#kesrith

Author: C. J. Cherryh

Genre: sci-fi, space opera

Year: 1978

Notes: first volume of the Faded Sun trilogy, followed by The Faded Sun: Shon'jir and The Faded Sun: Kutath. I have read the Cosmo Oro italian edition, translated by Gianluigi Zuddas. Hugo Award, Nebula Award and Locus SF Award nominee. Read this review in Italian here.

Kesrith is a very unwelcoming desert planet, used by the regul (an alien race) as a mining station. Another race, the humanoid Mri, live on Kesrith. For centuries they have worked as mercenaries for the regul, proving themselves to be deadly warriors. Many of them have died in the last war, too many of them… to the point that only a few Mri now live on Kesrith. Among these Mri is Niun, one of our main characters: he belongs to the warrior caste, the Kel, and he’s the only young Kel left. He’s impatient and ashamed of never having fought a real battle, but the members of the Sen caste - those who rule the Mri - have forbidden him to leave the planet. He does not understand the wishes of the She’pan, their ruler, but he will obey. It is not easy for him to be the only young Kel left: his sister Melein was a Kel until she was ordered to become a Sen. It is clear that the elders have something in mind, but they are not the only one with plans in the galaxy. Soon humans and Mri will have to meet, but the two civilizations couldn’t be more different… as we see from the eyes of Sten Duncan, a military officer who is coming on Kesrith with a specific task.

I’m going to start with what I didn’t like about this book… that is, the style. Some parts are written worse, some better, but overall there are some problems about the distribution of info to the reader. Things that are well known even by the reader are repeated in characters’ thoughts for no real reason, and infodumps are everywhere. There is a chapter from a regul’s point of view that is actually pages of badly delivered infodumps. It was a really hard chapter and I had to push myself through it. This is why so many people insist on the importance of “show, don’t tell”... and it’s a shame she doesn’t show more, because when she does, she does a great job of it (that scene in the cave, near the end? I got shivers). I didn’t have any trouble following through the various Mri words and concepts, even if it can be a little overwhelming at the beginning.

I am surprised because, according to wikipedia (the source link is dead, sadly), she claims to write in a limited third person, without mentioning things a character already knows and so on. A pity she didn’t do it for this novel… my guess is that she developed that style later, after all this is one of her first novels.

In terms of sense of wonder, however, this novel is satisfying: no, it doesn’t have that groundbreaking weirdness other authors offer, but she managed to create an interesting desert civilization after Dune… and her Mri are nothing alike the Fremen. She did a good worldbuilding job even with the regul, and both Mri and regul sound truly alien.

There isn’t much action in this novel, and while I do not mind intrigue-based plots, I have to warn you that nothing much really happens. It would be perfect as a first part of a novel, but as a standalone novel it just doesn’t work: it ends when things get really interesting. I know it is the first volume of a trilogy, but every novel of a trilogy should be complete on its own.

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.