The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

by C.J. Cherryh

Daw is thrilled to present the first and only complete and comprehensive volume of C.J. Cherryh's short fiction in trade paperback.

Featuring the short stories, novellas, and novelettes-including the award-winning story, Cassandra, and a new novella written specifically for this book-of the multiple award-winning author, this volume is a must-have for fans and newcomers alike.

This publication is both an omnibus and a collection as it contains two previous collections, Sunfall (1981) and Visible Light (1986), plus 15 extra stories.

Introduction (Sunfall) essay
Prologue (Sunfall)
"The Haunted Tower (London)"
"Ice (Moscow)"
"Nightgame (Rome)"
"Highliner (New York)"
"The General (Peking)"
"MasKs (Venice)"
Introduction to MasKs essay
Visible Light (introduction) essay
Introduction (Visible Light) (1986) essay
Untitled: Visible Light (part 1 of 7)
"Cassandra"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 2 of 7)
"The Threads of Time"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 3 of 7)
"Companions"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 4 of 7)
"A Thief in Korianth"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 5 of 7)
"The Last Tower"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 6 of 7)
"The Brothers"
Untitled: Visible Light (part 7 of 7)
"The Dark King"
"Homecoming"
"The Dreamstone"
"Sea Change
"Willow"
"Of Law and Magic"
"The Unshadowed Land"
"Pots"
"The Scapegoat"
"A Gift of Prophecy"
"Wings"
"A Much Briefer History of Time"
"Gwydion and the Dragon"
"Mech"
"The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB"

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Anthologies, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fiction, Collections

642 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title says it all ... I'd actually read about 2/3 of this in the past; Collected Short Fiction includes the complete contents of two earlier books (Sunfall from 1981, which was also the original source of the cover painting, and Visible Light from 1986, Cherryh's first short story collection). The remaining third is previously uncollected stories from the late 1970's until the early 2000's. In order:

Sunfall, the first portion of the collection, is a series of linked stories set in various cities of Earth in the exceedingly distant future -- kind of Cherryh's take on the Dying Earth. Each story is set in a different city, and the cities themselves are unique and are effectively characters in the stories -- for example, New York is now a conglomeration of impossibly tall towers, and the New York story is about a crew of construction workers. Cherryh also wrote one new Sunfall story (the only new story in the collection), this one set in Venice. It was fun to see her revisit the setting after all this time.

Visible Light, the second portion of the collection, is pretty much a straight reprint of the contents of the original 1986 edition, which presented the stories and also let Cherryh give some background information and other musings. Some are fantasy; some are SF. My favorites were probably "Companions" (an astronaut marooned on a planet with no animal life) and "A Thief in Korianth" (sword & sorcery originally written for one of Lin Carter's Flashing Swords anthologies).

The third part of the book, as mentioned, is an assortment of previously-uncollected tales -- I expect these are most or all of Cherryh's short fiction output that wasn't part of various shared-world anthologies (Thieves' World, Heroes in Hell, etc.). Several of the stories seem to have been written for themed anthologies; all are quite good. Most of the fantasy stories here (and, in fact, most of the fantasy stories in Visible Light) have a decidedly Celtic bent to them. I enjoyed them all but if I were to pick out a couple for particular mention they'd probably be "Pots" (SF; archaeologists investigate a dead world) and "Gwydion and the Dragon" (a young prince, a princess, a dragon, a curse -- standard ingredients but combined in unexpected ways).

[StarMan · Rating 4 out of 5]

RATING: 4 suns or thereabouts.

REVIEW: Fantasy & SF. Mostly 3-4 star tales, two 5-star memorable. Imaginative author Cherryh rarely disappoints.

Includes one of the best shorts I've ever read, entitled "Companions."

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it was the blank visor, maybe it was the rig--maybe it was everybody's guilt. With the sniffer tracking, you could see the stress around you, the faint red glow around honest citizens no different than the guy you were tracking, as if it was the whole world's guilt and fear and wrongdoing you were smelling, and everybody had some secret to keep and some reason to slink aside.

from "Mech"

C.J. Cherryh's collection of short fiction includes her previous anthologies Sunfall as well as Visible Light as well as other stories collected from the 1980s to early 2000s. It's a massive collection and to read from page one to page 640 takes patience and time. Cherryh offers fantasy as well as hard science fiction--and sometimes the two genres are blended into a unique confection. While not wholly consistent in quality (since some stories overstay their welcome and could have benefitted from editing), there's some real gems here: "Cassandra" (winner of a Hugo), "The Scapegoat," "Mech," and "The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB." I especially enjoyed "Scapegoat" and "The Sandman" since they were set in her Alliance-Union universe.

Overall, I recommend this collection to C.J. Cherryh completists with the caveat that some stories go on for a bit too long and there's often a shift in genre between one story and the next. At the end of the day, though, it's quintessentially C.J. Cherry. It's worth a read if you've the time and inclination.

