Alliance Space (Company Wars #2)

The Company Wars #2

by C.J. Cherryh

This omnibus edition of two novels set in Cherryh's most renowned universe--the Union-Alliance Universe--marks the first time these books have been available in more than a decade. Includes "Merchanter's Luck" and "Forty Thousand in Gehenna."

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Space Opera, Audiobook, Collections

608 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 4, 2008

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

An omnibus of two Cherryh novels (Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna) that don't really have much of anything in common except that they both take place in Cherryh's Union/Alliance setting at about the same time, and they were originally published by DAW in fairly close succession. Oh, and they're both very, very, very good.

But still, to consider them separately:



Merchanter's Luck is something of a direct sequel to Cherryh's magnificent Downbelow Station. (Or, if I have the story correct, Downbelow Station initially started taking form because Cherryh had the seed of Merchanter's Luck and wanted to flesh out the background.) It takes place shortly after the end of the Company War and the formation of the Merchanter's Alliance as depicted in DBS.

Once, there was the merchanter Le Cygne, operating Union-side. It was old, small, slow, and (as is standard practice for Cherryh's merchanters) crewed by a family, the Krejas, about 30 in number. Then, 15-20 years ago, during the war, Le Cygne had a run-in with one of Mazian's fleet of carriers (who even then were often no better than pirates) out in the deep dark and things went very, very badly; only three young Krejas survived, including one Sandor Kreja.

But that's all ancient history -- our story opens with the small merchanter "Lucy", captained by her sole owner, one "Edward Stephens", scraping a marginal (and not, to be sure, entirely legitimate) living in whatever way he can, with whatever hired crew he can scrounge up (or, if need be, running solo), who finds himself berthed at Viking Station, where he makes the acquaintance of one Allison Reilly, crewmember of the much, much larger, newer, faster and altogether more impressive merchanter Dublin Again; and he enjoys her company so much that he ends up following Dublin Again (more than a little recklessly, to be sure) to Pell Station, where ... Well, complications ensue, including but not limited to his past scams catching up to him, and the Reillys being most displeased to have their name potentially tarnished by his behavior. And some of those Mazianni carriers are still off roaming the dark between places ...

This is a relatively short, fast-paced book -- an updated version of the sort of small-scale space opera you might have gotten back in the 1950s or 1960s, but it's Cherryh so the writing is precise, the characters are well-drawn and often more than a little broken, and the setting is vivid and lived-in. Highly recommended.



Forty Thousand in Gehenna was, I think, the first new Cherryh book to come out after I had started reading her work and I admit that it took a couple of reads for it to really start to click for me. That's at least partially because my first few Cherryh had been Downbelow Station, Merchanter's Luck and The Pride of Chanur, all of which were space opera set primarily on ships and stations with minimal time spent groundside, and 40,000 in Gehenna is ... very, very different to whatever I might have been expecting. But once I got past those expectations and was able to take the book on its own terms (which, hmmm, is actually strangely appropriate given what happens in the book), well, it's really a remarkable piece of work.

We begin, again, in the immediate aftermath of the (official) end of the Company Wars -- Union, in an effort to complicate things for the newly-formed Alliance, is planting colonies as quickly and as widely as it can on whatever habitable (or marginally habitable) planets it can find, including the titular Gehenna, whose only other inhabitants of note are the calibans (large, mound-building semi-aquatic lizard-analogues, of interest primarily because a) they're big and b) their preferred nesting regions are also, by and large, the sorts of riverine regions that would be ideal for human settlement). But that's fine -- we'll try to minimize the disturbance to the native ecosystem, but we also have high-tech firearms and building equipment on our side if they get too inquisitive.

So the colonists are dropped -- about 40,000 azi (Union's tank-grown, tape-trained, mass-produced worker class) and another 5-6,000 actual Union citizens (a.k.a. "born-men" in the parlance of the azi) -- and they get to work setting up camps with a mind to eventually creating a more permanent settlement, especially in a few years when the ships come back with more equipment, including the birth labs used to produce azi (although in the meantime, both the azi and the citizens will start helping the colony's population increase in the old-fashioned way).

(As an aside, while we'd been introduced to the concept of azi in previous books, this is our first real up-close and personal glance at them, and at Union society, as far as I'm aware.)

And then (minor spoiler) the ships don't come back -- Union never intended (and, in fact, lacked the capacity) to support the colony; they're just throwing out obstacles in the face of eventual potential Alliance expansion.

And while we've gotten several POV characters (both azi and citizen) in the first part of the book, we won't actually be following them; because after seeing the initial collapse of the colony, we're going to watch as it regresses to Pleistocene-level technology and a ... unique relationship with the caliban, and we're going to follow it (via a series of generational time-skips) for the next couple hundred years (including the return of the Star-men) as the humans and calibans try to find a mutual equilibrium, and eventually it'll turn out that much, much bigger things have been going on than we had initially expected and this is actually a fairly amazing novel of first contact of a sort.

[Hank · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never know how to review ominbus books. Merchanter's Luck was probably a 3.5 rounded down, a good, albeit, mundane story about a down on his luck space merchant trying to scrape by. It was fine.

