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FMK: Downbelow Station Pt. 1
HAH I bet you thought I'd given up on these!
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh is very long, and also, frankly, not an enjoyable experience so far, so it's taking awhile. I'm only 2/5 of the way through but I want to write up my impressions at this point because it might take me another while to finish, and I think (hope?) I might have a very different impression once I'm done, and also I find myself with a lot to say already. (Also this is going to be at least half about Imperial Radch anyway, sorry-not-sorry.)
The main thing is that this book is GRIM. And DARK. I don't know that it's all the way to grimdark, but so far it's pretty much completely lacking in hope. Or happiness. Or fun. I know I have a lot of readers who really like Alliance-Union, and I can see why, because it's objectively a very good book, it's just... a grindingly awful experience for everyone involved, including me. It drops you in at the everything-is-lost low point of a three-act play, and then it just gets worse from there.
But I am glad I'm reading it, if only because it's so very very clear that this was an influence on later mil-SF, including parts of Imperial Radch, and particularly, I may have made a mistake starting it right after a re-read of Ancillary Sword, because the parallels in the setup are so blatantly obvious that way: the military ship arriving unannounced at the previously-theoretically-neutral Station, bringing unwanted tidings of war and disaster; the overcrowded station, the cut-off but inhabited section like a tourniquet around a necrotic limb; the system that is important because it has the capacity to be self-supporting with all the trade lines down, but is going to have to scramble to become so in time; even the leader adopting a powerless personage of complicated loyalties and a troubling history of hamhanded brainwashing.
But that also makes the grinding hopelessness of Downbelow even more apparent, because the thing is - when you look at it dispassionately, the Radch is at least as dark as the Cherryh. Maybe moreso. There's rape and death, riot and massacre, racism and oppression and conquest and totalitarianism in both. At least three of the main characters in IR are at best passively suicidal the whole time, and with more than enough trauma to get them there. And unlike in Downbelow, several of them were also active participants in the galaxy's most notorious genocide. Everybody on Athoek Station is mostly acquiescent to a system built on slavery and worse than slavery. Everybody's already living under an oppressive regime, the civil war is coming, nearby stations are going dark one after another, nobody knows who to trust or what the future will bring, and even if they survive their own civil war, there's the constant overhanging threat of an enemy beyond human politics who could destroy them all with no effort, who can be neither fought nor understood, only conciliated. Even the happy ending is nothing but a prospect of a precarious and temporary truce contingent on the Presger continuing to find them interesting.
And yet.
Imperial Radch is fun.
Downbelow Station just got to the bit where one of the characters killed himself, and the closest thing he had to a friend thought, "Well, at least he's not trapped in this narrative anymore, that's about the best outcome any of us can hope for at this point", and this reader pretty much agrees.
Part of it is - IR, through Breq's POV - simultaneously the POV of a total outsider, of a high-status insider, and of an invisible Untouchable - manages to show the Radch as a totalitarian dystopia built on aggressive conquest and enslavement; but also as a pretty good place to live, with a reliable social safety net, a society that actively balances egalitarianism with cultural plurality, and a system that for all its failures at least strives for social mobility and justice, and achieves them about as often as any system could; and also as a too-honest mirror for modern imperialism, where we all sort of know the injustice is there, in the foundations, but it's not in front of us, and for all its flaws this is home, and we can't change the whole system by ourselves anyway, we can just live in it best we can.
And which of those views of the Radch you get at any given time and on any given reading depends on so many things, but they're all there in the text.
Meanwhile DS so far seems to be showing Union as just plain completely awful, and meanwhile everything bad about Pell is the fault of the war forcing hard choices on them, nothing inherent to Pell's own system - we are not really (yet, at least) getting any of that certain-point-of-view complexity that makes IR work.
