Glass and Amber

by C.J. Cherryh

Contains a selection of short stories, novelettes, and essays from award winning author C.J. Cherryh. This is a limited numbered edition of 1,000, the first 225 being a signed, slipcase edition. Cover painting by Barclay Shaw.

Contents:
"Pots" novelette by C.J. Cherryh
"The Dark King" short story by C.J. Cherryh
"A Gift of Prophecy" short story by C.J. Cherryh
"Homecoming" short story by C.J. Cherryh
"Of Law and Magic" novelette by C.J. Cherryh
"Sea Change" short story by C.J. Cherryh
"Willow" novelette by C.J. Cherryh
"The Avoidance Factor" essay by C.J. Cherryh
"Goodbye Star Wars, Hello Alley-Oop" essay by C.J. Cherryh
"In Alien Tongues" essay by C.J. Cherryh
"Perspectives in SF" essay by C.J. Cherryh
"Romantic/Science Fiction: The Oldest Form of Literature" essay by C.J. Cherryh
"The Use of Archaeology in Worldbuilding" essay by C.J. Cherryh

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Essays, Anthologies

212 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 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

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my 33rd birthday in 2021, I bought myself the 994th edition of this limited 1000 print book. Little did I know my partner would buy me for that same birthday the 94th edition, signed by artist Barclay Shaw and author C. J. Cherryh!

It was a source of some annoyance (his) and later laughter (ours) because of course I'd buy it for myself, but I thought the better of his present, it being signed by one of my favorite authors.

I've now sent the 994th off for a birthday present to someone else, below is my review of "Glass and Amber" although there was not a "Goodbye Star Wars, Hello Alley-Oop" essay by C.J. Cherryh in either of the copies that I had which lends me to thinking it is not in any of the 1000 limited editions of the book. My review seems to be the only one on this book so I can't be sure.

"Of Law and Magic" novelette on Melot Cassissinin who seeks a "Dr Toth" to save her brother Gatan from wizards but she's always been unlucky but what her unluck hides is a nexus that threatens Liavek itself.

"Homecoming", a strange sinister little story of what Tuclick finds out about in his "homecoming" meal.

"Romantic/Science Fiction: The Oldest Form of Literature" essay, a question to put to students if you could save only one book from destruction, what would it be?

"The Dark King", a short story on Death and King Sisyphos it reminds me of of something between W. Somerset Maugham's retelling of an ancient Mesopotamian tale "Appointment in Samarra", that goes;

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Which comes down another version is in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 53a.5-6:

The Gemara relates with regard to these two Cushites who would stand before Solomon: “Elihoreph and Ahijah, the sons of Shisha” (I Kings 4:3), and they were scribes of Solomon. One day Solomon saw that the Angel of Death was sad. He said to him: Why are you sad? He said to him: They are asking me to take the lives of these two Cushites who are sitting here. Solomon handed them to the demons in his service, and sent them to the district of Luz, where the Angel of Death has no dominion. When they arrived at the district of Luz, they died.

Death can be tricked, captured and avoided, but in the end Death is kind and comes to all as a guest with a gift, be it unwanted or wanted.

"Perspectives in SF" essay on time and possibility in the individual and our technology and what may yet come to be "normal".

"Sea Change" short story set in Fingalsey a village who's luck is a girl Mila and her two loves the brothers Marik and Ciag and how they come between her and the sea and what's in the sea that loves her...

"The Avoidance Factor" essay on why aliens might be avoiding Earth and first contact and the challenges we might yet face.

"A Gift of Prophecy" short story set on Aneth, amongst visitors from Shant come with a question for the Oracle, is a design in the making of machine and women set in motion for the alliance called the Amphictyony -by Sibyls like Maranthe and Mishell and those who came before and will come after.

(Maranatha, I found out is an Aramaic phrase which occurs once in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 16:22) & Didache 10:14. It is transliterated into Greek letters, rather than translated, and means "Our Lord, come!" but notes that it could also be translated as: "Our Lord has come”; the NIV translates: "Come, O Lord"; the Message version paraphrases it as: "Make room for the Master!", but "Maranatha" has been used as a solemn formula of excommunication (alongside "anathema"). It is also used in a mantra of meditative prayer.)

"The Use of Archaeology in Worldbuilding" essay considering archaeology like a quilt of the past (ours or theoretical aliens) that goes down and backwards and imagining, building, the world up from the alien ideas there.

