Downbelow Station

Downbelow Station acts as the foundation of Cherryh's expansive Alliance-Union universe, within which there are several series that tackle mostly unrelated storylines. Pell Station, which hangs in orbit over the habitable and inhabited world Downbelow, serves as a major port of call for traders within the delicate supply chain of human colonized space. Pell has always tried to maintain their neutrality in a long standing and hot conflict between Earth, with their increasingly beleaguered and disaffected fleet, and the Union, a much stronger group of planets on the edge of colonized space that have seemingly unlimited resources and clones. How will Pell manage when the war reaches perhaps its explosive conclusion on its doorstep, with both factions positioning themselves for a hostile takeover? Simultaneously, how will Pell manage its bloated population of antagonistic and starving refugees from nearby evacuation stations? Pell finds itself precisely in between the rock and the hard place, with mere days to squirm its way out before being figuratively and perhaps literally destroyed.

Initially I was more than captivated with Downbelow Station's premise and detailed political intrigue. It reminds me a great deal of the Star Trek Series Deep Space Nine, a space opera much more focused on the courtrooms, ethics, and political agreements between species than lasers and violence. Unfortunately, these echoes were only able to carry me for so long into a four hundred page book that felt much more like fourteen thousand pages.

>Cherryh's prose isn't all that bad, but is so filled with cold exposition that it requires the reader to have the patience of a deified Buddhist monk. Towards the end of the novel there is an increase in real action, suspense, and reward, but at what cost? I felt as though I were a donkey chasing the carrot only to have it ripped out from between my teeth on several occasions. It's painful, slow, and remarkably dull to read, in no small part because of how removed I felt from the plot. I never found myself caring about the fate of any of the numerous characters who, by-in-large, felt too similar to one another.

Unmentioned so far is the bumbling and poorly drawn alien race, regrettably referred to as "Downers", who speak in a teeth-grittingly bad childish version of English, even when they are supposedly conversing in their native language. The Downers end up being an unfortunate inclusion to the story, better to have been edited out entirely. There's more than enough other stuff happening.

>A real disappointment. Perhaps I'll have better luck with Cherryh's slimmer works.