Part of it is that - no matter what POV Breq is coming from at any give time, she always looks into a crowd and sees individual people where Pell Station sees nameless, faceless mobs. Pell Station sees the teeming mass of refugees "living in their own filth"; Imperial Radch sees "overcrowding meant they were living in a corridor, but they'd still managed to put together a surprisingly comfortable camp." (It is also probably relevant that Pell sees people who are just born violent and criminal when it looks down at the faceless refugees; Breq find those people when she goes among the rich and powerful.) Pell Station sees a line of desperate displaced subhumans about to become a riot; Breq sees her ward's language tutor and her friends trying to be heard. Athoek Station finds a thriving black market and thinks "yay, a market! Life finds a way." Pell Station finds a thriving black market and thinks "so black, so violence, so criminal." Downbelow sees "too-identical mannequin soldiers, the kind that cannot be talked to or reasoned with"; Breq sees human soldiers with secret weaknesses for tea sets and individual, unique ancillaries whose ships will be pained if they die.
And then there's the hisa.
Mostly my reaction to DS has been "I can see how it's a good book, I'm just not enjoying it at all" but y'all, I'm not sure the hisa are redeemable. I want-hope-trust that Cherryh has some kind of plot reveal up her sleeve that they're more than they seem. But. So far, I can't see how that's going to happen. The Hisa are just so perfectly every first-half-of-the-20th century White writer's idea of innocent, simple, playful, superstitious natives who speak broken English and don't understand "civilized" things, like Capitalism, or the value of hard work, but worshipthe White Man's Human technology and will love their masters with loyal devotion, and willingly help to strip-mine their own land, if they're only shown a little (a very little) generosity and kindness.
So far Sky-sees-her is the only POV character in the book I enjoy spending time with even a little, but her face is so clearly overlaid, every time she appears, with the minstrel-show Black woman who provided her framework that I just cringe the whole time.
I think (hope?) the book is leading toward a point where the "good guys" realize how fucked-up even their kinder treatment of the hisa is, as some sort of lesson about racism, but that might even make it worse at this point, because it'll be so very much too little to late, and it still won't fix the fact that the hisa really are just that innocent and superstitious and guileless and easily led.
....and you know, IR has aliens too, but they are all really really believably alien, not some parody of a 1910s National Geographic article about Tahitians. Oh, and it has a nonhuman servant race too, who are treated as subhuman and simple and utterly lacking in deceit or self-interest but will always, always love and serve their Human masters even against their own interests because that is all they're capable of.
And yet. IR gives us Sword of Atagaris, who loves its utterly unworthy Captain unquestioningly and has no interest in rebelling, but still jumps at the chance of freedom when offered it; Mercy of Kalr who barely managed to pretend not to hate her Captain and then decided to exploit a loophole and love someone entirely inappropriate instead; Sphene who ran away rather than be forced to serve again; Athoek Station, who seems like the perfect obedient servant but has mastered passive aggression at a high enough level to undetectably outmaneuver an immortal Emperor; and Justice of Toren, who was pushed too far and decided to push back even if it destroyed everything she was. And they all know that the humans who underestimate them are wrong; they may not all agree on the ethics of it, but they know that they're factually wrong.
Meanwhile Downbelow has Sky-sees-her, who just loves Bennett-man so much because he hit the very very low mark of "valuing hisa lives and culture even a little bit at all", and Sun-shining-through-clouds who mostly does whatever Sky-sees-her wants (and also loves Bennett-man), and Sun-smiles-on-her, who has spent her whole life gladly waiting hand-and-foot on the Massa's wife, because the Massa's wife taught her about God. And yeah. That's about all there is to that.
Augh. AUGH.
And I do think - hope (?) that some of this is Cherryh setting it up as a lesson about how we need to be better at seeing other people, people we have power over and people we're afraid of, as people. Part of the reason I wanted to write this up at this point is that I keep hoping the book will swerve soon. But even if it does, that won't really fix a lot of the problems I had with this point. Because if it is, it's doing a thing - that's really common among a certain type of people of my culture - that starts with "look how awful I was to people I thought were lesser than me! But it's just because I didn't realize yet how wrong I was, and you, too, can come on this journey of realizing [other type of person] is also a person." My pastor keeps setting up her sermons that way and I keep coming up with excuses to talk my mother into skipping church again. I mean, there's a TON of stuff that's wrong with that narrative, but the most blatant ones are the assumption that a) your audience can all recall a time when they, too, didn't yet realize that being gratuitously awful to other people was bad, and b) none of your audience could possibly feel more in common with [other type of person] than they do with you.
