Devil to the Belt

The Company Wars #4-5

by C.J. Cherryh

C. J. Cherryh's upcoming new science fiction novel Hammerfall (Avon Eos, 7/01), is the perfect opportunity to revisit this author's strong backlist, including the latest book, Devil to the Belt (Warner, 12/00). Ranging from Earth to the asteroids and beyond, the acclaimed novels first published as Heavy Time and Hellburner are knife-edged thrillers of deadly intrigue in an era of dangerous transition. In the future world of the Merchanters and the Alliance, emerging new forces, including the Union and the Fleet, are challenging the strangle-holds of global governments and world-spanning corporate cartels. But it will be ordinary people -- the innocent and the unlucky -- who are trapped in the turmoil when interstellar powers collide.

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

608 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

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

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an omnibus comprising Heavy Time and Hellburner. Since these are a prequel and sequel focused on the same characters, it makes sense to get them in this format if possible. These books were written later than some of the others in the same universe, so the character development is better than that in, say, Merchanter's Luck. (Even if some of them are a little irritating.) It's interesting to see how things are on Earth as the Company Wars are slowly kicking off. The second book ends a little abruptly, and some of the intra-Company fleet politics drag a little. The initial part of the first book is excellent at establishing what the mining/spacer culture is like.

There is something that's a little weird about this book. Cherryh's spacer characters say constantly that life in space is what's real, that living on a planet is pointless. (Elene Quen from Downbelow Station, various characters from Finity's End, possibly others I'm forgetting. But note that I don't think that Cherryh herself fully espouses this viewpoint.) Here, one of the characters wonders, in what is a departure for Cherryh, what they're doing by raising people who don't know who William Shakespeare is. That is an interesting question and one I've been idly pondering.

Originally I recommended this as the third/fourth book to read in this universe, after Downbelow Station and Cyteen. Now, I'd say that you would definitely have want to read Downbelow Station first, even though it is chronologically after this book. Earth is kind of ... isolated from events and these books don't give you a clear picture of what's going on.

(Re-read July 2012.)

[Pedro L. Fragoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

These books are remarkable—and somehow, Hellburner manages to surpass Heavy Time. I understand that these are prequels to the Hugo Award-winning Downbelow Station, which is supposedly an even greater achievement, but we'll see. These two novels are a triumph in their own right, radiating a mastery and intellect that are simply breathtaking.

The stories unfold along three main strands:

First, there's an unfortunate young man who starts out by getting into mischief as a teenager and seems doomed to pay for it for the rest of his life—moving from one injustice to another—until an elusive chance for redemption...

Ben Pollard was trying to stay alive and stay out of the war, that was what he’d been doing. Ben Pollard was back on helldeck, the bubble had burst, and what turned up but Sal Aboujib, the Fleet’s own damnable doing, screw the bastard who was responsible for this—
    Hell, when it came down to it, Dekker was responsible for it, it didn’t matter the UDC and the Fleet had gotten their shot in, Dekker could reach out from the hereafter and screw his life up with one little touch, the way he’d screwed Cory Salazar’s—way he’d screwed the program up—
    Off chance that part wasn’t his fault, but you didn’t protect yourself by figuring a mess of this magnitude that Dekker just happened to be in the middle of — didn’t have Dekker’s fingerprints all over it. Wasn’t that the guy necessarily did anything, he didn’t have to do it, he just was. Like gravity and infall, things went wrong in his vicinity...

Then there's the politics, and the corporate power that poisons it all. The exhausting, uncompromising, and oh-so-realistic way Cherryh depicts this—and the immediate and potentially disastrous consequences it has for the protagonists and their world—is a remarkable feat. It's truly something to behold.

It's worth noting that these books were published in 1991 and 1992. Corporate power wasn't what it is today, yet Cherryh already portrays it with uncanny precision. It's as prophetic as it gets...

The conservatives mere are in fear for their lives over the radical resurgence. And that promotes Company hardliners, like Bertrand Muller. Muller is for the war, incidentally. He wants us to ‘recover Cyteen.’
    “My God.”
    “He calls it a colony. What do you want? He’s ninety years old, he formed his current opinion on his fortieth birthday, and he says the Company police who fired on the rab were defending civilized values.”
    “We’re in the hands of lunatics.”
    “Of financiers. Far worse.”

“He can’t be the one to take the controls. That name can’t be prominent in this program.—Have you no comprehension?”
    “Senator, political decisions in crew choice caused the last disaster to this program. And I can’t believe I’m hearing this all over again.”
    “I can’t believe what I’m hearing from the junior command officer on this base. I can’t believe your persistence in putting this man into the glare of publicity..."

“Then why in hell haven’t we been using it all along? Why spring it now? Why this whole damned, accident-riddled program?”
    “Politics, sir.”

“He’s too politically sensitive. It’s already too public. God! Why do you people persist in shoving this man in our faces? Are you actively challenging the legislature?”
    He shook his head. “Your creativity, sir, with all respect. Any choice made on political and not operational grounds reduces this ship’s chances of survival. If this test fails, the EC has no alternative and no further resources to offer us...”

Finally, to balance out this terrible world — where everything, including the very odds of survival, is stacked against everyone by a corporate-controlled political system — there’s human decency, solidarity, and love, however grudgingly it manifests, a powerful counterpoint to the surrounding darkness.

Inevitably, some aspects are irredeemably dated. Surprisingly—technical details aside—this includes the portrayal of the feminine condition. Or at least that was my impression, but hey, this is what Jo Walton opines (in What Makes This Book So Great): These are great feminist novels. There are women in them who succeed on their own merits and yet are questioned because they are women. They’re not in a magically non-sexist future. They’re accused of making it by “whoring around on Helldeck,” to which one of them replies, “You a virgin, Mitch? Didn’t think so.” So, there's this.

