsoever, but
the narrative almost immediately shifts to their concerns for themselves and abruptly
flips between consideration of first Alicia, then Angelo. As a parent, I was struck by how quickly the
subject turned from the fate of their children to some really quite dull motivations
for staying on station. This type of
thing bothered me throughout.
And then there was the awkward
grammar and punctuation. This was
something that I really tried hard to make sense of, but I’m still curious to
hear what other people thought.
Throughout the book, there is inconsistent or ineffective use of
alternative punctuation which upon first encounter created lilting, if not
completely jarring, sentence structure.
She realized suddenly
the aspect of the distant faces, behavior not panic, but hate; and
weapons—pipes, clubs—
Pg
262
I am no
advocate of strict adherence to grammar and punctuation guidelines. I shudder to think how many times I have
broken rules on this blog. In fact, I
own a number of books that I enjoyed especially for creative use of space and
punctuation to add tension, excitement, whatever. Where I struggled with Downbelow Station was in that sometimes the creative grammer had me
stumbling, re-reading, and stumbling again.
Other times it was just annoying. On one page, which included a break for a
chapter heading, ellipses were used 5 times.
I didn’t see any benefit other than to infuriatingly halt up my reading
pace.
My
favorite example of how just ineffective these techniques seemed came in a
sentence (sorry I don’t remember where) that instead of using a comma preceding
a quotation, used a semi-colon. This was
an instance where I didn’t feel particularly stressed, but totally
confused. So confused that this was the
point in my read when I decided I needed to hear how others read this book.
I read
through some of these weird sections.
Then I listened to them. Then I
read along, while listening at the same time (You can see how far this week
departed from trying to comprehend anything resembling plot, setting,
character’s names or anything important to someone who would want to say they’d
“read” a book. Still, I knew I was
struggling and wouldn’t ever be able to catch up with what was happening, so I
wanted to be sure that I knew what I liked and didn’t like about the way in
which this book was written, so that I can approach my impending re-read with a
thoughtful and less stupid methodology.).
The effect on the audiobook was also completely lost. Many if not all of the instances I took issue
with, were completely unnoticeable in the audiobook. Of course this could have simply been a
choice by the production company, but it kept me scratching my head. I love it when authors play with the English language,
but here I was mostly confused. I ask
you, what did you think of it?
Perhaps I
didn’t have enough time for this book.
No, not perhaps. I did not have
enough time to devote to this book and it seriously affected my enjoyment. Nevertheless, something is strange about the
grammar and punctuation (and even sometimes the dialogue) in this book and it
is so strange that it made me sort of not like it.
Recommendation
In the
wine world they say that if you are using the same words you hear others use to
describe your wine, you are probably lying.
In the case of Downbelow Station,
so many reviews blather about the realistic and strong characters and the
action packed pages. I’m not going to
say they are wrong or lying, but in my first read, it was the characters that
were drug, kicking and screaming throughout the novel until at the very end
when the tension and excitement and action finally forced them to stand
up. And with that said, though there
were moments of action throughout the entire novel, the tension only built at a
barge’s pace, the action never really grabbing me until the very end when the
book stayed exciting for a maximum of about one hundred pages straight.
There are
moments of really awkward prose and there are moments of breathtaking
clarity. One of my favorite moments
involved the description of a ship slowly coming to pieces and though it was
just a brief description; the passage struck me as one of the best conceived
and most poetic in the entire 400+ pages.
Though it doesn’t sound like it, I enjoyed this book, especially toward
the end. I just didn’t feel like I got a
firm enough grasp of it to form any kind of worthwhile opinion of it. With that said, take my HEP score with a gigantic
grain of salt.
HEP SCORE
Universe 4/5
Social/Political
Climate 4/5
Dialogue 3/5
Scientific
Wonders 4/5
Characters
3/5
Overall
18/25
The die being cast…
This
week’s book is Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh. I hope I have better luck with this one,
though I have no idea how I’ll ever finish on time. I guess I should say goodbye to my family for
the week.
Next
week’s book is Foundation’s Edge by Isaac
Asimov. Asimov’s third Hugo Award in
four decades. Wow.