So yeah. I feel like even if Cherryh tries to pull it out with the Hisa (and the living-in-their-own-filth teeming refugees) she is at best going to end up there. Meanwhile Leckie drops us right in with people who have always been the wrong sort of people to be people, and trusts that everybody in her audience is capable of following her there.
But ALSO, and much more shallowly, for all that IR is in many ways in even more of a crapsack universe than DS, IR is a crapsack universe that has penis festivals and folk songs about chickens and small children who love sweets and utterly impractical gardens and all different kinds of board games and questionable fashion choices and radish-growing competitions and ancient, beautiful, incomprehensible technicolor glass and fish-shaped cakes and bad poetry and dirty jokes about the gods and mystery mushroom sauce and homebrew beer and antique tea sets and singing flowers and soap-operas with unfortunately catchy musical numbers and teenagers who dye their eyes purple and then agonize over whether to change them back, and maybe most of all, families who love each other a lot: everybody has a family, blood family or chosen family or family of circumstance, who love each other a lot. Even the incredibly fucked-up abusive families love each other, if in incredibly fucked-up abusive ways.
Whereas Pell has - uh, outside the Innocent Playful Natives Frolicking, it has some references to offscreen Card Games Of Sadness. Some questionably acquired hisa carvings on display out of their cultural context. Really boring propaganda films. An observation deck that gives a lot of people vertigo. That is literally it for culture or fun or beauty. Oh, and we have the Konstantins, who are distinguished as being The (only, so far) People Who Love Each Other, mostly demonstrated by the way they choose to nobly suffer for each other, oh and by deciding to have a Sadness Baby because the wife's family are all dead and she feels obligated to continue the line.
There has yet to be anything even vaguely resembling a moment of comic relief. ...or even a moment of happiness, for that matter, even for Konstantins.
So yeah. Other than the hisa, I don't really have anything very bad to say for it. Except that it's just relentlessly, grindingly no fun.
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh is very long, and also, frankly, not an enjoyable experience so far, so it's taking awhile. I'm only 2/5 of the way through but I want to write up my impressions at this point because it might take me another while to finish, and I think (hope?) I might have a very different impression once I'm done, and also I find myself with a lot to say already. (Also this is going to be at least half about Imperial Radch anyway, sorry-not-sorry.)
The main thing is that this book is GRIM. And DARK. I don't know that it's all the way to grimdark, but so far it's pretty much completely lacking in hope. Or happiness. Or fun. I know I have a lot of readers who really like Alliance-Union, and I can see why, because it's objectively a very good book, it's just... a grindingly awful experience for everyone involved, including me. It drops you in at the everything-is-lost low point of a three-act play, and then it just gets worse from there.
But I am glad I'm reading it, if only because it's so very very clear that this was an influence on later mil-SF, including parts of Imperial Radch, and particularly, I may have made a mistake starting it right after a re-read of Ancillary Sword, because the parallels in the setup are so blatantly obvious that way: the military ship arriving unannounced at the previously-theoretically-neutral Station, bringing unwanted tidings of war and disaster; the overcrowded station, the cut-off but inhabited section like a tourniquet around a necrotic limb; the system that is important because it has the capacity to be self-supporting with all the trade lines down, but is going to have to scramble to become so in time; even the leader adopting a powerless personage of complicated loyalties and a troubling history of hamhanded brainwashing.
But that also makes the grinding hopelessness of Downbelow even more apparent, because the thing is - when you look at it dispassionately, the Radch is at least as dark as the Cherryh. Maybe moreso. There's rape and death, riot and massacre, racism and oppression and conquest and totalitarianism in both. At least three of the main characters in IR are at best passively suicidal the whole time, and with more than enough trauma to get them there. And unlike in Downbelow, several of them were also active participants in the galaxy's most notorious genocide. Everybody on Athoek Station is mostly acquiescent to a system built on slavery and worse than slavery. Everybody's already living under an oppressive regime, the civil war is coming, nearby stations are going dark one after another, nobody knows who to trust or what the future will bring, and even if they survive their own civil war, there's the constant overhanging threat of an enemy beyond human politics who could destroy them all with no effort, who can be neither fought nor understood, only conciliated. Even the happy ending is nothing but a prospect of a precarious and temporary truce contingent on the Presger continuing to find them interesting.
