Compromise and Conceit

This weekend just been, I had to travel by boat to Amsterdam to spend the weekend with my World of Warcraft friends, the good Dr. A and Miss B. This meant much time to myself in trains, boats and the like, so I bought myself a hefty book : The Faded Sun Trilogy by CJ Cherryh. It was so good (and my time so unconstrained) that though it was 800 pages long, I finished it by Tuesday.

This trilogy is an effort at one of my favourite things, writing about aliens so that they are genuinely alien. Other authors who have done this – Samuel Delany, Paul Park, and Ursula le Guin – are big favourites of mine for the same reason. Imagining difference is what sci-fi is all about. CJ Cherryh is apparently a bit of a regular at this, though I think this is the first book of hers (?) that I have read. This series was published in 1973 in a trilogy, and bound together for this “classic” series. 

The essence of the story is a conflict between humans and 2 other alien races, 2 members of this triangle being rather hell-bent on genocide or something like it, and one member being rather ambivalent about stopping it. Three people end up having to go on a long, hard chase across the galaxy to try and prevent disaster, but they aren’t all from the same race, and this makes things hard for them. The central plot is driven by deep moral tension, as people try to rise above their own horror at others’ immoral or evil behaviour to try and prevent worse moral outrages occurring. I would say that the essence of this moral tension wasn’t adequately conveyed at times, and particulary the explanation for its cause was ultimately a little weak. But the story held you to it without much extra imaginative effort, and the difficulty of understanding the motives of the aliens made it very engaging and very difficult to guess how it would end. So that was good.

I was struck at first by how much one alien race – the Mri – were like the alien race in RM Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire,  and also by how much they at times seemed to be like bedouin, or like a fantastic orientalist would imagine bedouin to be. They had the veils, most of the action took place on harsh desert planets, they were unrelenting and unbending in their cultural outlook, and they were fierce at war (so maybe also like the muslim soldiers who fought against the crusades). Another race, the regul, seemed a lot like they might be a caricature of The Eternal Jew – ugly, dirty, only interested in trade, physically weak,  unwilling to do physical labour, infanticidal, and with impossible memories. This book came out in 1973, a year after the Munich olympics and 4 years after the PLO brought “The Palestine Question” to the eyes of the world, and I wonder if it somehow influenced CJ Cherryh – at times it was as if the humans were caught up in the Mandate, trying to work out what to do about competing claims. The moral tension at the heart of the story seems to reflect one possible interpretation of the Palestine issue, as well. However, not all the parallels and analogies stuck – the mri are the nomadic race, moving from world to world, and no-one in the story could really be cast as blameless in the various genocides and cruelties contained therein. 

Nonetheless, I am interested by the coincidence of the release of the book and the onset of Palestinian struggle – and fear of the Arabs during the Oil Shocks – and I wonder if the political events of that time of CJ Cherryh’s life are reflected in the novel. If so I think this merely strengthens the novel’s claim to greatness, were it to be said that the novel can discuss the moral tensions inherent in the political dramas of its times, but in a subtle enough way to separate them from their earthly element, and look at them in the abstract. This is the joy and the greatness of good sci-fi, in my opinion.