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Bezig met laden... Forty Thousand in Gehennadoor C. J. Cherryh
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. This is really kind of a mess. There is some didactic idea behind the book, but the story is largely missing. We get an actual story line somewhere past the halfway point, but it is short-changed. The first part of the books is over-extended backstory and notes, the sort of stuff that Tolkien put in the appendices. This could have been a good book if it had been subjected to a bold editor with a machete. What we have instead is a choppy slog without much of a point. The was originally published in 1983, making it one of Cherryh's earlier works, and it is easy to see the development of many themes that Cherryh later mines for gold in the "Foreigner" series: the epic sweep of nations and politics, human/alien cultural divides, and individual endurance (in fact, it is easy to compare 40,000 to Foreigner, as the last half of the book centers around the observations and experiences of a "starman diplomat" to the native Gehennans). This is a book to savor, not just for Cherryh's excellent use of language and descriptions, but because of the hugeness of the story, which covers several hundred years of history and the lives of many characters. It is an eminently satisfying read, and as usual Cherryh brings to life not only the human characters in all their glory and with all their faults (her humans are always, always genuinely, humanly flawed) but also the alien "dragons" of Gehenna, who are fascinating but truly otherworldly creatures.
"Cherryh tantalizes our minds with these enigmatic aliens, captures our hearts with her characters and involves us completely with her mix of broad and narrow views of a new culture’s rise. Once again, Cherryh proves herself a consistently thoughtful and entertaining writer"
A few years after the truce between the Union and the Alliance factions, Union lands a new settlement on the world called Gehenna, a colony consisting of 41,911 "non-citizen" clones and several hundred natural born men as supervisors. Gehenna seemed to have no intelligent native life-and therein lay the mistake. Calibans, dragon-like beasts, had a different sort of intelligence; and, as time passed, they began to twist the minds of the new generations to their own inhuman rhythms of life. Abandoned as a colony, life on Gehenna assumed stranger and stranger forms-until the day that Alliance spies arrived and applied the match to the many social explosives that had been piling up. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The basic premise doesn't seem very original - new colony starting out a fresh inviting earth type planet. It quickly departs from the expected and turns darker. From the way the 'azi' are transported and the rest of the colony shipped out to the reasons for the colony's very existence it's unsettling and thought provoking.
It continues on for the next 200 years without ever losing the darker edge.
It's not space opera moving the plot along with Hollywood abandon, but it's also not as 'meta' and internalized as many of Cherryh's other novels often are. A long book split into eight major parts, I suspect it was originally conceived as a trilogy or at least multiple novels, and then pared back. My biggest criticism of the whole book is the uneven transitions between some of those parts, which is only partially covered up by the change of characters and generations.
Start to finish it's a rewarding narrative of the rise of new culture from the mismatched building blocks of several old ones. Worth reading more than once. ( )