"Willow", Dubhan rides back from a war into a world changed by cruelty of men - and perhaps something more than men, for his encounter with a mad girl child named Willow and her mother, the family of Bryaut a once comrade he'd murdered on the road proves darkness did not end with the war and he has no home there and only the road to take him on the journey elsewhere.

"In Alien Tongues" a essay where language and land are revealed to be tied to each other and time too, and the land's riches moved by merchants and the wealthy may prove to be what is behind our 'universal tongues'.

"Pots", where Lord Desan comes down to a planet where his people believe the Ancients who sent a probe into space that saved their world and began his Mission for facts. He finds the overly polite AIs, and Dr. Gothon and her research on the threat faced by the Ancients on their world and the very real consequences of the find for her and her team and Desan.

(Of course it could be the Ancients are us, with a nod to the Pioneer plaque -or another ancient alien with the same idea of a parallel world and timeline.)

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

C.J. Cherryh’s Glass and Amber feels like a meditation written inside a prism, where every turn of the page refracts light in a slightly altered direction.

It is one of those quietly shape-shifting works, not loud or operatic in its movements but intricate in the way it asks the reader to listen—to the echoes of civilisations, to the brittle shimmer of memory, to the tremor of identity as it fractures and reforms across time’s stubborn landscape.

Cherryh, whose prose is known for tensile strength and psychological density, brings both under a softer, more impressionistic lens here. The result is a book that feels like holding fragile stained glass up to a late-afternoon window: beautiful, uncertain, and full of shadows that hint at the contours of stories left untold.

What makes Glass and Amber particularly resonant is its commitment to opacity. Cherryh is intentionally elusive, building a world—or perhaps multiple overlapping worlds—that do not reveal themselves all at once. Instead, she unveils them through texture: the way light falls on unfamiliar artefacts, the way an isolated traveller interprets a silence that might not be silence at all, and the way a landscape seems to remember something the characters have forgotten.

There is narrative, certainly, but it feels secondary to the experience of immersion, as if the story has been embedded within amber and we are watching the air bubble slowly drift toward its surface.

Cherryh’s preoccupation with language—and the instability of meaning—comes through delicately but consistently. Dialogues feel like coded exchanges, gestures like footnotes to unspoken histories. Everything is filtered through the fragile glass of perception, which gives the novella a dreamlike fluidity.

At moments, one wonders whether the events are unfolding in a physical space or in the psychic architecture of its characters. Yet this ambiguity never becomes alienating. Instead, it pulls the reader closer, inviting contemplation rather than demanding certainty.

The postmodern qualities of the book arise from this destabilisation—Cherryh refuses the comfort of linearity and refuses to turn the speculative elements into puzzle pieces that “fit”. The story remains slippery and open-ended, a mosaic of possibilities rather than a single completed picture. One can sense a quiet rebellion here, an insistence that science fiction need not bow to the expectation of technological spectacle or neatly diagrammed worlds.

Instead, Cherryh traces the contours of emotion, displacement, cultural translation, and the haunting fragility of connection.

Her imagery is quietly stunning. There are passages that feel like the textual equivalent of blown glass—transparent, curved, and capable of distorting reality in delicate and unexpected ways. The amber motif deepens this further. Amber is memory fossilised, time captured, beauty hardened by pressure.

Cherryh uses it as both symbol and atmosphere. Encounters feel suspended, conversations feel preserved in resin, and even the landscapes seem caught between eras, as though the planet itself has become an artefact.

What ultimately makes Glass and Amber so gripping is its emotional undertow. Beneath the abstraction lies a palpable sense of longing—a desire for understanding, for belonging, for orientation in a place where the ground shifts subtly beneath the feet.

Cherryh never articulates this outright, yet it hums through the narrative like a frequency only half-heard. It lends the novella its quiet ache, its sense of human fragility amid cosmic vastness.

The book ends not with resolution but with resonance. It lingers like light trapped inside a shard of coloured glass, refracting through memory long after the final page is turned.


Glass and Amber is not a story for readers seeking answers; it is a story for those who enjoy wandering through ambiguity, who appreciate fiction that moves like a half-remembered dream, and who find pleasure in the delicate fractures of perception.

Cherryh offers not clarity but illumination, not conclusions but glimmers—and in that shimmering uncertainty lies the book’s enduring beauty.