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>From: Lesley Grant <lgrant>
>Subject: cherryhlist
>Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 9:04:24 GMT

> >From: nancy ott <ott@ansoft.com>
> 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.

	I think her fantasy novels are quite varied in quality, perhaps
because she does, as you point out, not give a lot of explicit detail.
She infers the setting rather than lay it out. I think this works very
well in _The Dreamstone_ and _The Tree of Swords and Jewels_, as the
readers already have a common pool of fairy-celtic-elvish imagery to
flesh it out with, from all the other fantasy novels and myths that
have undoubtably been read before. Her tone in these 2 books also helps-
bleak, dark, heroic in the Bronze age sense. The Rusalka books however,
don't work as well, probably because most readers are not (as) familiar
with Russian folklore. There just isn't the background knowledge to make
the setting come to life. There's also the possibility that Cherryh is far
more familiar with the celticish material, and thus was more confident in
her handling of it. This may be because she researched it more, or it may
be the influence of her best (IMHO) 'fantasy' book/s, _The Chronicles of
Morgaine_, which I've read that she first started at 14 (plenty of time
to get the bleak, heroic tone down pat :-) Elements of _Morgaine_ certainly
crop up in the _Dreamstone_ and _ToSaJ_, not least the enormous similarity
between the qhal/qujalin and the elves. For the Rusalka books, she didn't
have the years of experience in angst-ridden Russian fairytales.

> I do like most of her fantasy short stories, and this "style" thing is
> probably at the root of it.  Because short stories are so compressed,
> lazy readers like myself work harder to fill in the descriptive gaps
> left by authors like Cherryh, who focus on action and psychological
> manipulation.  

	Her _Sunfall_ collection is incredible, and different from most
of her work: details filled in all over the place, psychological
explanations, the triumph of the human spirit and lots of other good
stuff. And great stories too!
	Does anyone have a complete list of her short fiction? Apart
from _Sunfall_ and _Visible Light_, I think I've only seen 1 other
story, in one of MZB's _Sword and Sorceress_ collections. That was the
one about the woman in the desert with the broken sword (to say anything
more is to say too much...)

				Lesley