Cuckoo's Egg

I've only read a few Cherryh novels but none have failed to impress me yet (including the amazing Cyteen, one of the best SF novels I've ever read), particularly how she manages to keep everything in a consistent universe (the Alliance-Union series, for those taking notes) while spinning off any number of stories about different people in different parts of the giant canvas she's constructed. While I like overarcing plots and continuing stories just as much as the next guy, I love the possibilities of this setup, since any story could conceivably happen against this background, it's only really bordered by her imagination. And what ideas she has. Cherryh isn't a "hard SF" writer, and more often she deals with the fine details of characterization and interactions and the like, all of which to me resonate more on an emotional level than watching a writer go through the motions and prove some obscure law of physics with his plot. Sometimes you want to learn and sometimes you want to be entertained. In this book, we have the exact setup that the title suggests, a boy is raised on an alien world and realizes quite early on that he's not quite like anyone else who lives there. The whys and hows are left until nearly the end, as Cherryh drips hints little by little, but it's the interactions that count for the most here, whether their between the boy, Haras and his "father" Dunn, or Dunn and the other people of his race, or Haras and others, the book sparkles, keeping it's own momentum even when it's just people standing around and talking. Cherryh manages to craft an entire alien culture without requiring the reader to go read a separate sourcebook, giving us just enough details to fill in the blanks, making them not so alien that we can't relate to them but giving us a general sense of their "alieness" (along the lines of visiting an unfamiliar country with an utterly new culture). The style of the book is notable as well, in keeping with the alien viewpoints, Cherryh affects a brilliant use of minimalism and stream of consciousness, driving the book along with short, to the point sentences, breaking it up with cascading series of phrases illustrating thoughts, giving the book a taut, lean feel that almost makes it feel like it's from another world. In the end the plot is almost secondary, she immerses you in this new world and makes you care about these people who aren't us and in a genre where people try to be as weird as possible, this is something indeed. One of her best book, although not as famous as the oft-mentioned Cyteen or Downbelow Station (also excellent reads), this is well worth checking out for fans of literate, well thought out SF, and remains an underappreciated and minor masterpiece of the genre.

Following the interception of a spaceship of unusually high capability, crewed by creatures from a world nine light years distant, the cat-like, judge warrior, Duun-Hatani becomes the central figure in a covert programme through which a human baby boy is genetically engineered from the last of the spaceship's dead crew. He calls the boy - Thorn. Duun gambles that, Thorn, after becoming integrated into their society and, through the use of archive material - mostly tape recordings - found on the spaceship, will become sufficiently well versed in human traits, also, that he can mediate between the two cultures, if they should meet up, again, sometime in the future. From Duun's perspective this could be next decade or next week: neither he nor anyone else are sure of the spaceship's real capability despite having duplicated one, and Duun's people are incapable of speaking or interpreting the information on the tapes. It is hoped that Thorn will have inherited some instinctive means by which he can grasp the meaning of the tape recordings. This turns out to be the case. Duun has Thorn send a message. And they wait.Like the rest of C.J.C's Sci-Fi I have read, Cuckoo's Egg primarily concerns itself with the characters' motivation and the thinking behind it, imbuing her books with a high degree of reader-character association. I find this adds an extra dimension to what would be fairly standard for the genre in terms of action, technology, and plot, creating stories, which transcend the limitations of such; a robustness that makes me remember them much more easily than would usually be the case with others' work. Readers of Cuckoo's Egg should also find the following worthwhile: Cyteen, and the Foreigner series, both of which draw quite heavily on Cuckoo's Egg for some of their inner details.

I first read Cuckoo's Egg in 1986 and, when I thought about the most interesting speculative works I'd read, my thoughts often drifted back to this story. I finally decided it was time to add it to my library. It's an excellent retelling of the fable of the changeling, seen from an unusual perspective.

I was browsing the library shelves when I saw this book. I was interested in the title, but the cover art pulled me in. I flipped the book open with one hand as I was walking to my car....about an hour later, I noticed that I had blown my lunch hour and should've been back at work 20 minutes ago! The depth of the characters in this book is wonderful. The story gives nothing away - it entertains without letting you guess what will happen until - it happens! No other author I've ever read had the talent to do that. The others either throw something in at the end which has no tie at all to the threads of the story (Asimov, for one, with apologies to fans of the Doctor) or they give the plot away halfway through the book. Not so with Cherryh - the reader is as clueless about the character's future as the character is. It is as if you live the action of the book with the charcter. Wonderful writing! Read and enjoy.

I just finished reading this book, and found it so moving--what a wonderful book! It was gripping from beginning to end, and beautifully written. I marked this passage on page 158 of my edition in which Thorn, one of the main characters, is moved to tears at his first sight of the world from space, and how he wipes his tears away "and a droplet floated free from his fingertip, perfect, a wobbling orb like the world in space." That is a perfect image in itself, but it is also symbolic of the war going on below them, and the mourning it is causing.The plot of the book is summarized in the jacket quote and another on-line review. I will only add that it revolves around the main character's solution to his world's problem: come to know your enemy (aliens, in this case) intimately, and come to love them--like sons, even--and you cannot kill them: with the hope that the aliens will do the same for you.In this book, Cherryh develops a cast of memorable characters that will live with me for a long time. I highly recommend this book.