[urbancohort · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories of Heavy Time and Hellburner take place long before Downbelow Station, however, I would suggest reading Downbelow Station first, as it gives the reader a clearer picture of the Alliance-Union universe.

Even though this is a military sci-fi book, it focuses more on the political side of things and the struggles of small people.

Cherryh is brilliant at telling stories of people at the bottom of the social hierarchy from their narrow third-person perspective, while slowly revealing the larger political machinations of the universe she created. Her books do not hold readers' hands. She does not do pages and pages of info dumps, instead, she introduces the technological, sociological and economic concepts of the universe to the readers. The readers find themselves initially clueless in her established universe, and that is something I absolutely love about them. It feels very rewarding to read her novels. The book contains a lot of technical explanations, but somehow Cherryh manages to do it without having readers bogged down in details. The characters we get to know here are complex. They are not heroes, and just managing to get by in the harsh reality of corporate politics that do not care about such people and see them as expendable for profit.

My one issue was that the pacing of the book was uneven. Some parts dragged too much. The build-up was very slow and took a long while, and the story was wrapped up quickly in the end.

The world-building is superb. On one side, we have various factions with their own interests taking a seat in the political power play, some obvious, some pulling the strings behind the scenes. The rivalries between Earth Company and MarsCorp, the companies and the independent shipowners, Unified Defence Command and the Fleet, the Earthers and the Belters (and later the Union)... On the other side, we have (sometimes semi-decent) people trying to find a place in the universe. Slowly unravelling the web of relationships between the factions is very satisfying. I am also impressed by how well she does this in claustrophobic spaces, in small mining ships, and in space stations.

I really cannot wait to read more Alliance-Union books, and luckily, there are a lot of them.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

HEAVY TIME: 4 stars. One of the best Union-Alliance books. Also, a shining counterpoint to intro volumes that are written long after their series-es started that are never any good as actual intro volumes. You absolutely could start with this.

HELLBURNER: 2.5 stars. More interesting if you’ve read DOWNBELOW STATION in particular recently enough to recognize certain characters (especially this one schmucky bastard) and want an idea of how they get to who they are (i.e., get their rep) in that novel. Also, the ending obtains a degree of bittersweetness because… reasons. With or without that knowledge, however, it’s a bit of a letdown after HEAVY TIME. It’s not as incisive, and though you don’t usually get to see the Company vs. Earth (vs. station) dynamic in the other U-A books because… reasons… that doesn’t counteract the general sense of bloat (scope creep?). If maybe 50 pages could’ve been boiled away from this (there are one or three storylines I can think of that I wouldn’t’ve minded seeing pared back a little), I suspect this could’ve been a classic. This is another way to say that HELLBURNER spends many more words than HEAVY TIME spends on events that are not as impactful (wide-ranging?) as HEAVY TIME’s events. That all said, I know several other U-A fans who feel HELLBURNER is the best in the whole series, so as usual Your Mileage May Vary. ;-)

OVERALL RATING: 3 or 3.5 stars depending on how I squint at it. I do think sticking HELLBURNER between the same pair of covers as HEAVY TIME does the former a bit of a disservice from an artistic/critical point of view, though it absolutely makes sense from an economic/chronologic/collecting point of view.

[Jeannine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who knew Cherryh could write a slow story. Hellburner was an incredibly slow slog with a big fast finale; while Heavy Time moved along a bit steadier throughout and followed the same characters, so you will want to read the slow one to make any sense of the second one. Part of the "problem" is the characters are speaking in terms they understand and the reader doesn't (yet), so it takes a while to develop the vocabulary. But stick with it, because Cherryh never tells the same old story; hers have content. And both of these do too. Worth the extra time.

[Rob]

Excellent - but tried to sell first editions of both original books, hardback, via our local Oxfam bookshop at a mere £20 and no takers. What are they thinking?

[David Merrill · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my reviews for Heavy Time and Hellburner for my review of this book.

[David Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy Time is a brilliant prediction of how the impact of the development of our solar system and of asteroid mining in particular will impact human society in space. The space-warped human characters are just a bit alien and yet the reader is still able to relate to them - or at least, most of them. Company and interplanetary politics, not to mention interpersonal human politics, are very plausibly developed. In the sequel Hellburner, the military development made necessary by earth-bound ("blue-sky") thinking and misunderstanding of the nature of spacers and spacing societies is the setting for a tense tale of a high-risk, high-gain development of a cee-fractional* velocity military craft, the Hellburner project.

Cherryh's focus, as it often does, rests upon the question of how extraordinary pressures impact on being human. At times her pacing is a little off, but on balance the books are so good that I still give her five stars for this duo.

*a convenient way of saying that the speed is a significant fraction of the speed of light, and therefore too fast to be easily expressed otherwise.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first Cherryh. I really enjoyed the first part of the book which was a story called Heavy Time. Hellburner was good as well, but I had a hard time getting through it. I think I could have enjoyed these stories better had I read other stories set in this universe first. There were terms and concepts that were not explained well but seemed to assume that the reader was familiar with them. Still, Cherryh is a terrific writer and does a good job with her characters. The stories are not very fast paced and have a lot of political intrigue in them. I will be reading more of her work down the road.

[Cpt Skyhawk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of two books in CJ Cherry's Alliance-Union universe, from well before the events of her first book in that series (Downbelow Station). Fabulous books about pre-FTL asteroid mining, which is way

[Anna]

Wanted to like it, but Cherryh is mostly miss with me.