She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She is the author of more than forty novels. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. I still like the overall gestalt of Cherryh’s space stories so I’m rating this higher than I might, but I hope the sequels give the readers a little more to work with.Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. The characters just think and talk about them and expect you, the reader, to follow along with the jargon. But unlike in the writings of, say, Neal Stephenson, there’s no geek-out attempt to explain these logistics.

And there’s a lot, a LOT, about the logistics of space travel.

The characters learn to respect each other. There’s something about a “Union” and an “Alliance,” two unhelpfully generic names for rival space empires. They then get entangled in some business between space-pirates and space-pirate-hunters. For some reason - love? Impressed with his dedication? - Allison convinces her bosses/grandparents to more-or-less buy “Lucy” and let her and some cousins help run the ship with Sandor and do some interstellar trade on their account. He follows her spaceship on a risky “jump” to another star system, which causes attention to fall on his shady business. As far as I can tell, the plot is he falls in love with Allison, from the “Dublin Again,” a respectable family generation ship (in scenes with the family, one is tempted to cry out, “MICKS… IN… SPAAAAAACE”) that does big-time interstellar trade. Sandor, the protagonist, runs a sort of tramp-steamer in space, the “Lucy,” which does various low-grade contract-shenanigan deals, staying one step ahead of the law. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t drown the reader in technobabble and the particularities of gray-market interstellar trade. “Merchanter’s Luck,” the next book in the series, has some of its interstellar-workaday charm, not unlike that found in the universe of the “Alien” movies.

Cherryh’s “Alliance-Union” series, “Downbelow Station,” a fast-paced and agreeably overstuffed scifi novel set on a trading station on a remote planet. Cherryh, “Merchanter’s Luck” (1982) – I very much enjoyed the first of C.J. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A…Ĭ.J.

Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”.

Merchanter's Luck by C.J. Cherryh