C.J. Cherryh's Short Fiction for Fans and Critics Alike

C.J. Cherryh is an award-winning speculative fiction novelist who already has a legion of fans, but her woefully underrated short fiction is sure to win over a few more. Admittedly, Cherryh writes with a tangled pen--sometimes her prose is so awkward that the reader is forced to go over a phrase three or four times to decipher its meaning. Because of this tendency for odd phrasing, and because of the different approaches she seems to take to fantasy and science fiction writing, readers often fall into one of three camps.

Either they love her fantasy, they love her science fiction, or they don't like either. I fell into the latter camp. I was not impressed with Cherryh's highly lauded Morgaine cycle, and wondered what all the fuss was about. That is, until the collected short fiction of C.J. Cherryh fell into my lap.

Through this collection, I came to realize that Cherryh has eclectic interests with a strong taste for history and she brings a sociological perspective to her work seldom seen in other genre short fiction. Her educational background includes archeology and a degree in classics from Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, and it's this background that seems to bring her Sunfall short stories to life.

Each of the Sunfall stories is set in a far future earth when the sun is dying, and cities have even more character than they do today. Almost every short story of this collection is memorable because Cherryh does not overly dwell on the speculative elements of her story--she instead illuminates the ordinary in extraordinary ways. Her Sunfall story set in future Paris tells a haunting tale about unrequited love that not only honors the character of the city of love, but sheds light on the fickleness of the human heart. There is magic in the story, certainly. But like Paris itself, the story focuses on the magic of human attraction.