Fever Season

Merovingen Nights #2

by C.J. Cherryh (Editor), Chris Morris (Contributor), Janet E. Morris (Contributor)

Carried by the dark, winding waterways of Merovingen, the yearly fever spreads, wreaking havoc with the plots and counter-plot of even the greatest Houses, laying low the likes of such key players in the games of power as Thomas Mondragon himself.

And as the fever-fed canal city is brough to the brink of war, and panicked by the threat of the alien sharrh's imminent return, those who prowl both the high ways and the waters below, from Jones to Raj, from Black Cal to Rif, must take up the challenge to keep Merovingen safe from devastating internal treachery...

In Angel with the Sword, Hugo Award-winning author C.J. Cherryh introduced readers to Merovingen. Once again, she has assembled a series of closely linked tales by herself and other top writers such as Lynn Abbey and Janet and Chris Morris that continue the wonder of Merovingen.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

297 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 6, 1987

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

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The backstabbing and political manoeuvring are, as usual, completely impenetrable, but this volume developed the story threads in some interesting ways.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably would have benefited from starting at the beginning of the series. This is a dense story with multiple layers of intrigue coming from several factions in conflict within the city of Merovingen, much of which is shown from a worms-eye viewpoint, and the authors do not spoon-feed the readers to explain what is going on or why it matters. It is left as an exercise to those readers to determine the agendas of those at the highest levels. This includes not just the political elites wrangling for succession but the conflict between spiritual schools and how these things intersect the others.

You might need to take notes, in order to keep everything straight. I didn't, and I don't think I'm appreciating the whole of it, from the deep worldbuilding to the intricacies of the conflicts and interpersonal relationships.

As it stands, the machinations feel circular. The end doesn't conclude anything but shakes it all up in different ways, by a dramatic display taken by one of the factions. Its outcome is not described, possibly left as the starting point for the following collection.

[Salimbol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't heard of the Merovingen books before I picked this up, and I'd assumed it was a fantasy, but it is actually sci-fi (or perhaps it straddles the uneasy border between the two, as humanity may have been stranded on an inhospitable planet by alien aggressors, but the story revolves around the murky politics of the miasma-ridden canal city of Merovingen, with particular focus on the tensions between church and state). Interestingly, the man primed to be the centre of the story (all the right heroic attributes: handsome, mysterious, deadly-but-compassionate, etc) gets sidelined by a nasty bug, and instead the story really revolves around Altair Jones, tenacious young canal-woman, and Raj, a street boy with a complicated past. Though half of the chapters are written by various contributors and the other half by C.J. Cherryh herself, it has almost the seamless feel of a novel. I enjoyed it greatly and I intend to lay hands on more books in this series.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 4 out of 5]

The books in this series are credited as anthologies so I will keep to it although they also can easily be considered multi-author novels - the story flows almost cleanly from story to story - in a lot of cases you actually need to remind yourself who wrote a story.

The second anthology (and third book overall) in the Merovingen Nights series starts shortly after the previous one closed. If you had not read the novel that started it all and the previous anthology, this book will be quite annoying (not to mention that it will spoil the previous 2 books for you). If you read the previous 2 and liked them, you will probably like this one as well.

Generations ago an alien race, the sharrh, defeated the human inhabitants of the planet of Merovin and left them stranded and away from the human civilizations of the Union and the Alliance, without the technology used to get them there. Humanity survived - it split into factions (which got more and more different with time) and built its world, forgetting the stars and that they are not alone. Even the sharrh are only a myth, one that most people do not believe in. By the time the series opens, the aliens are used only to keep people in line - at least in most of the the planet cities - some religions still believe in them. The whole series is a political thriller in the middle of a planet like no other.

In this anthology, we pick up where the previous one left off - after the Sword of God attacked the rulers of Merovingen and used the opportunity to get their spies inside of the city, the machinations of all the groups just continued. It is the season of the Plague - every year people die from the malady coming from the river. Merovingen, the city where the story is based in, is similar to Venice - with the canals at the bottom - except that a whole city is literally built on top of them - the more money you have, the higher you live.

One of the plot-points of the first anthology was the Janes (one of the three main groups) trying to eradicate the Plague in Merovingen. It may have worked - but that does not mean that people do not get sick - and this time one of them is Tom Mondragon - the assassin/spy who is at the center of the story. Being sick and trying to do your job is hard regardless of what you do - doing this kind of a job is impossible. So things get a bit complicated.

The first anthology introduced a lot of new characters, each of them connected to someone we knew from the first novel or to someone introduced earlier. Except that this is a very small city - so before long the lines started to cross and people who were parts of different stories got mixed together. I suspect that by the end of the series, the lines will be so thick and the connections so complete that it will be just a big blob in the middle, with everyone connected to everyone.

The political machinations continue, everyone seems to have at least 2 different agendas (except for the ruling family, the Kalugin, who seem to have only one goal - staying at the top for the father; getting to the top for the children), Rif and the Janes seem to try to continue with their cleaning job (although as it turns out, they are not shy to use some bio-terrorism elsewhere, a few minor characters get snagged into the action and the love story in the middle of it all had almost settled down into normalcy (even if Altair Jones seems to still not believe it most of the time). And some of the mysteries from the previous book are still not resolved.

It is an adventure story with things changing and getting more tangled with every page. I am really enjoying the whole series - a lot more than I expected to. I was worried how the anthology format will work but you sometimes forget you are in an anthology - the styles are a bit different but they blend well together and the story flows through the book, with Cherryh's fragments connecting them and weaving them together. But the separate stories also reuse the same characters with continuity and characteristics and the whole story reads more like a novel than an anthology.

[Macha]

3 and a half stars

[Bill Stebelski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weaving new webs and stirring the pot, above and below, the world becomes more complicated.

[Edward Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still enjoying the series.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this second installment of the anthology series, "Merovingen Nights," we are once again thrust into a world of scheming, skulking and political conniving all taking place along or above the murky depths of Merovingen's watery canals. Filled with the contributions of her fellow fantasy writers, many of whom worked on the similar Thieves World saga, C.J. Cherryh has done a superb job weaving the chapters together, with clues interlocking one short story to the next in flawless creativity. Another engaging, entertaining read for everyone out there.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It sure is too bad that the sequels to such a good book (Angel with a Sword) were written by a committee, and show it. Pretty much the only reason to read any of them is to see what became of our dauntless heroine, and you can get that from the first chapter. I actually kinda wish I'd stopped there.... There are just too many characters thrown at you, the story lacks a real arc, and there's no emotional depth.

[Semantic Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantasy/SF, second of the Merovingen Nights collaborations. Same characters, more stress; it's fever season in the swamp of Merovin, and the politicking gets fierce and bloody.