40,000 in Gehenna was a solid 4 star. Definitely different than other colonization stories that I have read. At the beginning, I kept drawing parallels with the Azi to another book I read recently, Just City. In Just City there were machines trying to become and get recognition for sentience. The Azi seemed exactly opposite. They were humans trying desperately to have born men make all the decisions for them. I am not sure how Azi personality and genetics contributed to the later part of the novel but that is probably something I missed, not something that isn't there.

The Calibans were fascinating and the whole novel for me was trying to figure out their place in society and motivations. I would say nothing was fully explained by the end but enough to let the mind wander. The Weirds/Riders/Caliban society that Cherryh set up is truly unique and interesting to spend time in.

My 1 to 1.5 star docking is due to Cherryh's writing style. I can only describe it as brusque. It is very direct with much left to read between the lines and I am not a huge fan of it. Cormac McCarthy seems to be able to pare down his words and still let the language flow. The flow of this is like teaching a teenager to drive a manual car.

I own Cyteen but am not excited to read it. All three of the books I have read by Cherryh have been imaginative but harder to get through.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Cherryh, the Alliance-Union universe books are (mostly) fantastic -
* In order to read:

Downbelow Station (1981) - Superb!!
Merchanter's Luck (1982) - Perhaps her best ever!
Rimrunners (1989) – Very good!
Heavy Time (1991) - good, but long winded
Hellburner (1992) - good, but long winded
Tripoint (1994) - very good
Finity's End (1997) – Superb
Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) - good but uneven, important for Cyteen and Regenesis
Cyteen (1988) – Superb
Regenesis (2009) - Superb

[Mareike · Rating 4 out of 5]

*This review is only for 40,000 in Gehenna*

I enjoyed the way this book was centered on how adapting to another planet (out of necessity) and coming in contact with alien species would affect humans. And also how all of this went beyond the theories about it advanced in-universe. It subverted my initial expectations of where the plot would go in a very pleasing way.

There were parts that were deeply upsetting especially the treatment of and methods of control used on cloned humans but it never felt like those were only there for shock value. Even without having read other books by Cherryh, I can tell that she has put a lot of work into worldbuilding and thinking through theceffects of societal structures.

A minor point of criticism for me was that in some ways I felt that the narrative almost advanced too quickly through the first few generations which left me feeling a little disconnected from the characters, but the latter parts of the novel centering on McGee/MaGee and (to a lesser extent) Genley thoroughly drew me in. I especially enjoyed their debate shown only through memos and reports. It takes a lot of skill to make something like that engaging and even fun.

I will definitely read more by C. J. Cherryh in the future.

[Samantha (AK) · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, this is my new recommended starting point for those who aren’t sure about Cherryh or her Alliance-Union ‘verse, and don’t want to jump into Downbelow Station. Alliance Space is an omnibus publication of two novels that really don’t have much in common: Merchanter’s Luck (1982) and 40,000 In Gehenna (1983). The first is a short and fast-paced space adventure, the latter is a generational novel set on an alien planet. Between the two, I think the reader gets a good overview of Cherryh’s strengths, and some introduction to her weaker stock characters.

I read and enjoyed Merchanter’s Luck earlier this year, so the rest of this review is entirely concerned with 40k.

Shortly after the end of The War, Union (a genengineering space state) sends a handful of citizens and 40,000 azi (a lab-cloned, brainwashed slave class) to the planet Gehenna II. Gehenna is temperate, and supposedly devoid of sapient life, making it an ideal colony world. But the resupply ships never come, and the superficially lizardlike calibans are more than they seem. To survive the next three centuries, the human descendents of the azi partner with the calibans and become something new.

Generational novels are hit-and-miss with me. I thought that Sue Burke’s Semiosis was tiresome, but enjoyed both Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (even though the latter had creeptastic ethics). The difference seems to come down to the ever-nebulous quality of ‘execution,’ but this is one of the good ones.

At the beginning, the azi are horrifying. It’s not so much them as individuals, but the fact of their existence. This is a class of lab-designed humans whose will, morality, and dreams are all pre-designed by the State. They are ‘happy,’ because they have no choice to be otherwise. Their born children do not suffer this state, and that changes things. As terrible as the political abandonment of the colony is, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful for ensuing generations.

From colony inception, to colony collapse and the rebuilding of civilization 40,000 skips around a bit. It becomes clear early in the book that there’s a lot more to the native calibans than the survey team assumed, but Cherryh doesn’t make the mistake of lifting the curtain on motivations. From beginning to end, the calibans remain alien, and in that alien-ness, they reshape the new human population to their own ends.

When spacefaring humans inevitably re-discover Gehenna, they’re faced with a Trekian conundrum: a first-contact scenario with their own species. The resulting debates, conflicts, and assumptions are slow-paced but fascinating. There’s a lengthy section of conflicting scientific reports and theories that reads very true-to-life, alongside the ethical debate of introducing advanced technology to what is now a nascent alien culture. The overall focus remains planetside, but the reader does get tantalizing glimpses into the wider political situation.

If you’re a reader who likes action, this probably isn’t the book for you. This is a story of civilization over 200+ years; it’s all about a population and its environment. As such, there’s not much in the way of heart-stopping action. It’s more like history. Sometimes events occur in close detail, and other times you blink through a massive timeskip to get to the next ‘big moment.’ I should warn you that character names do repeat, but maps and generational charts are provided at opportune moments.

