Conference noted::sf

    It's interesting, too, for its portrayal of space as a resource-poor
    environment (people are short of all sorts of things), rather than
    the old-fashioned SF world of lot-and-lots of everything.
    
    I've read several of the Cherryh books, but still don't know what
    the actual background is--perhaps this is her goal, as I'm then more
    in the situation of a typical low-level person.
    
    		-John Bishop

    re: .-1
    
    You mean what's the background of the Alliance-Union setting?  A lot of
    it comes out in Downbelow Station.  It's basically set in the early
    stages of human interstellar expansion.  The technology level is not
    far from our own (e.g. there's no nanotechnology or serious AI), except
    that FTL travel is possible.  It's expensive, though, so expansion has
    been slow. A series of orbital bases are built by colonists from Earth.
    Habitable worlds are few and far between, so almost all activity is in
    space.  The further bases rebel and form the Union, a culture based on
    cloned slaves. Earth is too weak and interstellar travel is too
    difficult for the Earth to maintain its control.  The nearer bases
    form a third political power based on an alliance of independent
    traders.  The trader ships are clans, much like those of Heinlein's 
    "Citizen of the Galaxy".  The more wide-ranging traders are just
    coming into contact with aliens, most of whom are not far from the
    human technical level.
    
    That's it in a much-too-brief summary.  The great strengths of the
    setting are the vividness with which Cherryh portrays ordinary life on
    ship or on station, and the sophisticated politics that permeates that
    life. Its great weakness is that it's too close to the present-day to
    be a plausible picture of life several centuries from now.  It's
    especially unlikely that humans and aliens would meet on near-equal
    terms in spaceships.  The slightest difference in development rates
    would produce dugout canoes paddling out to meet an aircraft carrier.
    It would be hard to get interesting stories out of that, though,
    so Cherryh does it for the sake of dramatic license.  Advanced aliens
    do appear in some books (e.g. "Voyagers in the Night"), so she's
    aware of the problem.
    
    /jlr    

    Thanks--I'd never seen the "cloned slaves" bit before.  I did
    get a hint that the Union may be a different species by now,
    but not what was going on (beyond the phrase "ritual public
    cannibalism").
    
    You say "dugout canoes paddling out to meet an aircraft
    carrier"--that's the real experience of many non-Western peoples,
    which makes it all the more apposite and persuasive.
    
    The lack of AI and nanotech and other such clearly-about-to-arrive
    technologies has always bothered me about standard SF--but the
    effort to include them (in cyberpunk, for example) almost instantly
    creates a society so alien that I either can't follow or lose interest
    or both.  I can grant the simplification because what's in people's
    head matters as much as what the technology is.
    
    Some authors just throw in a "Butlerian Jihad" or two to explain
    the lack of truly advanced technology--so it's a real problem for 
    the authors, and ignoring it is as good a solution as any.
    
    			-John Bishop

    re: all previous
    
    this sounds like an interesting kind of 'meaty' series. can anyone list 
    the novels, in the order that the events described happened?
    
    ken

   I'm not positive even Cherryh can do that ;'D

   If you're asking because you are thinking of reading them in some
   chronological order, I don't think it's worth the trouble. Her
   `universe' is something that slowly builds a coherent picture after
   reading many of the books. They weren't written in any chronological
   order, and quite a few of them (I feel) were `tied' to that universe as
   a convenience (having nothing at all to do with it) just in case a
   later plot device might appear.

   Mike J

<    this sounds like an interesting kind of 'meaty' series. can anyone list 
<    the novels, in the order that the events described happened?
    
    I just picked up "Merchanter's Luck" this weekend and it has a list of
    the "Union-Alliance" novels.

    Downbelow Station
    Merchanter's Luck
    Forty Thousand in Gehenna
    Voyager in Night

    Rimrunners wasn't listed but may be newer than this book. ML is a short
    book but so far has got my interest. It's another story of someone just
    barely making it in the war torn world of stations and super powers.
    This time it's the last survivor of a merchanter ship running on the
    margin. He falls for a woman of one of the big merchanter families and
    decides that merely surviving isn't enough anymore. Taking an illegal
    cargo so he can follow her to Downbelow Station attracts the attention
    of Norway, and the fun begins.

    Cherryh's depictions of those on the edge make me wonder if she spent
    some time on the streets herself. She seems to know that desparate
    straits meld people in unusual ways. In this world of "no papers" then
    "no existence" an individual is hard pressed to survive. And mind wipe
    is the price for capture. I think this could be a look at a possible
    future. liesl