C.J. and Neal
Feb. 13th, 2005 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowC. J. Cherryh has long been one of my favorite writers of F/SF. The Morgaine books, the Faded Sun trilogy, Downbelow Station, The Pride of Chanur and the Chanur trilogy, and Cyteen stand, in my mind, in the front ranks of the field. Her writing is typically dense; she writes not one word more than necessary, and trusts the reader to fill in the gaps. I don't always succeed in this. I remember, when I picked up the second book of the Chanur trilogy, reading her "the story so far" at the beginning and thinking, "OH! So that's what was going on!" Most often, I have to reconstruct things backward - reinterpret earlier events on the basis of what happens later.
The point here is that Cherryh's work has to be read very carefully, if you're to get the most out of it. This came to my mind today, as I was continuing to plow through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Here, I'm looking at the first volume of a trilogy - a volume which is itself nearly a thousand pages long - a volume in which I'm making what feels like very slow progress - and I realized that it's because, like Cherryh, he's an author who demands careful reading. But this is for a very different reason. Stephenson's work is simply crowded; the kitchen sink is the least of what he throws at the reader. He slides from the technical (philosophy, engineering, mathematics) to humor (subtle, bizarre, or both), to the grotesque and even horrifying, without giving a moment's warning or pause. It'd be exhausting if it weren't so entertaining.
I guess it's appropriate that the trilogy is entitled The Baroque Cycle; baroque it most certainly is. Rococo, even.
The point here is that Cherryh's work has to be read very carefully, if you're to get the most out of it. This came to my mind today, as I was continuing to plow through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Here, I'm looking at the first volume of a trilogy - a volume which is itself nearly a thousand pages long - a volume in which I'm making what feels like very slow progress - and I realized that it's because, like Cherryh, he's an author who demands careful reading. But this is for a very different reason. Stephenson's work is simply crowded; the kitchen sink is the least of what he throws at the reader. He slides from the technical (philosophy, engineering, mathematics) to humor (subtle, bizarre, or both), to the grotesque and even horrifying, without giving a moment's warning or pause. It'd be exhausting if it weren't so entertaining.
I guess it's appropriate that the trilogy is entitled The Baroque Cycle; baroque it most certainly is. Rococo, even.