Velocity and vector depended on the ship that, somewhere out there, fifty and more years ago, had fired what might be one, or a dozen inerts. There could be a whole swarm inbound, a decades-old broadside that wouldn't decay, or slow, or stop, forever, until it found a rock to hit or a ship full of people, or a space station, or a planet.

from "The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB"

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories are good for authors because they let them play with ideas that are either wildly different from what they would normally write and perhaps take ideas that can't be developed into a full brick of a novel into a still workable tale. Short story collections are often good for giving the reader a glimpse at what else an author can do besides what they might normally be used to without having to scour magazines and various anthologies to hunt down the interesting side trails, not unlike haunting record shops and online auction sites to find the obscure B-side of some beloved band, although the latter scenario does have a better chance of turning into the basis for a romantic comedy, while the former probably has a higher chance of making you the subject of some cautionary documentary, depending on how that obsession is taken.

Fortunately, at least in CJ Cherryh's case, her publisher was nice enough to come out with a large volume of collected short stories. It doesn't make any claims as to being complete and I'm not sure that it is, but as the author herself points out in the introduction, her output in that vein is fairly scant anyway so this is probably at best the cream of the crop, compiling two different out of print short story collections as well as various odds and ends that have appeared elsewhere.

For me, this is an opportunity to what else Cherryh has to offer. I have an inordinate fondness for her Alliance-Union novels, which merge action and space politics and a view of aliens that feels truly alien at times while still being accessible like no one else has ever really done, at least not to that extent. And while I know she's written other novels and other series, none of them have ever really grabbed me enough to make me want to try reading them. So what we have here is a welcome variety in a format that she herself admits isn't really her forte.

For the most part you can tell short stories seem to exist as a clearinghouse for ideas that don't quite have the thematic weight to carry an entire novel, although in the first collection, "Sunfall", she goes out of her way to theme each story after a famous city of the world, giving us future views of how the cities might develop without always sticking to strict science-fiction and more often than not venturing into fantasy (at least two of them, the Paris and the London tales, could be interpreted as ghost stories, though I suppose you could make a broad case for the Moscow one as well) . . . in generally every case the ideas are intriguing and in the New York story she manages to concoct a rather crackling political murder mystery case out of it. There's also one new story about Venice, which is entertaining enough without setting the world on fire. One thing that strikes me about her stories is how consistent she is . . . her stories have the mark of a master craftsman in the sense that you get the impression she doesn't write a short story (or anything, really) unless she's pretty confident of how the results are going to turn out. There's no wild experimentation at play here, no messing with story structure or points of view, they're well told and solidly told tales . . . sometimes I wish she took a few more chances but that's more a personal quirk than a comment on their quality.

The second collection is a little more of a mixed bag, despite having a Hugo Award winner amongst its members ("Cassandra", which oddly is one of the few that didn't do much for me). You have to be saddled with a slightly pretentious interstitial piece between each story where she talks to an unnamed person about stories and the ideas behind the various stories, which didn't seem totally necessary but it was probably part of the original collection. Fortunately you get more actual science-fiction this time out, with a more expansive story that might qualify as novella length ("Companions") that she makes work with just one actual character and one of those alien viewpoints she's great with, this one encompassing an entire world. She also manages a couple decent fantasy tales that play with some genre conventions ("A Thief in Korianth", which otherwise reads like one of her SF tales despite the inclusion of swords) although some of the fantasy tends to get bogged down somewhat in itself, until you're not entirely sure what's going on ("The Brothers" suffers a little from this, although it manages to nail the landing more or less and achieving some nice otherworldly moments).

In the last section of catch-all tales we finally start to get some Alliance-Union stories and, alas, accuse me of knowing what I like or being a space meat and potatoes kind of person, but I found those tales to be the best of the set, with "Scapegoat" managing a folded structure, layers of political considerations and an alien viewpoint that is vastly different but ultimately understandable, with an ending that even when you see it coming still hits like a punch in the gut. Some of the fantasy tales have touching moments ("Willow" in particular has a nice final line and "Sea Change" is creepy and touching, no mean feat). The fantasy tale I enjoyed the most consistently through was "Of Law and Magic" which takes a clever premise of an alternate world and has some fun with it. But it's the Alliance Union tales that feel the most grounded in actual stakes ("Mech" comes close, mostly by being gritty) and even when she's being somewhat goofy (the instant messaging sequences in the last tale), there's an urgent clatter and intensity to her space stories that all the fantasy and ghost stories, for all their merits are often somewhat lacking. If nothing else, it proves that the best place to experience Cherryh is in the novels (preferably the Alliance-Union ones, in my opinion) as the length gives her the room to really stretch out and develop the situations and themes but the short stories prove that she has more sides to her than what might first appear. You can imagine it as a sampler of sorts, keeping in mind that if you like these, there's only better ahead.

[Jennifer Povey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cherryh is an author who works best in longer forms. In fact, often in very long forms - her Foreigner series is pretty much science fiction's Wheel of Time.

This curated collection of the best of her short fiction, though, does contain some true gems. My favorite was probably "Of Law and Magic," a novelette originally published in Moonsinger's Friends. I also liked "Gwydion and the Dragon," a novella that earned a World Fantasy award.

And even her bad stories are better than a lot of people's good ones. You can see how she earned her place as a Grand Master.

