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.

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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.