Okay, so I seem to be updating my GoodReads page again rather than this site. I wish I could make up my mind.

Finally. I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. To remind me what was going on in the story, I reread Deliverer and loved it again.

Conspirator was worth waiting for. I am always amazed by how Cherryh makes me feel more comfortable with the extremely etiquette-conscious aliens and really embarrassed about the humans.

Here’s a little more detail I wrote about this series when I first picked it up.

I’ve actually listened to this twice—once when it first came out, and then again when my book club picked it.

Both times, I enjoyed it. Vowell reads the audiobook herself, and I love the way she delivers lines.

One of the biggest problems I had with the book was that it was hard to keep track of the people, even though I minored in history and still read history and had heard of most of the people she was talking about. Probably this was a problem because I was listening rather than reading.

The other problem I had was that it felt too short, somehow, like it was just getting good and then it was over. I wanted more information about Williams and Hutchinson, especially. Of course, some of my fellow book clubbers didn’t like the book enough to finish it, so perhaps for them it was too long.

I liked it. I liked the focus on how intellectual the early settlers were, and how each of the people Vowell describes had their own firm beliefs, which were actually quite different from each other (and occasionally rather internally inconsistent, especially with regard to the indigenous people). I think Vowell did a good job of picking apart the settlers’ fussiness about God and laws, state vs. religion, and showing how it still affects us now. Plus, funny.

I don’t know. I have been feeling like resurrecting this blog for a while. And yesterday was my birthday, so I sort of feel like it’s a time of starting new things. Or resuming old things. Whatever.

I’m in the middle of reading this trilogy for the third time. I’ve read all of Czerneda’s stuff, and I think this is the best three books. She’s so good at weaving together plot and character development and science. And it’s really interesting science–a lot of evolutionary biology stuff.

I guess if I really wanted to find something wrong, I could say that sometimes the lines delivered by one particular male character  are a bit melodramatic, especially when he is trying to say something romantic.

But that is so minor compared to how Czerneda manages to go through a whole trilogy of really long books, juggling dozens of characters (many of them aliens) and giving them all distinct personalities with believable growth and change. I’m trying to write a single novel, with just a few characters, and I can’t figure out how to delineate one character from another. Something of this size and complexity, well, I’m very impressed.

If you like science fiction, read this. If you aren’t sure whether you like science fiction, read this.