message 0068

• Comparing C.J. Cherryh's Fantasy with her SF

>Subject: cherryhlist
>Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 07:35:10 -0700
>From: shrum@hpphigs.fc.hp.com


Nancy Ott writes:

> Personally, I'm not wild about most of Cherryh's fantasy.  Somehow her
> gritty, kind of minimalist style doesn't work as well in the realm of
> fantasy as it does in sf.  Perhaps it's because I'm used to writers
> like Tad Williams and Steven Donaldson who lovingly describe every
> detail of their fantasy universes (in Donaldson's case, with
> adjectives worthy of H.P. Lovecraft).  I tend to think that -- to be
> done right -- fantasy requires a greater attention to detail than most
> sf does, and Cherryh has never been strong on that sort of thing.

You must mean something different by "detail" than I do.  As a
specific example, some time ago my wife and I had both read the
Paksenarrion books (where I have forgotten both the titles and author)
recently, and then started Rusalka.  My wife had just finished
Rusalka, and I was just starting it.  She asked me to stop after the
first chapter or so, somewhere around page 30.  I did so, and she said
"tell me about Pyetr and Sasha."  So, I did, with some inkling of who
they were as people, and what their hopes and fears were.  She then
said "tell me about Paksenarrion", and I was relatively at a loss.
Her comment, which I agree with, was along the lines of "Cherryh did
more characterization in 30 pages than so-and-so in 900."

While I'm interested in a consistent world-view in the fiction I read,
it isn't very important to me to have precise descriptions of what
things *look* like.  

    Ken Shrum