This Hugo award-winning book is truly a chore to read. From the very beginning, the reader is battered with about twice as many names and subplots as are necessary for this novel. It takes good concentration and reading this book over a very short period of time (so you can remember all the subplots, which you need to know in detail) to really appreciate it. And don't get me wrong, I APPRECIATE what this book is trying to do. I just didn't ENJOY it. It is a book of politics and betrayal aboard a space station (reminiscent of Babylon 5, which is inspired largely by this sort of book) trying to exist in a galxy of warring factions and rapid change. Compared to other books with very intricate plots (Brust comes to mind), Cherryh suffers from trying to do too much, losing the reader in the process and diluting the few good subplots that are in progress. Characterization is pretty strong, but the most interesting characters in the book, Jon Lukas and Josh Talley, actually get LESS interesting as the book goes on.
The strongest element of the plot comes in the second book when the young Ariane Emory is "introduced" to an archive of computer programs and tapes created by her predecessor. I find it fascinating to think about the concept of actually "visiting yourself in the past" and giving yourself advice about growing up and so forth. If the entire series had been boiled down to one book, throwing out the purely political subplots and concentrating more on the relationship between Ariane and her predecessor, it would've been a "9" or a "10". As written, though, the series seems to drag and I had trouble slogging through a lot of it. The ending was extremely disappointing and left too many loose ends (perhaps this was on purpose, I'm not sure). I can't say I would recommend this to everyone, but it wasn't bad. The good ideas were just diluted by too much unnecessary extraneous activity (and too many characters) outside Ariane's immediate circle.
Instead, this book is cut from the same cloth as any of your standard fantasy/political intrigue works. For the first 100 or so pages, as the book follows the main character, Tristan, the writing is certainly a different style than I'm used to. I was initially intrigued, then ready to move on, then bored, then physically turning the pages to see if there would EVER be dialogue at any point. After that, the book got marginally better (by about halfway through, when the political machinations finally got into full swing), but it certainly didn't grab me and hold me. It took some effort to finally get through this book, and it was more to get it over with than any real interest (it took me the better part of a month to read this, both because it was rather boring and because my wife and I were house-hunting and house-buying, with all that entails, at the time).
If you want to read something similar in this genre but much better, try Brust, Glen Cook (Bragi Ragnarson books), Feist, Bujold (more sci-fi, though) or countless others.
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