5* to 40k, and 4* to Luck makes this a volume that rounds up to the full 5*. Go forth and enjoy~

[Kathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

9/10
This omnibus contains both Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, books in C.J. Cherryh’s Union-Alliance series. The fist is a tight story of a merchant ship and its captain and crew that follows closely after Downbelow Station, and the second is a sprawling story of a world that is colonized, abandoned, and recolonized. Very different stories, both excellent.

[David Overman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will be a three book review but it is not a trilogy review by any means. In fact, I don't think I've read a series of books that were this unrelated to each other. In some ways, I suppose, that is a good thing. I usually have to spend extra time re-evaluating things in my brain on whether a particular book in a series is a good stand alone book or not. Well... here, there's hardly any overlap at all. The Pell Space Station orbiting the Downbelow planet Pell, is featured in the first book is mentioned in less than half of Merchanter's Luck and pretty much not at all in 40,000 in Gehenna. And if there were characters mentioned in all three it would take some research to confirm that.

So in the little research I did do, there's like 20 some novels in this series and they all take place in the Alliance-Union Universe , and I do think the first book in this whole series is the one called the Downbelow Station, and the war that ends in an alliance in that novel is the main set-up for most of the rest of the series, although I saw several are considered prequels to the events of that one.

So let's begin with Number One:

So about those Na'vi, er I mean those Hisa.... or my **** star review of Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh

For the 1980's the space opera was fairly new territory with mainly Frank Herbert in literature and George Lucas in film leading the way. So it is quite the grandiose idea of powerful corporations controlling the colonization of worlds rather than governments but as the controlling Earth is stretched thin the resulting break away Union forces that have the merchanter's and stationers caught in the middle.

Set in the final days of the war the Pell station becomes kind of a Rick's place in Casablanca as many forces swirl around it. The stationers calling home the Downbelow Station and the settlement and natives on the Downbelow planet try and stay neutral as possible. But that of course, does not last long and instead sets the stage for much political subterfuge, espionage, betrayal, even among family members, as the stakes are raised.

The novel follows a confederation of Merchanter ships, plus Captain Signy Mallory and her warship, Norway, escorting a ragtag fleet fleeing from Russell's and Mariner Stations to Pell. Similar convoys arrive from other stations destroyed or lost to Union, leading to an enormous crisis. The flood of unexpected refugees strains station resources. There's also a faction of the "Azi" which is an acronym for "artificial zygote insemination" clones used a crew members for Merchanter ships and the Union's military, plus the influx of the gentle, sentient if technologically backward Hisa...(if it sounds familiar the human's also need masks to breath the air on their planet, so.....) anyway following the gentle natives interaction on the space station with the trials and tribulation of a war they can't conceive balances the big players of warships and plots to attack other stations with the one on one stories of simple people as we get to know Angelo Konstantin, Stationmaster of Pell, and his two sons, Damon and Emilio, struggling to cope with the situation.

So it may be a bit of a slow burn read but that it certainly what it takes to keep an believable plot moving forward with so many parts. So with master villains like Conrad Mazian who plan to exploit the war to his own gain even toppling Earth itself the all comes to a space war with an incredible stand-off climax. So in some ways this just has tinges of being just a bit dated, only in the fact it has no "hard science fiction" at all, has some simple tropes of "space elves" and such, but other than it deserves all the much acclaim it had at the time it was published and for the most part I think still holds up to today.
-DCO

Well I didn't shoot first.... or my ***1/2 star review of Merchanter's Luck by C. J. Cherryh

As I mentioned other than the destination and final setting of the Pell Space Station(the Downbelow Station) and some involvement of the Alliance warship Norway and it's caption Signy Mallory, this entire novel is a whole new plot. It is next in the timeline as far as it takes place only a few years later as the shaky alliance is newly established at the end of The Company War.

Whereas Downbelow Station kept many, many moving parts all going simultaneously with many characters, and forces of control, this book takes all of that setting and narrows it down to pretty much one character a Sandor ("Sandy") Kreja who is the sole survivor of a moderately prosperous merchanter family that had operated in Union space. This book only mentions the previous villain Mazianni who is now more of a pirate renegade after his retreat at the end of Downbelow Station, But it is Mazianni, unbeknownst to Sandor, during the war, has killed or taken all but two of Sandor's family for an attack on his ship then called The Lucy, but renamed over the years for concealment.

So the novel begins with Sandor losing one of the three remaining family members in an accident and having a shady deal go bad which set up him quickly running out of options, but he is able to take refuge by fast talking his way, with false document onto the space station Viking (which was a target of the attack mentioned in the first book in hopes of destabilizing The Union.)

It's here that sets up the events for the rest of the novel as he meets and has a fling with Allison Reilly who is a proud junior officer struggling her way up the chain of command, and princess of the famed Reilly clan of the ship Dublin Again, one of the most capable merchanter starships Unionside and true queen of the spaceways. At one point she lets slip that she is going "across the line" to Pell, the Alliance star system. Having heard rumors that trade between Pell and Earth might be re-established and wanting desperately to see her again, he decides to try his luck in Alliance space, plus he becomes a bit obsessed with seeing her again.

