Downbelow Station

It’s taken months for me to get halfway through this over-long book. [shelving it at page 248, 58%] Too much military; mostly politics. Too few characters I care about in a cast of hundreds. Earth is losing control over her former colonies as the “Beyonders” decide they no longer need her. Pell is the station that most must pass through in either direction, and is considered the last hope for Earth to remain relevant. As smaller outposts collapse or are overtaken, ships of survivors arrive at an already-crowded Pell. Gangs form. There is corruption. Then Union ships arrive. Oh and there is a race of (so far) docile, tall, and affectionate hirsute mammals that have learned to speak broken English and who like to give hugs with their strong and furry arms.

I read this novel when it came out and won a Hugo award. I enjoyed it then, but I think I missed a lot of details. Now, decades (!) later, my son read it and was blown away. He's reading a bunch of Cherryh now and goaded me to reread this one. So how does Downbelow Station read now? It's a science fiction epic. Definitely space opera: interstellar action, politics, scheming, big stakes, aliens, new worlds. The plot concerns the end of an interstellar war. Humanity has spread out into multiple star systems, colonies revolted, and are now winning against the Earth home base. The action turns on a strategic space station next to a useful, habitable, and inhabited planet, Pell. Under that framework we get space-going warships, merchants, competing companies and families, humans pushing genetic engineering, good and bad relations with aliens, assassins, riots, and more. I was impressed by the sheer amount of detail Cherryh works through. I don't mean infodumps - she actually resists this to an unusual degree, with much of the world more gestured to or summarized than visualized in detail. Instead we see the story through the very limited perspectives of many different characters, each offering their take on what they understand and trying to win through to what they want. An event will occur - a ship docking, a big speech, a group of people moving - and Downbelow Station will shoot it from multiple points of view, each iterating the point and giving it epic depth. I was reminded of John Brunner's big social problem novels, as well as of 19th century social novels and not a little bit of Richardson's Clarissa. What surprises in 2021: cybernetics are entirely mid-20th century, pre-cyberpunk. Little is networked and there are Central Computers. Gender is interesting, with a famously powerful ship captain who's really a fine military leader with a cult of personality, yet most of the actors are male, and many women end up on the sidelines or in supporting roles. The labor politics are a bit cloudy: working class people are fairly positive characters, if not to Soviet levels, but a ruling family appears as benign leaders. Economics is more about supply and tactics here. This is a novel about a phase of war with a strong focus on civilians, which I admire. Those characters are interesting. And they all have plausible reasons, making decisions that make sense for their situation. The story felt deeper and richer than many I read now. It has a heft to it which we can learn from. I think this holds us as a strong novel. Recommended.