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A review by accidentalspaceexplorer
Merchanter's Luck by C.J. Cherryh
5.0
A little while ago, I read Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great. It's a collection of essays about books, mostly science fiction and fantasy, that are all essentially "What Makes [Insert book here] So Great" - or, in a few instances, "What Makes [Insert book here] Not So Great". It was fantastic, and I devoured it and came out with a giant reading list of science fiction/fantasy novels, and this was one of them.
I wasn't really expecting much out of it, because the way Walton says to read Cherryh's universe is to read Merchanter's Luck, Finity's End, Rimrunners, and the other one that I can't quite remember (oh well) first, so that by the time you get to Downbelow Station, you will already love her and her universe.
So I was sort of expecting it to ramp up through Merchanter's Luck and then get better and better and better, but it's already good in Merchanter's Luck. Rather better than good, actually. I loved it. It was fun enough to keep me reading, but also serious, and I do so enjoy the privateer kind of people, the ones that operate in the grey area of the law, like Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew in Firefly. I especially like watching them or reading about them in space, because I think space isolates you like very little else does, so it forces all of the characters on the same ship to interact more, and be pushed into awkward, frustrating, painful, or emotionally fraught situations that you wouldn't get otherwise.
There were places where I would have liked more detail, towards the end, where Cherryh doesn't really give hints about what'll happen to them afterwards, so I'm hoping they'll turn up in one of the others. I care about the characters, especially Sandor and Allison, and I want to see what happens to them.
Excepting this, Cherryh painted a vivid portrait of the lives of these characters and the characters themselves in the brief window of time that the book covers, and it was absolutely wonderful, and I'll be picking up the next ones and likely devouring them in an afternoon just as I devoured this one.
I wasn't really expecting much out of it, because the way Walton says to read Cherryh's universe is to read Merchanter's Luck, Finity's End, Rimrunners, and the other one that I can't quite remember (oh well) first, so that by the time you get to Downbelow Station, you will already love her and her universe.
So I was sort of expecting it to ramp up through Merchanter's Luck and then get better and better and better, but it's already good in Merchanter's Luck. Rather better than good, actually. I loved it. It was fun enough to keep me reading, but also serious, and I do so enjoy the privateer kind of people, the ones that operate in the grey area of the law, like Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew in Firefly. I especially like watching them or reading about them in space, because I think space isolates you like very little else does, so it forces all of the characters on the same ship to interact more, and be pushed into awkward, frustrating, painful, or emotionally fraught situations that you wouldn't get otherwise.
There were places where I would have liked more detail, towards the end, where Cherryh doesn't really give hints about what'll happen to them afterwards, so I'm hoping they'll turn up in one of the others. I care about the characters, especially Sandor and Allison, and I want to see what happens to them.
Excepting this, Cherryh painted a vivid portrait of the lives of these characters and the characters themselves in the brief window of time that the book covers, and it was absolutely wonderful, and I'll be picking up the next ones and likely devouring them in an afternoon just as I devoured this one.