The novel follows his Hans Solo-like greed, and his pursuit of Allison back to the Pell Station(the Downbelow Station) where both his and her ulterior motives become entangled with Signy Mallory's own motives who precarious defection and stance against Mazianni and Earth Company remain tenuous. So again their strained trust on a mission for Mallory all sets up for more subterfuge and espionage, and even paranoia as Sandy still not sure which part of The Company actually killed his family, but all of this on a MUCH smaller scale, as we only need root for our underdog Hans Solo character Sandy, and his roguish ways, and the strong heroin Allison. (even featured on the cover although it's really Sandor's story) So is a relatively short book but as part of the over-all space opera of the Alliance-Union Universe it is rip roaring good fun melding adventure with depth and complexity of believable characters. If let's say Alliance-Union Universe was a television series this would be like a good side episode before we get back to the main characters.
-DCO


Giddy Up Gekko... or my ***1/2 review of Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh

If Merchant's Luck was a side episode this one is more of a parallel story. From what I've been able to gather the events of this novel are set in motion in the middle of The Company Wars and then follow several hundred years of events as the beginning with the colonization of the planet Gehenna II where a group of 42,363 Union humans and azi (the aforementioned Union clones) are dispatched to set up a base on a very rare habitable planet. When the colonists on Gehenna are abandoned for political reasons and supply ships fail to arrive, the colony begins to collapse. Now if you think that maybe a bit of a spoiler I'm pretty sure that fact is in any book description I've seen, but to me even a BIGGER spoiler is the cover artwork showing a girl riding a lizard! Almost half the book has the colonist not even beginning to understand the native calibans and being first presented as annoying lizard-like creatures constantly moving earth to make incomprehensible patterns. Eventually a symbiosis develops, with some of the calibans pairing off with humans with some even riding the creatures... knowing this from the cover made for an extremely long read of knowing more than the characters. I assume the science fiction allure of the image was too much to resist.

It really is something of a very bleak read compared to the other two. The non-arrival of the supply ships, and the much harsher than expected conditions were a disintegration of hope. I was very much reminded of the science fiction television series Raised By Wolves where android type creatures are trying to start a colony of humans in what seems like the most ridiculously harsh conditions. The novel follows several generations as the azi rather than their preprogrammed lab cultured gestation begin to populate the old fashion way, and also propagate with the human born colonist causing several factions to begin to emerge some more savage then others, as old concepts of "civilization" are eroded away. At one point "civilization" does return as the Alliance forces arrive to discover this Union lure of a fiasco, and sure enough, instead of any kind of rescue it was more like arrived and they saw the Lord of the Flies-type situation that had developed and decided to study it from afar rather than intervene, again with pretty bleak results.

So again VERY different than the other but as before very much a stand-alone book, although I understand the book plugs in nicely to a follow up book called Cyteen, (which if I continue on with this author I might give that one a chance), but overall I think these three books gave me a pretty good overall feel for the Alliance-Union Universe and as much as I might recommend them, especially for someone say interested in 1980's science fiction specifically these are awesome, but I don't think, for now anyway, I’ll be pursuing anything further than these three.
-DCO

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is kind of an odd pairing of books. They're both excellent books set in the same universe, but they're also very different books from each other. I guess it makes a nice sampler?

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alliance Space is two books in one and a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the work of C.J. Cherryh. In Merchanter's Luck, Sandy Kreja (aka Edward Stevens) is the very picture of desperation as he struggles to hold on to his ship Le Cygne (aka Lucy) as captain and sole crew member. Lucy is not only his home and his livelihood but a shrine to the memories of his family, who were slaughtered by Mazianni pirates. Running, starving, and taking crazy chances are about all Sandy can manage as he ekes out a living on the ragged margins of commerce. A chance encounter with Allison Reilly of the illustrious family ship Dublin Again leads to an unlikely alliance between renegade and royalty. Thanks to the flesh ceiling of her many older relatives, Allison is too far down the chain of command to ever reach the captain's chair of Dublin Again. Instead, she and a handful of ambitious cousins decide to take a chance on crewing the Lucy. Surely, this "Captain Stevens" guy will roll over nicely for the Reillys… Next up is Forty Thousand in Gehenna, a multi-generational colony saga taking place over hundreds of years. Over 40,000 Union settlers, including the docile, genetically-modified "azi" are unceremoniously dumped on the planet Gehenna II, ostensibly to start a colony, but actually to bring major headaches to their Alliance rivals later on. The promised supply ship two years' hence never arrives, and the senior leadership quickly dies, leaving the settlers adrift and unprepared to cope with life on their own. By the time the Alliance folk show up centuries in the future, a strange hybrid culture has evolved in partnership with the calibans, a lizard-like creature that is possibly sentient, possibly communicating, and possibly grooming humans to serve its own needs. In the end, two rival factions emerge, which I'll summarize as the boys (patriarchal hunter-gatherers) versus the girls (matriarchal agrarians). The Alliance scientific personnel, strangely grateful for this giant steaming turd left them by the Unionists, stoke their outrage at the abandonment of the colonists and react by writing copious memos. This triggers the mother of all academic pissing contests between Dr Genley (team boy) and Dr. McGee (team girl) which ends, as these things often do, with one of them dead and one of them promoted. Now that's what I call fun!

