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Feb. 9th, 2019 08:23 pmWhoo. I don't think anyone's quite so good at taking me outside my own head as CJ Cherryh is. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say no one is quite so good at taking my head somewhere else. I still remember being in the middle of reading the Finisterre duology and waking mornings wildly disoriented and thinking tall grass, tall grass because I didn't want to broadcast awkward truths or alert what might be out there. For a short while she damn near rewrote my brain.
I love books that can do that to me. I'm human and I relate, very much, to being human; I've had issues with my society and my culture and my fellow humans, and I've felt odd and lonely at times, but I've never really felt outside it all. I say this because I know people for whom that isn't true! And it's something that informs the way media touches me.
The joy of alien sci-fi and inhuman fantasy lies in how they're some of the few things that really challenge me to go elsewhere. I struggle with wrapping my head around social structures and ways of thinking that are truly different from what I know, and in that struggle I learn a little something about myself, on top of getting to feel like my brain just did push-ups for a few hours. Even fairly simple stories and writing, like the Books of the Raksura, can throw me if they're sufficiently Not Human. I reflexively read everything in the patterns of feeling that I'm used to, and it's a thrill when something successfully forces me out of that.
I don't know if I'd be any good at writing it myself; but how would I know? Anything that comes from my own head will feel familiar.
...anyway. I finished Cuckoo's Egg. In many ways it was a repetition of other books of hers (easiest to see echoes of Foreigner in there), but it was a good ride and the climax still managed to fling one last little twist at me. On to Serpent's Reach! >:)
I love books that can do that to me. I'm human and I relate, very much, to being human; I've had issues with my society and my culture and my fellow humans, and I've felt odd and lonely at times, but I've never really felt outside it all. I say this because I know people for whom that isn't true! And it's something that informs the way media touches me.
The joy of alien sci-fi and inhuman fantasy lies in how they're some of the few things that really challenge me to go elsewhere. I struggle with wrapping my head around social structures and ways of thinking that are truly different from what I know, and in that struggle I learn a little something about myself, on top of getting to feel like my brain just did push-ups for a few hours. Even fairly simple stories and writing, like the Books of the Raksura, can throw me if they're sufficiently Not Human. I reflexively read everything in the patterns of feeling that I'm used to, and it's a thrill when something successfully forces me out of that.
I don't know if I'd be any good at writing it myself; but how would I know? Anything that comes from my own head will feel familiar.
...anyway. I finished Cuckoo's Egg. In many ways it was a repetition of other books of hers (easiest to see echoes of Foreigner in there), but it was a good ride and the climax still managed to fling one last little twist at me. On to Serpent's Reach! >:)
