Alternate Realities: Three Short Novels: Port Eternity / Wave without a Shore / Voyager in Night Book

I picked up this collection from the library because I really wanted to read Voyager in Night again - I think it's the best science fiction horror story I've ever read. It's certainly one of the most memorable, with characters called things like <>, <^>, and ====. I see some reviewers had issues with this; maybe it's because I am a programmer, but for me, this was actually surprisingly readable.

Three people - a brother, a sister, and the sister's husband - own a small ship. It's not up to much but it's what they've wanted since they were orphaned, so they can control their own destinies. After a successful first run they get captured by a mysterious ship and taken far, far away from any other humans. Two of them die, and one survives, but all of them have their state mapped by the ship before they die, and it then recreates them from these templates multiple times.

Sometimes <> doesn't get it right, and effectively tortures them. Sometimes another part of the ship captures one of the copies. Sometimes <> assumes the identity of one of the copies to impersonate another. Sometimes they interact with the survivor. It's full of identity crises and explorations of how people handle trauma.

For a story that was published in 1984, this still feels remarkably fresh and prescient. (For better or worse, with a little tweaking, it could be a Black Mirror episode.)

Voyager in Night is actually the second story here, but I got excited and started talking about that before the others.

Port Eternity is the first story, and fairly straightforward. It touched on the Alliance-Union universe - particularly the Union side - with the tape-grown staff for Lady Dela. The story (and maybe even the title) flags that the characters may be wrong about what's happening fairly early, and that means it drags a little in the middle section. I found it hard to care about the details of their preparations for a situation I was pretty sure they'd misinterpreted.

Possibly this is a Cherryh thing. Downbelow Station, which is another book of hers that I really enjoyed, has similar pacing: slow for perhaps two thirds or even three quarters of the book, and then sudden acceleration towards the end.

On the plus side, I think by being first it serves as a nice warm-up for Voyager in Night, as this is also about something strange capturing a spaceship in the depths of space. This has a simpler approach, however, and a more optimistic one.

The third story, Wave Without a Shore, has a very different plot - two prodigies at a university on a remote planet try to impose their reality on the other. The people who live there don't recognise the existence of the other sentient species with whom they share the planet, or people who do. (So if you acknowledge an Ahnit, you are also an Outsider and therefore not noticed.) It's a lot like The City & the City in that respect.

The pacing here is like that in Port Eternity, and I found this really dragged in the middle section. Once the main character experiences their crisis, the plot starts to move much faster.

These are all enjoyable stories. Obviously Voyager in Night was my personal favourite, but I'd recommend all of them. CJ Cherryh is a very distinctive and underrated author, and I'd love to see her work be more widely-known.