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Merchanter's Luck [1982] - 7.18

With a fine start for what was really only the successor of Downbelow Station [1981] (an over-complicated predecessor with insufficient characterisation and too many characters), this vastly reduced that score, and it was easy to get into the story of Sandor and Allison Reilly and the small ex-Dubliner crew bound on an adventurous foray into 'cold space' towards Sol from Pell, like an old pair of comfortable boots, subjective years later.

It was a hiding to nothing and far too much risk for a small but capable freighter, but Lucy was up to it and they were shadowed by the military, for their own reasons - which they were soon to find out.

Part way - partly due to other literary pressures, partly because of tiredness - I slowed down to in-story real-time reading, which dropped the pace; but partly this was because the pace slackened off and too much was given over to the new crew's 'acclimatisation'... but once over that mildly tedious lull, the pace picked up and the action, when it came, was over in minutes - as it would be, real-time, under the circumstances.

But what impresses - even in a tiny story of the entire Company/Alliance/Union quadrant of the galaxy which Cherryh owns completely - is how she can create a 'world' full of verisimilitude, partly out of detail, partly due to her confident style, partly because it maps in your own mind so comfortably, which, if not quite Star Wars scale, is utterly credible and (usually) superbly peopled, a kind of small-scale Asimov Empire periphery of old and new tech, built from an imagination that has plotted the galaxy with stars and stations and is every bit as exciting as Asimov's Empire, if not quite up to the level of sophistication of interiority and metaphysics as Banks's super-sexy Culture universe.

But I do like Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe, during and after the Company Wars period (specifically, around 2350), and the way I can go back to these earlier stories with just as much comfort, if less thrill, than the superlative Cyteen [1988] and the incomparable zenith of her sociological science fiction, Regenesis [2009].

Forty Thousand In Gehenna [1983] - 6.9

Azis: that friendly, frightened, generally bewildered clone set that needed tape and calm supervisory reassurance and, like all of us, companionship and comfort and security. Alphas bred for born-man-or-woman companionship, betas for technical tasks, deltas for war fodder; more sub-classes. All sorts of highly stratified replicated tasks in the service of expansionist humankind. Colonising a new world, Gehenna, with no carnivores at the top of the food chain, just non-poisonous lizards, the large called 'calibans' (5m), with abnormally large brains, the smaller (1m) called ariels. (Nice touch). Non-aggressive, but left to their own biological niches, which show large earthen mounds and strange maze-like structures, the purposes of which unknown.

Seven thousands years of civilisational development in three days, construction azis dropped in the first wave, clearing ground, erecting tents and gradually solid plasti-foam temporary residences, power supply (solar tower), water supply (hot water for catering), field clearance for gardens and crops. Alternating swathes of human terrain and natural biological niches. All thought out. All interesting.

Then children start to go missing. And Alliance-Union policy undergoes a large co-operative shift: hence, rapprochement.

The story develops through successive waves and lapses of significant time to show the spread of generations and the deterioration of colony civilisation to hunter-gatherers - with a twist - and the attempts to resume a spacefaring human colony. It is wordy, this book running to 400+ pages. Most of this is easily readable, the pages turning. The problem - in order, I assume, to achieve balance - is the Alliance internal reports, which detract from the story development and flow and add nothing but an unnecessary insight - in the guise of bickering inter-office memos - into their meagre understanding of what is happening around them. These unwelcome intrusions about a third through are sufficient for you to want to put the book down and read something else. But I persisted largely because the Alliance-Union series itself offers an interesting 'world' creation, rather than the merits of this particular episode.

However, I want to move on from an anthropological examination to the vastly more interesting Cyteen series, of which its namesake [1988] and Regenesis [2009] are the epitome of compelling science fiction with a sophisticated sociological basis, which is what all great science fiction has (Dune, Foundation and Empire, The Culture) - and I was pleased to actually finish this, which was, frankly, 100 pages too long.

[Lis Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an omnibus of two novels, both in Cherryh's Union/Alliance universe, but otherwise not closely connected.

The first is Merchanter's Luck, a shorter novel about a small, older merchanter ship, which has had some seriously bad luck over the last couple of decades. It used to be Le Cygne, a family-crewed ship which is typical among Cherryh's merchanters, with a crew of about thirty. Then it had a run-in with one of Mazian's fleet, who were mostly pirates even when they were the official fleet of the Company. Only three young crew survived, one of them truly just a child, Sandor Kreja. They continue to have less than good luck, and by the time this novel starts, Sandor Kreja is calling himself "Edward Stephens, his ship Lucy, operating with whatever crew he can scare up, or when times are really tight, operating alone. He's scraping by, but not entirely legitimately. And then, on Viking Station, he meets Allison Riley, a relatively junior officer on the much larger, and much richer, merchanter ship, Dublin Again. They take an interest in each other. Their lives are about to get way too interesting.

What follows is a tense, closely plotted, small-scale story in which they both have a lot of their assumptions challenged, nearly get killed more than once, and have a dangerous and nearly disastrous confrontation with Mazian's leftover, outright pirates with no pretense.

It's very good.

The second novel is Forty Thousand in Gehenna, about an under-the-radar colony established by Union in what, in the logic of obvious expansion patterns will become Alliance space--except that, of course, when Alliance gets there, there will be a colony of Union-descended citizens. It's implied, but not stated outright, that this might not be the only such colony established. The colonists are 40,000 azi, Union's tank-grown, cloned, non-citizen worker class, and five or six thousand citizens, or, as the azi call them, born-men. They immediately set to work building shelter, building the basics of a functioning settlement--but some of their machines start to break down. This includes the tape machines that help the azi deal with the stress from events outside their usual experience. But everything will be fine when the ships that delivered them return with more colonists and supplies, right?