And yet.
Imperial Radch is fun.
Downbelow Station just got to the bit where one of the characters killed himself, and the closest thing he had to a friend thought, "Well, at least he's not trapped in this narrative anymore, that's about the best outcome any of us can hope for at this point", and this reader pretty much agrees.
Part of it is - IR, through Breq's POV - simultaneously the POV of a total outsider, of a high-status insider, and of an invisible Untouchable - manages to show the Radch as a totalitarian dystopia built on aggressive conquest and enslavement; but also as a pretty good place to live, with a reliable social safety net, a society that actively balances egalitarianism with cultural plurality, and a system that for all its failures at least strives for social mobility and justice, and achieves them about as often as any system could; and also as a too-honest mirror for modern imperialism, where we all sort of know the injustice is there, in the foundations, but it's not in front of us, and for all its flaws this is home, and we can't change the whole system by ourselves anyway, we can just live in it best we can.
And which of those views of the Radch you get at any given time and on any given reading depends on so many things, but they're all there in the text.
Meanwhile DS so far seems to be showing Union as just plain completely awful, and meanwhile everything bad about Pell is the fault of the war forcing hard choices on them, nothing inherent to Pell's own system - we are not really (yet, at least) getting any of that certain-point-of-view complexity that makes IR work.
Part of it is that - no matter what POV Breq is coming from at any give time, she always looks into a crowd and sees individual people where Pell Station sees nameless, faceless mobs. Pell Station sees the teeming mass of refugees "living in their own filth"; Imperial Radch sees "overcrowding meant they were living in a corridor, but they'd still managed to put together a surprisingly comfortable camp." (It is also probably relevant that Pell sees people who are just born violent and criminal when it looks down at the faceless refugees; Breq find those people when she goes among the rich and powerful.) Pell Station sees a line of desperate displaced subhumans about to become a riot; Breq sees her ward's language tutor and her friends trying to be heard. Athoek Station finds a thriving black market and thinks "yay, a market! Life finds a way." Pell Station finds a thriving black market and thinks "so black, so violence, so criminal." Downbelow sees "too-identical mannequin soldiers, the kind that cannot be talked to or reasoned with"; Breq sees human soldiers with secret weaknesses for tea sets and individual, unique ancillaries whose ships will be pained if they die.
And then there's the hisa.
Mostly my reaction to DS has been "I can see how it's a good book, I'm just not enjoying it at all" but y'all, I'm not sure the hisa are redeemable. I want-hope-trust that Cherryh has some kind of plot reveal up her sleeve that they're more than they seem. But. So far, I can't see how that's going to happen. The Hisa are just so perfectly every first-half-of-the-20th century White writer's idea of innocent, simple, playful, superstitious natives who speak broken English and don't understand "civilized" things, like Capitalism, or the value of hard work, but worship
So far Sky-sees-her is the only POV character in the book I enjoy spending time with even a little, but her face is so clearly overlaid, every time she appears, with the minstrel-show Black woman who provided her framework that I just cringe the whole time.
I think (hope?) the book is leading toward a point where the "good guys" realize how fucked-up even their kinder treatment of the hisa is, as some sort of lesson about racism, but that might even make it worse at this point, because it'll be so very much too little to late, and it still won't fix the fact that the hisa really are just that innocent and superstitious and guileless and easily led.
....and you know, IR has aliens too, but they are all really really believably alien, not some parody of a 1910s National Geographic article about Tahitians. Oh, and it has a nonhuman servant race too, who are treated as subhuman and simple and utterly lacking in deceit or self-interest but will always, always love and serve their Human masters even against their own interests because that is all they're capable of.
