A review by scribal
Forty Thousand in Gehenna, by C.J. Cherryh
5.0
There are a lot of books that imagine what it would be like to reboot human society on a new world--very few of them seem to get beyond the mechanics of reinventing soap and marriage. Cherryh starts way beyond that.
Cherryh's one of my favorite authors but when I first read this book it was not easy to get into. It was only after I started seeing the full shape of the story that I began to really appreciate it. That's fitting because within the story, it's only when the full shapes of things are seen that they can be understood. I reread it recently with that in mind and the beginning had much more resonance.
What I love particularly about this book are the ideas of language and pattern and abstract thinking....and questioning human interpretations. This is an early book of Cherryh's and the ideas are not as fully and slickly developed as in some of her later work but I think it's still one of my favorites.
Cherryh's one of my favorite authors but when I first read this book it was not easy to get into. It was only after I started seeing the full shape of the story that I began to really appreciate it. That's fitting because within the story, it's only when the full shapes of things are seen that they can be understood. I reread it recently with that in mind and the beginning had much more resonance.
What I love particularly about this book are the ideas of language and pattern and abstract thinking....and questioning human interpretations. This is an early book of Cherryh's and the ideas are not as fully and slickly developed as in some of her later work but I think it's still one of my favorites.