There's also the matter of the calibans, large, semi-aquatic reptilian-like life forms who build their mounds in exactly the kind of riverine areas the humans prefer. But, again, not a problem, really. The colonists will minimize their impact on the local ecology as much as possible, but if push comes to shove, they have rifles and large earth-moving machines.

It gets awkward when they realize, after a few years, that they have really and truly been abandoned; the ships aren't coming back. What we know, and they don't, is that there was never any intention for the ships to return. They're on their own, the small investment Union was willing to make in this throwaway colony intended to create complications for Alliance, a century or two down the line.

This novel is larger-scale, and more detached. We get episodes two or three generations apart, over the next two centuries, till Alliance finally shows up. In the meantime, while the citizens and their descendants--the "born-men"--remain mostly convinced the calibans are just large and potentially dangerous animals. The azi, on the other hand, gradually find themselves in a closer relationship, or rather, two very different closer relationships, with the calibans, and form a very different idea of how smart the calibans are. These different relationships are partly the result, and partly the cause, of two very different azi cultures.

Gradually, we realize, and Alliance and Union eventually discover, something much bigger is going on, here on Gehenna.

This is another excellent novel.

It's worth noting that, while Cherryh is very good, and very popular, she is a bit of a marmite author. You like her or you don't. I'm among the many who really love her work, and strongly recommend it. At the same time--some people, and that's not a small group either, just bounce off her prose. The people who don't like her prose, really don't like it.

And on the third hand, the narrator does a very good job of presenting these two novels..

My recommendation, my strong recommendation, if you are new to Cherryh, is give this a try. Listen to the audio sample, at least. If you are among the many who like it, you've got lots of good reading or listening to look forward to.

I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Alliance Space (2008), C. J. Cherryh reprints two of her early novels, Merchanter’s Luck (1982) and Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983). Merchanter’s Luck, a tightly focused space opera romance, was meant to be her first Alliance novel, but she put it on hold to fill out the details of the world she was building. The result was Downbelow Station (1981), which won her a Hugo Award.
Forty Thousand in Gehenna seems to have several fundamental flaws. Reviewers complain that the story stumbles over its world-building and that nothing is lost if you skip the first half. I get it. There are long interpolated lists of character names and roles that mean little to the reader. Character issues abound. We lose track of important characters as the generations come and go. We might wish that the scaly aliens called Calibans were easier to accept, more like the warm and fuzzy Hisa of Pell. We don’t have a hero or heroine to root for when we get to the war in the second half. When the Alliance forces swoop in at the end, neither the winners nor the losers much care.
Cherryh tramples our expectations on purpose. If Merchanter’s Luck critiques the freewheeling mercantile world of the Companies and the trading fleet, Forty Thousand in Gehenna takes on the Union culture that she would go on to develop in the Cyteen novels. The Union uses cloning, hypnagogic imprinting, and other techniques to modify people to fit the new social and physical environments that star travel offers. They are social experimentalists with a naturally gestated dominant class supported by a large population of designed “azi” clones. In a cold-blooded long game, the Union plants a colony on an undeveloped world, leaving it to shift for itself in the hope that it will one day act as an irritant to expanding Alliance forces. Their planning fails to account for a semi-telepathic indigenous Caliban population. The odd structure of the novel suggests the difficulties innocent Azi face when they are left without the comforts of their programming and must interbreed with their previous masters and ally with the indigenes.
It was fun to revisit these stories.

[Bjørnar Tuftin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sharon Reamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Individual Ratings:
Merchanter's Luck 2.5 stars
40,000 in Gehenna 3.5 stars

The actual nuts&bolts, the writing, in both books is superb - Cherryh's prose never, ever gets in the way of the story, and I found that absolutely amazing. Both books were Hugo award winners, and that was about all they had in common. The reason for these books winning the awards is a mystery to me. If it was on the strength of the writing alone, then that is too little to justify the awards.

Merchanter's Luck.

I did enjoy Merchanter's Luck but it had some serious flaws that marred the book for me, forcing me to place it below an amiable rating. The major characterizations were flat (Sandor and Allison) and the motivations unbelievable.

The plot premise. Sandor owns the merchanter ship Lucy but is running his trades without correct papers because, as we learn throughout the story, the ship used to be called something else until it was boarded by pirates and his entire family wiped out. So maybe he's still paranoid about that or doesn't want anyone to know what happened. I never really understood his motivation for being a (sort of) renegade - 'marginer'.

So he meets Allison Reilly - of the huge Reilly merchanter family - in a port bar. They have a 'sleepover' together and Sandor falls in love. I guess. Or falls into infatuation. Reilly seems to be fascinated by Sandor, who is certainly considered an inconsequential partner in her eyes. She goes back to her post on her 'family' ship, the Dublin Again, and Sandor goes back to Lucy. Sandor knows where the Dublin is headed next and he makes a daredevil series of timewarp maneuvers to get there ahead of her - piloting his ship alone. It brings him to the brink of losing his health and his sanity. For an infatuation? For the possibility of lucrative trade that Allison alluded to (new routes, etc.)? So he might have been desperate, but that desperate? Don't know.