And yet. IR gives us Sword of Atagaris, who loves its utterly unworthy Captain unquestioningly and has no interest in rebelling, but still jumps at the chance of freedom when offered it; Mercy of Kalr who barely managed to pretend not to hate her Captain and then decided to exploit a loophole and love someone entirely inappropriate instead; Sphene who ran away rather than be forced to serve again; Athoek Station, who seems like the perfect obedient servant but has mastered passive aggression at a high enough level to undetectably outmaneuver an immortal Emperor; and Justice of Toren, who was pushed too far and decided to push back even if it destroyed everything she was. And they all know that the humans who underestimate them are wrong; they may not all agree on the ethics of it, but they know that they're factually wrong.
Meanwhile Downbelow has Sky-sees-her, who just loves Bennett-man so much because he hit the very very low mark of "valuing hisa lives and culture even a little bit at all", and Sun-shining-through-clouds who mostly does whatever Sky-sees-her wants (and also loves Bennett-man), and Sun-smiles-on-her, who has spent her whole life gladly waiting hand-and-foot on the Massa's wife, because the Massa's wife taught her about God. And yeah. That's about all there is to that.
Augh. AUGH.
And I do think - hope (?) that some of this is Cherryh setting it up as a lesson about how we need to be better at seeing other people, people we have power over and people we're afraid of, as people. Part of the reason I wanted to write this up at this point is that I keep hoping the book will swerve soon. But even if it does, that won't really fix a lot of the problems I had with this point. Because if it is, it's doing a thing - that's really common among a certain type of people of my culture - that starts with "look how awful I was to people I thought were lesser than me! But it's just because I didn't realize yet how wrong I was, and you, too, can come on this journey of realizing [other type of person] is also a person." My pastor keeps setting up her sermons that way and I keep coming up with excuses to talk my mother into skipping church again. I mean, there's a TON of stuff that's wrong with that narrative, but the most blatant ones are the assumption that a) your audience can all recall a time when they, too, didn't yet realize that being gratuitously awful to other people was bad, and b) none of your audience could possibly feel more in common with [other type of person] than they do with you.
So yeah. I feel like even if Cherryh tries to pull it out with the Hisa (and the living-in-their-own-filth teeming refugees) she is at best going to end up there. Meanwhile Leckie drops us right in with people who have always been the wrong sort of people to be people, and trusts that everybody in her audience is capable of following her there.
But ALSO, and much more shallowly, for all that IR is in many ways in even more of a crapsack universe than DS, IR is a crapsack universe that has penis festivals and folk songs about chickens and small children who love sweets and utterly impractical gardens and all different kinds of board games and questionable fashion choices and radish-growing competitions and ancient, beautiful, incomprehensible technicolor glass and fish-shaped cakes and bad poetry and dirty jokes about the gods and mystery mushroom sauce and homebrew beer and antique tea sets and singing flowers and soap-operas with unfortunately catchy musical numbers and teenagers who dye their eyes purple and then agonize over whether to change them back, and maybe most of all, families who love each other a lot: everybody has a family, blood family or chosen family or family of circumstance, who love each other a lot. Even the incredibly fucked-up abusive families love each other, if in incredibly fucked-up abusive ways.
Whereas Pell has - uh, outside the Innocent Playful Natives Frolicking, it has some references to offscreen Card Games Of Sadness. Some questionably acquired hisa carvings on display out of their cultural context. Really boring propaganda films. An observation deck that gives a lot of people vertigo. That is literally it for culture or fun or beauty. Oh, and we have the Konstantins, who are distinguished as being The (only, so far) People Who Love Each Other, mostly demonstrated by the way they choose to nobly suffer for each other, oh and by deciding to have a Sadness Baby because the wife's family are all dead and she feels obligated to continue the line.
There has yet to be anything even vaguely resembling a moment of comic relief. ...or even a moment of happiness, for that matter, even for Konstantins.
So yeah. Other than the hisa, I don't really have anything very bad to say for it. Except that it's just relentlessly, grindingly no fun.