“Downbelow Station,” by C. J. Cherryh

FM's rating:

1.      Premise 8

2.      Prose 6

3.      Plot 9

4.      Characters 10

5.      Overall 8

Comments (optional - but try to keep it under 3000 words!)

You don’t get much view on a [space] ship, Elene had said once, trying to explain to him.  Not what you’d think.  It’s the being there; the working of it; the feel of moving through what could surprise you at any moment.  It’s being a dust speck in that scale and pushing your way through all that Empty on your own terms, that no world can do and nothing spinning around one.  It’s doing that and knowing all the time old goblin Deep is just the other side of the metal you’re leaning on.  You stationers like your illusions.  And world folk, blue-skyers, don’t even know what real is.  For me the main attraction of Science Fiction is that perspective shift; seeing the world – seeing Reality – from a different point of view.  The visual imagery of Sci-Fi is window dressing, albeit stunning window dressing much of the time.  The real deal, the real mind-blower is the perspective shift.  And there’s a lot of that going on in this book, which has been referred to as a Sci-Fi classic.  The prose here is precise, efficient, straightforward, imbued with a high degree of realism – and extremely DRY.  This seems to represent a well-established strand of Sci-Fi writing that sets it apart from the more colorful prose of, say, Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick.  It’s as if the author is trying to contrast and offset the unbelievability of the speculative nature of Sci-Fi with an almost clinical delivery.  It also seems to say two or three times as much in one sentence as the “lighter” writers manage to do.  One has to admire this attentiveness toward the “craft” of writing; it is impressive and can’t be an easy skill for the author to develop.  But most of us don’t read in order to appreciate the writing skills of the author – we read for fun.  This style of writing, while it may appeal to a certain demographic of reader who comes away feeling “smarter” for having read such smart writing (you know the type), simply isn’t as much fun for the rest of us.  The wonderful cast of superbly realized characters (Mallory is amazing!  I want to see Meryl Streep in this role!) goes a long way toward making up for the prose.  The aliens are not so well developed, used almost as props; but this story really isn’t about them.  Cherryh’s “The Pride of Chanur,” published in the same year, 1982, shows alien character exposition at its finest, and is a much better work in my opinion than “Downbelow Station”, which won that year’s Hugo Award.  Both stories center the action on very similar space stations and similar plot devices, but the differences in pace and description are night and day.  Great novel – just a little too stilted in its verbiage for me.  [Addendum:  The author Jane Haddam touches on this in her wonderful blog, in which one of the entries was about the humorless prose of Ayn Rand.  She states, "It is not only that she [Rand] has no sense of humor (which she doesn't), but that she is inherently suspicious of humor.  Like Dostoyevski and Tolstoy before her, she seems incapable of imaging [sic] that humor could ever be anything but belittling and antagonistic.  Like all the classic Russian writers, and like Solzhenitsyn as well, humor is never anything but a weapon.  I think this is why I've always found Rand's nonfiction more easy to read than her fiction.  I don't need funny in an essay about aesthetics of the foundational principles of moral behavior.  But I do prefer funny in [fiction] books, even very dark books.  And fiction without it feels cramped and rigid to me."]




Here’s the December line-up!

“Saints of the Shadow Bible,” by Ian Rankin [12/5]
“Not a Creature Was Stirring,” by Jane Haddam [12/12]

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” by James Hogg [12/19]

“The Christmas Night Murder,” by Lee Harris [12/26]

(As always, if there are any books you’d like to recommend for the next month, please do so.  Also, if you have already read one on our list, you are invited you to give your ratings/comments for that book!)