Anyway. He gets in a mess of trouble when he gets to Pell Station and the Dublin's captain (the Old Man) bails him out since it also embroils them in the problem. Allison asks to jump ship and with three of her crewmates/cousins (they're all family on the ships with 'Names') to become the new crew on the Lucy and make up the debts that Sandor has incurred. Again, we get a whole slew of motivations that didn't really add up for me.

The plot gets more complicated with Alliance military against the pirates and all kinds of things that I didn't really understand fully. In between, the ex-Dublin Reillys mutiny because they get all upset when Sandor doesn't hand over his command codes for the ship. Oh, really? They were expecting that first time out? Huh.

Anyway, there's a lot of space opera-y stuff that goes on with warp jumps and ship maneuvering that didn't interest me in the least until the pirates get defeated in a big showdown at the end and the whole mutiny thing is somehow forgiven. Yay. The love story got shunted to the side somewhere during the whole mutiny thing and never really picked up again, so that motivation disappeared.

For me, there was way too much information missing that was possibly contained in other novels about Union versus Alliance versus pirates politics that I didn't understand and after a while, just gave up caring about.

Fazit: good pacing and a whole lot of space opera. If you don't care too much about characters and why they do what they do, then it's an okay read.

40,000 in Gehenna

Colonists - some 'born men' and some clones (worker bees called 'azis' who make up the majority of the colonists) are sent to the planet Gehenna (also called confusingly at times, Newport) to get a colony going. It is assumed that the native species are not sentient.

The native creatures, which are called calibans, I kind of picture as cross between dragons and The Thing. The big ones build mounds and tunnels in spirally patterns. The mound builders are much bigger than humans. There are smaller lizard-like species that interacts with the humans and is something of a pest. They pile up pebbles into little towers and scavenge food from the colonists (and one is fed as a sort of pest-pet). All the native species seem to be benign and aren't considered to pose a threat to the humans. Right.

So there's a lot of negative stuff going on with the commander of the colony who lost his wife a while back and drinks a lot. He hands command over to a woman he's known for a long time and she runs things efficiently...until she gets killed when one of the construction cranes falls on her as a caliban tunnel collapses. It was thought to be an accident. Things kind of fall apart for the humans at this point.

The Union ships don't show up. The remaining colonists are on their own. Skips forward a generation. The azis - who have been 'trained' to reproduce for the colony have bred prolifically while the humans have not. The azis are the dominant humans on the planet. Some run off and go native, engaging with the calibans. The Union ships still never showed up. Civilization degrades. There is some conflict between the humans and the renegade humans (called Weirds). Skip forward.

Two rival factions of humans plus calibans (they're used as mount and personal bodyguards)predominate. Union ships never showed up, but now there are Alliance 'observers' who want to figure out what kind of civilization has emerged. This is when things start to get interesting since the two main observers - one in each of the rival camps - lose their objectivity and 'go native' with the two warring tribes. Things come to a head in a dramatic climax.

I enjoyed the fabulous world-building in this book. The ecosystem, alien-mindset, progressive integration of humans-native species, and the mystery of the sea creatures was highly entertaining. All that stuff was stunning. But the pacing sucked, included a lot of offstage narrating in the form of reports, colonization population tallies, cross-scientist squabbles conducted through memos, and generational family trees, that sort of thing.

I think the book could have been started much later, after the initial colony collapsed, without losing anything essential. The book works best when the action is 'live' and not retold through offstage narrative. We never get a satisfactory explanation about why the Union ships never showed up and why they then showed up later. Again, Union-Alliance politics taking place completely offstage that I had no understanding of and that didn't add to the story in any way that I could figure.

[Jeremy Preacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an omnibus volume so two separate reviews!

Merchanter's Luck:

This is the first Alliance/Union book I've read, so I came into it cold, no context. Which... probably didn't help too much? There was clearly a lot of political and sociological grounding that would have given this book some weight - as it was, it was fine? Slight, really, a tolerably unpleasant main character bickering with tolerably unpleasant shipmates until an action climax that didn't feel adequately set up. Really, this felt like an alternate POV from a much more interesting main story. 3 stars, and that's generous.

40000 in Gehenna:

What would happen if an unsupported colony got dumped on a planet with large intelligent herpetoids? Not the Dragonriders of Pern, Cherryh argues, but something much stranger. This is the Cherryh I'm here for - deep, complicated, multigenerational sociological theories. The reader gets to wonder about the calibans for fully four fifths of the book, because Cherryh isn't interested in holding anyone's hand, and I found this immensely compelling. What were they up to? Why were the clone-descended colonists occasionally going nonverbal and running away to live with them? The answers were eventually satisfying! Definitely a five-star read for me, although, as I've often found with Cherryh's work, there's a long slow ramp in intensity before it really gets going.

[Laura Lis Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Merchanter’s Luck: five stars

This is a gripping and surprisingly moving story, more akin to the taut action of Rimrunners than the larger-scope yet staid Downbelow Station. I suppose it would help to read at least one Merchanter-Alliance-Company Wars book before this one to get some of the nuances in the worldbuilding, but it’s not really necessary to buy in 100% for this ride.

