(no subject)

[sideways]

Whoo. 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! >:)

Comments

[dray]

It's been a long time since I've read any of her books, but I remember them standing out to me for exactly that reason. Everything read felt a little like coming out of a haze of a dream not quite remembered. She wrote strangely, but very effectively.

Only one thing for it but to try a bit, if you want to write like it. I would say, what is something that feels so far outside of your normal experiences, and how could you get into the perspective of a prospective alien to make it seem as natural as breathing--or of hashtagging a movement or a moment, if you want to think more along the lines of lately conceived social norms.

[sideways]

Haha, "like coming out of a haze of a dream" is a good way to put it.

I wouldn't call it an urgent goal, but it's interesting to muse on at least. Do you have any idea what kind of alien perspective you'd choose to explore? (Or have?)

[dray]

I've been playing through dryads and dragons where they interface with humans, trying to come up with things that humans take for granted that are new to them. Though I wouldn't say that it's on the same page as Cherryh, I've also been slaloming through Naomi Novik's Temeraire series and she does a delightful job of showcasing dragons' natural hoarding and (in some cases) meritocracy and how it rarely parses exactly with the way humans organize their cultures. That series is like popcorn with a seasoning of early 1800's European history.

[sideways]

Ah! :D I can't claim to be a hardcore Temeraire fan since ironically the Australia book killed me stone dead, but I'm still fond of the series overall and I can re-read the first one in particular endlessly. The detail of the dragons and their psychology was definitely one of its stand-out features.

[dray]

It did feel different from the first few, didn't it? I also found it less engaging than the first few, but I get that she was doing some world-exploring and some AUing of actual history there. I can't claim that the rest are exactly like the first, but she definitely starts looping her plots back around and together again, and the last two books I plowed through without quite being able to stop. She gets a nice balance of being able to have fun with tropes and indulging in how historical parallels could have gone, and how they still manage to mirror our own world in some ways.