Faded Sun: Kesrith (Faded Sun, book 1) by C. J. Cherryh

[james_davis_nicoll]

Faded Sun: Kesrith (Faded Sun, book 1) by C. J. Cherryh

Comments

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

the Regul are not a monolithic, unified bloc, but a cluster of related groups, each with its own agenda

There'd better be some fancy Regul genetics/brain anatomy to explain something so bizarre.

[illian.livejournal.com]

I thought he was saying the Regul weren't a single bloc socially/politically (which is still unusual in fiction) but its been 20 years since I read the books and I can't recall if it was in fact biologically.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This. The Regul have competing factions, as united as Asia in 1930.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think Monte was snarking about the traditional rigidity and biological determinism of science-fictional society-building.

[illian.livejournal.com]

My ability to parse online text is more deficient than usual after dealing with a 2 year old for days on end.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Bearing in mind his snark was dry, so very very dry.

It's not hard on the internet for such to be seen as serious...especially since there's about a 50% chance someone will wander in who WILL be serious in saying something like that

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

You'd think anyone reading our host regularly would have gotten sufficient practice in reading dryness by now...

[(Anonymous)]

Another parallel between the names Bren Cameron and Sten Duncan: both first names are types of gun.

I have a theory that the Faded Sun trilogy is another of Cherrhy's attempts to take existing SF situations and see how they'd really work. Chanur is intelligent lions, Serpent's Reach is giant ants, the Rider books are Lackey-style telepathically bonded horses. Faded Sun is, specifically, Dune: an outsider joins a warrior race from a harsh world with a female priest class and a history of oppression and migration. The senior Regul are also incredibly fat and need suspensor globes or something similar to get around, which seems like a deliberate homage to Baron Harkonnen. And, as you say, in true Cherryh style Sten Duncan does not get to be the Mighty Whitey.

-- Paul Clarke

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Going in the other direction, there's something Regul senior about Jabba the Hutt: until Lucas started re-editing his films with added CGI, one couldn't really imagine him getting around on his own.

(BTW, is it a fraction of the Regul fighting all of humanity, or fractions vs fractions?)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Faded Sun has always felt like a reexamination/deconstruction of Dune to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! I am not alone!

-- Paul Clarke

Mri

[(Anonymous)]

I enjoyed the series. However, one thing I think I remember from it that bothered me was that it seemed to imply the Mri were aliens, despite them being essentially identical (physically) to humans.

Is that actually in the book, or is my memory wrong, or did the latter books explain this in some sort of fashion?

The problem with the Mri being humans is that human civilization in Union/Alliance doesn't seem to be old enough to have spawned lost colonies, and there's no real implication that the Regul ever visited Earth as "ancient astronauts."

(Hmm: weird fanwank: since the Mri series and the Morgaine series are both tenuously in Union/Alliance The Mri are actually descendants from one of the worlds in the Morgaine series via gate that connects to their homeworld... they're from a branch of humans lost in space/time).

Re: Mri

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Whenever possible, blame the qhal.

Re: Mri

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Or the pre-qhal. Options!

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling that the mri caste structure (adults are divided into warrior kel, scholarly sen and nurturing kath) is based on a specific anthropological model popular in the 1970s. In fact, I am pretty sure I have read an essay that discusses Cherryh’s sources for the mri. Rather frustratingly, I cannot find the essay. Does anyone here know where it might be found—or even that it exists?

I don't know which essay you read, but that sounds like Georges Dumezil's Trifunctional hypothesis about Proto-Indo-European social structure.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I could swear I read somewhere that mri society was based on the Tuareg, but this was over a decade ago and I have no idea of where I read this. And I don't know enough about the Tuareg to know if this is plausible.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia! No source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mri_%28fictional_alien_species%29

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I made the mistake of reading the second book first, and was completely baffled (it was also my first Cherryh). Months later I read the first book and things made much more sense.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I did the same thing, and I've always wondered if that might have colored my whole impression of Cherryh afterwards. Because actually, that abrupt and baffling reading experience was kind of great, like a distillation of the experience.

[hand2hand.livejournal.com]

I adored these books when they first came out, and kicked myself for years for letting my hardback Science Fiction Book Club editions go in a garage sale.

I recently bought the reissued omnibus and really need to reread them.

I let my one-volume Morgaine book go, too. Really need to buy that again.

Thanks for the reminder!

[melita66.livejournal.com]

Is it Melien or Melein?

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

It's Melein.

[melita66.livejournal.com]

My post was a perhaps too oblique hunt to James that the former is in the review.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

You hunt obliquely? I guess that makes it harder for your prey to spot you.
:)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angle-y."

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

The Dumezil hypothesis sounds more likely, but I was always put in mind of Plato's Republic. (I think it was the malleable memory of the warrior caste (Kel? It's been a while.), more than anything else, that made me think that.)