Hestia

by C.J. Cherryh

Brought to Hestia to build a dam for the failing colony, Sam Merrit discovers that intelligent alien beings are responsible for sabotaging the colony.

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

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

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

[Red Haircrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hestia is a really a prime example of C.J. Cherryh's early works: it is a detailed, methodical and slower paced combination of fantasy and science fiction which requires a certain amount of patience. The settings often involve a group of human colonists assigned or stranded on a terraformed or Earth-like world struggling to survive in a difficult environment where natives of the planet object to their presence. There's usually a main protagonist who comes to be the medium, either by choice or circumstance, between the two factions.

In this case, it's a stranded engineer who has agreed to help nearly defeated colonists build a dam which might save their drowning lands, yet the natives don't care for this idea at all, secretly sabotaging and slaying encroachers. When Sam Merritt finds a young female cat-like humanoid who was caught in a rock-clearing explosion, he wants to learn more about her and her peoples, yet naturally the colonists object and the situation turns ugly, forcing him to choose who to help and protect.

If you want non-stop thrills even at the cost of good writing and realistic world building, Cherryh's work will often seem slow or overly descriptive but I prefer solid writing and balanced plots over "flash and bang" any day. C.J. can always be counted upon for thoughtful, believable sci-fi/fantasy with good characterization. A great plus for me also: I prefer the shorter, stand-alone works like Hestia and absolutely love the cover art from "back in the day" before so much is computer generated. Lovely cover art by Don Maitz!

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another relatively early (1979) Cherryh novel that's not included in the Alliance-Union universe, but there's not really anything in the book to say that it couldn't be included.

Sam Merritt is part of a team that has come, on the starship Adam Jones to Hestia, a mostly low tech (like, they use steamboats) and struggling colony world, to determine if the colony can be made viable or if they should just march all of the colonists onto the ship and send them elsewhere. (A course of action that the colonists strenuously oppose.)

Not entirely -- well, not really at all -- of his own volition, Merritt is "persuaded" to stay behind when the Adam Jones departs so that he can go upriver and supervise the design and construction of a dam that will, they hope, tame the river and make the colony a going concern.

And that's when the real story begins. Y'see, there are rumors of Outsiders dwelling off in the wilderness and, sure enough, it doesn't take long for Merritt to meet a couple of them off in the wilderness and find himself entangled with one in particular, one Sazhje, a female of the species. (The species being vaguely feline looking furred humanoids, at least if the cover painting is to be believed.) And the Outsiders are decidedly displeased with the idea of a dam that will flood one of their valleys, and the humans are decidedly displeased with Merritt's conflicted loyalties and attempts to bridge the gap ...

And it's only just now, 40 years after I first read it, that I realize that this book is essentially an American frontier story transplanted to an alien planet.

[Gregg Wingo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hestia" is Cherryh's stab at Joseph Conrad's "In the Heart of Darkness" but in an interstellar sense. She looks at issues of colonial dependence to the colonizing power and the perspective of colonists versus indigenous peoples. The story reflects on the brutality of settlers and the dynamic of native resistance to "being discovered". Like so much of Cherryh's work it is about the clash of cultures and, in this work like "Wave Without a Shore", marginalization of The Other.

Unlike "Wave" this story is not about philosophy but the Engineer. It examines the impact of technology on traditional native rights and development on localities and the people who live there. It hearkens back to events like the Trail of Tears, the creation of Skyline Drive, and, very specifically, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Aswan Dam projects. It is about the power of knowledge to change the face of the world as we know it through the heroic vision and endurance of one man, one engineer, and Mankind in general over Nature. However, this is not an unquestioning Modernist work of Classical SF but rather a Postmodernist reflection on Modernism and its authority. Cherryh hints at the future Neo-Classical science fiction of today - she doesn't create it but she is foreshadowing it.

