An Old Star

[mtvessel]

Sep 2022
Alliance Rising – C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher – Daw Books, 2019
* * *
Here's a mildly depressing fact: the Alliance-Union universe, one of my favourite SF settings, is now over 40 years old. I first came to it through the Chanur quartet, a first contact story told from the perspective of cat-like aliens. It was fun but I enjoyed the grittier SF psychodramas that followed - Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and particularly Rimrunners and Hellburner - rather more. These books dotted around the history of the rise of the Merchanter Alliance and its conflicts with the technically advanced but quasi-Nazi Union without ever resolving it one way or the other; this unfinished quality is clearly intended by the author as being closer to the messiness of true history than the neat narratives of epic fantasy or space opera, but is a little frustrating for the reader, who just wants to know what happens next. Sadly, this book, the first Merchanter-Alliance novel for many years, will not tell you.

The reason for this is that the story is set in an early period of the Alliance-Union history. Alpha station, the first space station outside the solar system, was built before the discovery of FTL worm holes. It acts as the interface between the sublight "pushers" that carry all trade goods to and from Earth and the advanced FTL freighters that move them on to Pell, Cyteen and the other worlds of the Beyond. As its stationmaster Ben Abrezio is well aware, Alpha's continued existence is precarious, threatened by the possibility that an FTL wormhole route to Earth will be discovered. Then there is the suspicously large ship that Earth Company has decided to build in one of its outer docks, based on pilfered designs for Finity's End, a Pell-based merchanter vessel. And as the novel opens, an unidentified ship is approaching from the Beyond, much too fast, greatly alarming the station inhabitants and crew of the family ship Galway, including its first navigator Fallon Monahan and his young and hunky understudy, Ross Monahan.

What follows is a tense political drama built from familiar ingredients of earlier novels – spacers versus stationers, merchanters, family ships, Earth Company and the Beyond, told through viewpoint characters belonging to each faction. It's engaging enough, but the necessity to explain the situation from so many perspectives means that there is little dramatic action for the vast majority of the novel, which mostly consists of people worrying about things and speculating.

And when I say "people" I mean men. Almost all of the characters with speaking roles are male. The one significant exception, while an engaging character in her own right, is primarily there to act as a romantic interest and has relatively little agency. Given that this is a book written by two women, it is extraordinary that they did not think to include more characters with which their female readers could identify. One is also aware of the somewhat crudely stereotyped cultural characterisation of the family ships. Sadly, Cherryh's style, so revolutionary in the 1980s, now feels dated and out of touch with the diverse and inclusive trends of modern SF.

This may sound negative, but the worldbuilding is as solid as ever, and the ending does somewhat redeem the book as a whole. The sequel is due out next year and I will probably read it.