(This post was for the February reading thread but is really too long for that. I'll stick it here. If more people have read this book and post, it'll change from a question thread to a general discussion thread (though I'd still be interested in an answer to the original question).)
Finished C.J. Cherryh's Finity's End last night. Otherwise known as "Dude, Where's My Stick?" I've rarely if ever read a book that was such a mixture of bad and good and, if it hadn't been both Cherryh and Union/Alliance, I never would have made it past the beginning. This would be a YA book complete with a 17 year old implausibly virginal protagonist and even younger co-star except that it's 564 pages long and I've never heard of a YA book like that. The first 50 pages spent planetside/stationside were stupefyingly boring; the next 50 spent fighting about whether or not to go shipside were very boring; the next 50 pages spent starting to adjust to ship life were boring. 150 pages in, when classic SF would be in the final 40-50 pages of climactic action, and we've basically done nothing but tell the reader 67 times that Fletcher Neihart has had a rough life. Boy meets planet/girl; boy loses planet/girl. The next 100 pages aren't much better. Aside from that repetition, part of how we jack our book up to 564 pages involves things like a paragraph that's a solid page long which consists of variations on "there were pickles and syrups and stuffed pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat breads and meals and pro-paste pepper rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups" repeated for the page (p.185-6). And the final sequence, which runs from 482-564 ends in a silly, melodramatic fashion in a way that completely fails to balance the big and little pictures or plausibly unite them, IMO. I mean, it technically may but truth may also be stranger than fiction. It feels melodramatic, silly, and wrong.
So I find it completely bizarre that the middle chunk, from about 243-482, was pretty damned good. However implausible some aspects of Fletcher Neihart are and however implausible some of his and the other characters' changes are, the overall impression is of an excellent character, nearly as well done in the case of the nominally lovable Dennis the Space-Menace (aka Jeremy, the 12 year old sort of kid brother-type) who, honestly, seems like a demon or albatross round Fletcher's neck but, if you sort of look past that, is interesting in his own right. And not bad depictions of James Robert Neihart, Sr. and JR (James Robert, Jr.), either. And the conflict between all these people and, especially, of Fletcher and Chad/Connor/Sue is initially very well done from a psychological level, even if it seems bizarre to me that even a Merchanter ship of "family" would be so undisciplined as to allow multiple fights and chronic disrespect of senior officers.
Anyway - not a total loss but easily my least favorite Merchanter book and well down on the list of Cherryh books in general. It just makes me groan in dismay when I read reviews blurbs on this book saying "SF at its very best" from Publisher's Weekly and even "Cherryh's best novel since Cyteen" from Locus. Because it's long and boring and is a "novel of character"? I will say in PW's defense that, if you were unfamiliar with the Merchanter milieu, it might be more impressive because it might seem all shiny and new but, if you are familiar, it breaks little or no new ground and spends a lot of time describing things you already know. Yet it can't be recommended as an entry point, either, because it's just not that good and also, to me, seems to presuppose a lot of familiarity. Neither fish nor fowl there.
Stray point 1: Cherryh's pseudo-1st person narrative, where the narrator speaks the characters presumed thoughts - "Damn right he was mad. The hell he was going to take that from anyone." (example; not quote) - is annoying in this book, perhaps because the narrator so rarely shuts up to describe action or allow characters to have dialog. She uses it frequently and I don't know it's ever the best idea but it usually works better than here.
Stray point 2: if you're looking for an extreme antidote to post-human post-Singularity fiction, this could be the ticket. Aspects of this 1997 novel are largely unchanged from 1981's Downbelow Station. Kids working in kitchens and laundries and dumping out containers to look for bombs rather than even being able to scan them with a gizmo. Despite being on spaceships and space stations and occasionally talking to aliens, there's minimal SF content here. IOW, a kid could have been taken from a foster home where he'd hung out near an Indian reservation (and been given a stick) and taken on a cruise ship with his rich family, stopping in various ports while they worked on business deals and it'd basically be the same story. I usually like the anti-Singularity stuff but this is a bit overkill.
Basically, for some form of Cherryh/Merchanter completist, well, this is one of those, so you need it, but I don't recommend it otherwise.
Or maybe it's partly a margin issue - the Aspect doesn't have overly generous margins, but they might have been able to fit in another line at the bottom margin.