On Forty Thousand in Geneva: four stars

This is a tough one. The tale covers several generations, and much of the main tension for the reader is trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I would almost describe this as a series of xeno-anthropological stories.

*mild spoilers*

The first quarter of the story is pretty grim and dreary. The Union, not exactly a humanitarian empire, colonizes a planet using genetically engineered and brainwashed slave humans. Through arrogance and willful ignorance, they refuse to actually learn what the indigenous beings are about and reject out of hand any notion that they might be intelligent. I thought I already hated the Union, but this really drove it home just how monstrous Union is.

After they set up their first colonial base, everything goes to hell, and it’s hard to care about anyone. But—

Then we start jumping from generation to generation of descendants of the slave humans as they adapt into coexistence and symbiosis with the indigenous life. Lots of very interesting questions arise about colonization, what is culture, the rights of beings, the nature of intelligence, myths of objectivity, the cluelessness of conquerors, forms of communication — but there’s precious little of a story thread rooted in characters, rather a series of shorter episodes, until the last quarter of the book. I can’t say I relished reading this, but it was very provocative reading. It’s a book that raises questions few SFF books address, especially back when this book was published.

[Freyja · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book containing two novels, Merchanter's Luck and 40,000 in Gehenna. The first is a well-paced space adventure with a protagonist with secrets and a big fear of the biggest one becoming known: his and his ship's true names.

The second one drags a bit but the world-building is done well. A colony is created in contested space and deliberately abandoned to just live and grow there. They are given what they need to succeed including the mental programming in the nonmilitary colonists to do what they need to do to take care of this world. Of course the other political side doesn't buy it when they find out...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merchanter's Luck
An orphan runs his family's battered ship with little success, smuggling, odd jobs, until he meets an ambitious member of the O Reilly family. A crazy solo flight to Downbelow station puts him in the public eye and the O Reillys are worried that he may cause trouble for them. Its a gripping, dark tale and just another Han Solo knock off.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna.
Members of an abandoned colony world join forces with the local intelligent lifeform to create a strange society. Reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin writing, an excellent read.

[Jacqueline Lichtenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alliance Union series is Famous For Good Reason

Two novels are in this volume, one set in the culture of starship crews and one on a planet where humans are puzzling out new life forms.

The starship families become socially detached because they live with time dilation. Humanity spreads to uninhabitable systems by building orbiting habitats.

A few planets are found with life, and some have sentients.

The series features the sociology and complex politics driving the ever more diverse populations of humans ... and other sorts of people.

[Sarah Guldenbrein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, just fantastic. The first book in this collection is a delightful space romp. The second is a masterpiece.

Seriously! Why doesn't Forty Thousand in Gehenna get more attention? Its a little bit Leckey's Ancillary Justice, a little bit Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, and very C.J.Cherryh, with all of her genius for aliens.

Okay, so I get that the heated scholarly debate between two anthropologists/xenobiologists in the middle of the book might not be everyone's cup of tea. But DANG is it a relevant epistemological debate.

[Brett A Grard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her ability to create a different mode of sentience and criticize the definition of sentience

Cherryh creates a new mode of thinking with every universe. In this, varying genetic classes of humans are seeded on a lush planet with the promise of resupply. 40,000 of them are lab born and without any sense of humanity add you it I would know it.
If you loved the Faded Sun Trilogy this is right up your winding alley.

[Ikramul Haque · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing! One of those books I totally lost myself in. Towards the end of the book, I thought I was beginning to think in patterns too 😊. Very well developed story. The timescale went in a blur but so much was going on that I didn't have time to reflect. Now that the story is at an end, I can go back and talk to Jin in my imagination and I have so many questions to ask him!

Loved it!

[Chad Nabity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good books. I read/listened to these between Cyteen and Regenesis. This provides substantially more background information that adds to the Regenesis experience. I can't believe that I have't read more Cherryh.

[Gary Lee Veale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable story

A story of a society that is completely different from normal civilization realistically, that is well thought out and written. Very thoughtful and enjoyable read.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 starts 4 for Merchanter's Luck, 5 for Forty Thousand in Gehenna

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very entertaining in a kind of easy way.

[Keith Vai · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my reviews of the individual books

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first read of both of these novels and I'm sorry to have waited so long. Looking forward to more in this universe.

[Brad Lucht · Rating 5 out of 5]

A combination of two novels, Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, in theory the sequels to Downbelow Station. They both take place in Cherryh's Union/Alliance universe, but don’t have much in common beyond that. Except they are both very well written. Of the two, Forty Thousand in Gehenna stands out.

Gehenna is the story of a group of settlers, along with 40,000 lab-born drones, sent to establish a colony, with relieve ships to follow in three years time; the relief neve comes. This is the story of what happens to that colony as hundreds of years pass and how the colony devolves over time. Very original story.

[Kane Jozzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both books in this omnibus, Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, are five-star books on there own. While there could be better thematic pairing*, it is conceivable that both begin simultaneously, within a year after the events of Downbelow Station. Both books are about Union Space people, from the bottom and top of its power structure, winding up in Alliance Space. This omnibus serves as the perfect bridge, time-wise and culture-wise, between Downbelow Station and Cyteen.

*Merchanter's Luck with Rimrunners / Forty Thousand in Gehenna with Serpent's Reach.