Rest assured this is a great adventure and one you will thoroughly enjoy. It will also surprise you and provide you with a reflection on NIMBYism in our times.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book follows an engineer named Sam Merritt who arrives on the rainy planet of Hestia alongside a crew of other Earthmen. The colony of five thousand people has summoned them to the small and struggling city of New Hope, from which they will head up the river that lies adjacent to it and construct a dam to prevent an inevitable and destructive flood. Upon arrival, the rest of the crew sees the dilapidated state that the colony is in and opt to return home, deeming Hestia a lost cause. Before he has the chance to leave, Merritt is captured by the governor of New Hope and given the ultimatum that only when he has designed and delivered the dam can he then leave the planet.

Sam sets out up the river on a tugboat crewed by a father and son, getting a good look at the yellow-clayed soil and the sprawling blue-green forests that are mostly bathed in misty rains. Cherryh does a great job of building this world and the characters that inhabit it early on, constructing something that feels much like a frontier western in tone. When he arrives at the settlement where he is to construct the dam, the people are eager to get started, worried about the impending flooding caused by the extended wet cycles of Hestia and the melting mountain ice caps. When he asks why they don't just head up to settle in the mountains to avoid the flooding, the colonists tell him of mysterious beings that live within the highlands, who raid their townships from the jungles and steal their supplies.

The plot mostly follows Sam and the colonists attempting to build the dam while fighting off these beings, which are referred to as 'The People', with lots of internal conflict that bubbles up due to events which I won't spoil. I mentioned that this feels like a western, and that's because it's essentially an allegory for the American frontier, specifically the clashes and communications between colonial settlers and the indigenous people.

Ultimately, Cherryh doesn't really do anything all that interesting or thematically profound with this metaphor, but it's still a quick, enjoyable read.

[Caleb Best · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite Characters - Amos, Jim, Meg

Favorite scenes - Sam's epiphany on colonialism

This book is a great dissection of why colonialism and acquisitiveness are so dangerous. The way in which Cherryh highlights this destructive power is though thmese of isolation and otherness. Her ability to play with how we view others who are different than us is second to none. This is a very common theme for Cherryh, seen in some of her other books, such as, Wave Without a Shore. And though I do think that book handles it better, this book is definitely still hitting all the notes I want it to. Cherryh is never heavy-handed in her theme work. In this book, she chooses to not only include alien and human interaction, but has our protagonist be from Earth instead of Hestia - the planet the book takes place on. This allows us to see how much humans put into seeing someone who is not like them as other, or inherently wrong, going so far as to treat our protagonist as if he is worse than the aliens. All these themes lead to a story that reminds the reader that sometimes, it is better not to rush progress, and instead, let it come as it may - in its own time.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

An engineer from off-planet lands on a colony world, tries to build a dam, meets a primitive cat woman, and that's pretty much it. Doesn't stick the landing.

[William Leight · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a really obvious allegory of the settling of America, except that this time the natives are a race of primitive cat-people. (Which is fairly problematic, when you think about it, given all the times that settlers referred to Native Americans as being less than human.) Cherryh really goes out of her way to underscore the resemblance, giving the settlers all the characteristics — forms of dress, clothing, and language, not to mention being white with English surnames — that are traditionally associated with Americans pushing West in the 19th century, even though the book is set in a far-future universe with spaceflight between planets, one of many aspects of the book that don’t quite make sense. I can accept that a low-priority colony planet might operate at a lower technology level than the planets that build the spaceships. It seems less likely, though, that an engineer trained on one of those planets would know anything about building dams without the use of robots and lasers and all the fancy advanced technology that such a world must have to do its engineering. The spaceships can’t be the only sign of high technology there is, can they? Furthermore, it makes even less sense that the mother planet would bother sending a single person to a low-priority colony. (Ok, there were two — one has second thoughts and skedaddles, leaving our hero behind, partly because he was arrested by the colonials in case he started getting second thoughts, too — but still.) Either they would send a team with a large quantity of equipment, or they would send some books on dam-building and a note saying “good luck”. Finally, of course, there’s the whole question of inter-species romance, as signaled by the cover illustration of a cat-woman wearing a bikini: unfortunately, Cherryh puts about the same amount of thought into it as a B-movie scriptwriter. (For once, the cover illustrators of a 70’s sci-fi or fantasy paperback have given a female character more clothes than she usually wears: Sazhje, being, as mentioned, one of a race of primitive cat-people, generally wears nothing at all.) The most annoying part of the book, though, is the way it distributes the blame for imperialism. The settlers are often small-minded, violent and xenophobic, prejudiced not just against the cat-people but also against other humans not from Hestia and even native-born Hestians who have off-worlder parents: our hero, by contrast, is enlightened and broad-minded. Of course, our hero also represents the imperial center, the people who are responsible for dropping the settlers on Hestia and creating the conflict with the cat-people: to absolve them of any blame is to miss the point by a considerable margin. One could perhaps overlook these political issues if the book were better, but it’s really pretty predictable: Cherryh is good at maintaining tension, but there’s only so much you can do with a by-the-numbers plot. Definitely the worst of my continuing review of early Cherryh so far.

[Kenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot is there not only to move the story forward, but also to focus on character. Cherryh has her main character dealing with love and purpose in life; the human society has to find a way to live the native species on the planet. The end is a bit too pat, but the characters make this a fine read. Recommended.

[Feamelwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this book up in a used books' bin purely because of the comedic value of the nightmarish purple cover.



It was just slightly weird and less terrible than I thought it would be. Still, lots of delicate must-be-protected females fading from fear in the arms of the rugged interplanetary traveller/hero. Also contains a surprising ... furry ... love ... triangle ?.. I don't really understand the feelings of these characters anyway, man. Their inner feelings are rarely described, which could be great since it would mean that they would be shown rather than told, but their actions aren't always understandable either, at least not in regards to their feelings. Might be the syndrome of what I call the "stoic space male", a stock character type in science fiction, whose feelings are often inscrutable and only expressed by staring towards the distant horizon like a post-season 3 Daenerys (maybe she's a stoic space male too?)

This love triangle is set to the backdrop of a frontier colonization/clash with the natives narrative.

The writing style isn't bad. Some nature descriptions are okey. I really felt the wet, soggy and depressing nightmare experienced by everyone on that damned planet.

Overall, didn't live up to the hilarity promised by the cover.

[January Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

My feeling from the internet is that this book is the dark step-child of Cherryh's writing in many readers' opinion. I break with that, because I love this book. Yes, the writing does not have the polish that most of Cherryh's books have. I don't know, but it feels like it was an early story that was grabbed up and finished in a rush after she made major splashes with her earliest published books (which were excellent in all ways). But despite the uneven prose in places -- and that's only comparing to the high bar that Cherryh sets herself in her other books, as many authors don't even measure up to this book -- it's an interesting little story, with some challenging ideas.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept is explained very quickly with engineers from earth arriving to help a colonised planet, but they don't like the job and all but one manage to get off planet. That one, Sam Merritt, is stuck between an episode of Rednecks in space and Avatar and unsurprisingly is always at odds with someone. Easy to read.

[Katie Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small novel, Cherryh explores what it means to be human again in this early novel. While it has jarring moments of plot shift, she slowly builds the story to a steady boil until it has a page turning ending.

[Christoph Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars, because compared to other science-fiction of back in the day, it is very good. Well written.

But it's short, it's not very surprising in the end, though the resolution teeters on the very edge for quite a while.

[John JJJJJJJJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

On a distant planet, 5,000 colonists live in fear. For good reason: in the nearby forest, live the Hestians, a race half-woman, half-feline, who attack the herd.

When I read it, I wasn't sure if it was excellent or just okay.

I might have to reread it another time.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked where the story kept heading. Just very tiny print.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5* One of Cherryh's early novels (on my quest to read everything she wrote) that takes place on a failing colony planet. Well written and interesting characters.

[Elizabeth R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

(GR broken, not letting me leave stars)

[Phil Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tiny colony of Hestia is beset with problems. Engineer Sam Merritt arrives on the planet to address the flooding by building a dam. However, he soon runs into the native Hestians who oppose the construction. Sam’s off-world morality quickly causes conflict with the self-interest of the colonists.

