If you haven’t read any of C.J. Cherryh’s incredibly intelligent, complex, thought-provoking, entertaining science fiction or fantasy, \u00a0 perhaps you don’t know how deserved this announcement is, and why some of us met it today with “About time!”\u00a0\u00a0 Cherryh has published somewhere the far side of 60 novels and many, many shorter works (though I think her novel series–very long arc stories–are her real metier, since they give her the space she needs to tell the kinds of stories she does.)\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Those of you who have read her works know exactly why she deserves to be named Grandmaster.\u00a0\u00a0 You know she\u00a0 creates characters who are fully rounded, who have agency, whose motivations (however weird they have been to me at times) make sense within the cultures where they exist.\u00a0 Her many varied cultures are grounded in foundations of biology, geology, terrain, political systems consonant with their biology, economic systems consonant with their location and resources.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 She can write old people, young people, middle aged people (people including her many alien species),\u00a0 male\/female\/other people,\u00a0 people with distinctively *different* personalities, talents, limitations.\u00a0\u00a0 She can write action; she can write mood; she can write intellect; she can write emotion…and she can write in both branches of our super-genre, SF\/F.<\/p>\n
I have admired her work from the first, when I read Kesrith: Faded Sun<\/em> serialized in a magazine (I think Galaxy<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We still buy her books as soon as they show up in the stores and sometimes end up with two copies because neither of us wants to wait out the other’s reading speed.\u00a0\u00a0 She’s won awards, of course (though I think she should have won more) and her winning honored the awards as much as they honored her.\u00a0\u00a0 She is one of the great writers in our field; she would have been a great writer in any field she chose.<\/p>\n Grandmaster Cherryh:\u00a0 finally.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Finally.\u00a0 And forever on that short list.\u00a0\u00a0 She’ll receive the award formally at this year’s Nebula Awards ceremony (where, alas, I can’t be to stand up and cheer.)<\/p>\n In lieu of that,\u00a0 the Universes section of Huygens Waystation will hold an all night party in her honor.\u00a0 Come as a Cherryh character and receive a free drink.<\/p>\n (mirrored on http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you haven’t read any of C.J. Cherryh’s incredibly intelligent, complex, thought-provoking, entertaining science fiction or fantasy, \u00a0 perhaps you don’t know how deserved this announcement is, and why some of us met it today with “About time!”\u00a0\u00a0 Cherryh has published somewhere the far side of 60 novels and many, many shorter works (though I Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[14,13],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-writers","tag-awards","tag-writer-to-read"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}