Words, words, words

[hawkwing_lb]

Wordcount!

Progress:

"Dreamdark, or, the Confused-Title Story"

New words: c. 1000
Previous words: c. 800
Total relevent words: c. 1800
Old-and-now-irrelevant-but-I'm-still-counting-them words: c. 20,000
Total words: 22,000
Estimated words required: 120,000
Unpleasant things that characters were subjected to: rain, mud, fear, close encounters of the sharp and pointy kind, deaths.

21,800 / 120,000 (17.0%)

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My current reading is eclectic again. Sigh. Started a new book on the First Crusade - the first book about the crusades I've ever read, so should be interesting. I'm reading for college, of course: art and architecture books this week, because Thursday = test. And I'm halfway through CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station.

I'm feeling somewhat ambivalent about Downbelow Station. The prose is solid, the characters are solid and interesting - even if they do all seem to sound alike, and come from the anti-hero end of the scale - but... I dunno. I'm not being gripped, but yet I feel that I should be.

Partly it's the humanocentric view of the future. Partly it's because I can almost see real-world politics informing the text (uh-oh, literary phrase. help, please), but mostly, I think, it's because I could care less if all these characters went to hell in the same handbasket.

I can almost identify with Signy Mallory. But not really. They're just a little bit too far around that corner of unlikeableness (or non-entity-ness) for me to form any kind of connection.

::sigh::

I'll finish the book - I'm interested enough to want to find out how it ends - but I don't think (unless something major changes in the next few hundred pages) that I'll be getting any more of Cherryh's SF. Although, interestingly enough, I've read other books by the same author and found them much easier to connect to.

Question, if anyone's out there who's read Downbelow Station and feels like answering: am I the only one who feels this way about it? Interested to know.
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I'm off to type up my wordcount now, and to try to get it to make sense. *g*

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Merchanter's luck
And Angel with a sword (IIRC) are the only two I've bothered to re-read. Some a lot lighter than Downbelow. The later Chanur ones (where the bilogy drove me spare) were distinctly light. Cherryh has IMO an unfortunate prose-style. I really struggle to 'get in' to her work and bind to her characters although the plot and setting are good

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Hello, anonymous. Thanks for the recommendation :-).

What's wrong with the biology, if you don't mind my asking? [Haven't read any Chanur yet to see for myself, if indeed I could see, not being particularly biologically-trained :-)]

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

Sorry,'twas me. I hadn't logged in. You should have guessed by the spelling. Um. I have problem with her extrapolations leonine of behavioral biology to the aliens. Ask Ginger. Her field. And yes, it does seem to be the style she uses for sf. Her fantasy is more accessibly written. I just don't like it as much

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was you. I thought the style seemed familiar, but I wasn't quite sure. In future I'll be more confident of my ability to identify people by orthographical means :-).

Thanks for expanding. I haven't read enough Cherryh to have any kind of opinion on her style, but so far Downbelow Station is losing out to Thomas Asbridge's much more accessible The First Crusade (non-fiction). This is rare, for me. I finish most fiction within 48 hours of starting it.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd read Chanur before vet school, so my perceptions of the books would be vastly different now. Yes, her writing is sometimes oddly dense to the reader. The reason I remember Chanur is those books were less dense, more accessible. It was almost a different writer.

Thinking of biology affecting behavior reminds me of Tanya Huff and her take on werewolves. This I read as a resident, and the behavioral differences in Huff's werewolves was awesome -- and made such good sense I wondered why no one else had thought of it before. Wolf (and wild canid in general) society is very different from the human concept of "family", but we tend to think of canids as being family-types because they join our packs so nicely.

Lions have different packs and different social structures. I vaguely recall that the Chanur books at least addressed the typical "lioness hunting/lion lazing about" sort of thing.

Heh..musing over what you'd written, I pondered momentarily the possibility of melding Cherryh's plot and environment with Misty's characterizations. Yeah, I know, it's been done (Merovingen Nights). Still.