The themes of the book are an echo of America’s own colonial past. The native Hestians are especially interesting to CJ Cherryh enthusiasts as they are a third feline alien race in her stories. Likewise, the trademark terse style and characters in conflict will be familiar to regular readers of her books.

Hestia is a welcome addition to my collection and a solid story,

[Matteo Pellegrini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se non sapessimo che l'autore di questo romanzo (ormai celebre negli USA) è una donna, non esiteremmo a lodare in primo luogo la sua straordinaria delicatezza di fantasia e di stile. Ma come evitare che alcuni lettori non pensino subito a un "romanzo rosa", benché l'avventura sia spaziale e il lugubre, degradato, piovoso pianeta Hestia sia popolato da rozzi ubriaconi? Metteremo l'accento, dunque, piuttosto sulla robustezza dell'intreccio e sull'eccezionale qualità di un "suspense" che non ha nulla di particolarmente femminile, né di particolarmente maschile, ma è per così dire un suspense unisex, ovverosia per tutti.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the low side of three stars, but too good for just two. Certainly well-enough written, and a nicely imagined world - and the action is both believable and page-turning...but...but.... It doesn't ring true. Human nature being what it is, the ending in particular seems impossible - to go from animosity towards "a sub-human race" to seemingly peaceful coexistence in a year is ludicrous. And for the settlers to have gone the whole length of the book without asking Merritt why he was doing what he was doing also seems unlikely, to say the least. Sadly, also, the ending was pretty obvious from fairly early on in the work. Despite all this, I'm loath to write this off as a two-star work - it hasd enough positives to escape that.

[David Palazzolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the novel started out with Sam Merritt, architect, hired by the colony of Hestia to design and construct a much needed dam, I thought the book might run in the direction of an H P Lovecraft story as we spent a good bit of time navigating a river populated by a rural community suspicious of strangers and plagued by unseen malevolent entities. However as the book progresses and Merritt starts to fulfill his obligations, we find out the entities are in fact the native population of Hestia and the the situation runs closer to an allegory of old west settlers and their encounters with Native American tribes.

Will the dam be built? Will there ever be peace between the races? Will Merritt ever be welcome on Hestia? Read the book and find out.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

The plot is not big, even if it handles big issues of a human colony far away in another solar system. It is about cultures clashing and meeting, and I was very much reminded of the last two books of Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy - the two books have the very same setting, only tell the story from different sides of the fence.

What really caught me is Cherryh's writing - not a redundant word, and dialogue is too well written to be realistic anymore! I seldom have this coherent discussions myself.

Simply enjoyable little book.

[Jim Mcclanahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written sometime during the author's Faded Sun project, it seemed to be something of a pot-boiler. More of a novella than a novel, the plot was simple and the characters were a little less fleshed out than I generally expect from her. Nevertheless, the story flowed nicely and the reader is compelled to care about the outcome and the fate of the principals. Ostensibly a tale about the conflict between mankind and nature on an alien world, the dilemmas thus faced bring out the best and worst from the characters, both human and alien.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as developed as her later books, this is nonetheless an interesting and quick read. The many challenges facing the main character, and how he chooses to resolve them, held my interest and the character development was good. Cherryh makes her characters vividly read and her use of language and detail are excellent.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the first sci-fi books that I ever read, and it will always hold a special place in my heart even though I really am not super fond of the author in general. It had an awesome cover and was a book that my parents wouldn't notice if it went missing for a little while whilst I read it. I was probably about 12. What a great introduction to sci-fi. After that I was fairly hooked.

[Stephanie Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

An earlier work of Cherryh involves a desperate colony hoping for help from Earth to build a dam.Not everything is as it seems & the colonists have given short shrift to the indigenous people already there.A bittersweet,realistic book which doesn't end "happily ever after".Cherryh was well on her way to the accomplished world building author she became

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Iain Parkes]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14079546