I did find the science error in the Sunfall stories somewhat egregious. I won't say what it is, but read for it and see if you can find it.

Even if you already own Sunfall and Visible Light you might find this worth getting as the best stories are the ones not from those collections.

Her novels are still better, but this collection is worth a read.

[Jemppu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 to 4 stars. Reading updates.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple good, a lot of average and a few poor stories. Nothing particularly memorable.

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A huge range of stories: hard sci fi, high fantasy, alternate reality. The quality is mostly good, with some baffling, at least one or two hilarious, and a few that are stunningly beautiful. I'd pretty much recommend this book to anyone.

[Gregg Wingo · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, folks, I am going to use a term that I absolutely hate: speculative fiction. There is no other way to describe what C.J. Cherryh does in this collection. She illustrates her mastery of SF, fantasy, horror, detective stories, and Classicalism - her formal field of study. Not only does she cover them all she mixes them to create something astoundingly nove and in the shorter storytelling formats no less. This is, of course, best realized and recognized in the Hugo Award winning "Cassandra" which combines nuclear holocaust SF with the Greek myth of the doomed Trojan princess.

The collection is divided into three parts. The first is a previously released end-of-the-world collection, "Sunfall", with tales centered on the once great cities of a dying Earth. This section has been lengthened with a new tale concerning Venice. The second section is an expansion of the 1986 collection "Visible Light". There are no "new" stories added to this collection but rather pieces published in other collections from 1978-84 have been attached including the aforementioned "Cassandra" and "A Thief in Korianth". The final section entitled "Other Stories" is just that and includes tales from the late 70s to 2002. They are a welcomed addendum including gems such as the haunting "Willow, the tragic "Pots", and the police thriller "Mech".

Jumping genres may be more challenging for the reader than it clearly ever was for the author. Cherryh is a master of SF but this book will leave no doubt she could have shined in any speculative fiction category.

[Carl Barlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Large collection of Cherryh shorts. This is not her preferred form, nor is it her best (as evidenced by the fact that all the longer entries here are the most enjoyable), but, nevertheless (and because it's Cherryh), this is an excellent read.

The whole first section is her Sunfall collection of Dying Earth-type tales. I've -very favourably- reviewed this elsewhere, so won't dwell, except to say that she's written an addition especially for TCSF: it centres on Venice, is lush, languid, beautiful... but could very easily be historical fiction of the Renaissance.

The second section has also been published separately, its stories interlinked with fictionalised insights into their creation and the author's attitude to them. Here are Fantasy tales intermixed with SF, some of which allude, or are directly connected, to more well-known series (Morgaine, the Alliance-Union sequence). Their only similarity is Cherryh's unique, intimate style, drawing the reader in to the deeds of -surely!- real people in situations anything but.

The final third covers stories from the eighties into the early two thousands, and again is a more or less equal mix of Fantasy and SF, from the Faerie Folk to Cyberpunk Noir.

There is nothing here to waste any genre reader's time. Quality ranges from -at minimum- good, to superb, with the preponderance grouping toward the latter levels. A recommended collection showcasing a talent at home almost anywhere in genre fiction.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Individually I would rate a few of the stories at 4 stars and others at 5, so I took the 4.5 average and rounded up.

I first read a story by Cherryh back in the 1980's though I cannot recall the title. Fast forward 30 years to the present and upon searching the sci-fi section and plumbing my memory for someone who made a lasting impact on me, Cherryh's name popped up. I figured a collection of short stories would be a good starting place.

I love her concepts and how she plumbs them out. Her vast knowledge of human history, of human frailty, and of human perseverance shine through in her writings.

The entire Sunfall series is a litany of ideas set near the end of existence on Earth as the sun is dying and humanity has reached its logical evolutionary ends.

The other truly outstanding story, at least in my mind, is COMPANIONS. Cherryh's portrayal of a marooned man on a foreign planet where it appears he is the only living being , his only companion a robot, is haunting in its beauty and Orwellian in resolution.

This is a book which in future will be reread in portions whenever I yearn for a short story to read.

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are always stories you like the best, and ones you weren't quite so keen on. But this is brilliant.
I've read a lot of her novels, some good, some ok.

Her shorts though, are outstanding. It's a pity she didn't write more of them.
Sunfall, the first portion of the collection, is a series of linked stories set in various cities of Earth in the exceedingly distant future -- some are ghost stories, some fantasy, some SF. My favourites were Paris and London.

Visible Light, the second portion of the collection, is pretty much a straight reprint of the contents of the original 1986 edition. Some are fantasy; some are SF. My favourites were A Thief in Korianth and Cassandra.


The third part of the book is a mixture, some faerie, some SF. POts is about a dead world and did the inhabitants get off before, what exactly? Catastrophe happened? I won't spoil it, but it was rather good.

You should buy this book, it is well worth it and shows her writing at it's best IMO.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collects Sunfall (a collection about Earth's great cities in the final age of the world), Visible Light (Cherry's first short fiction collection) and various uncollected stories. Quality is variable, but the best stuff is good enough for a four star average. The weakest part was actually the individual introductions to the Visible Light stories, in which Cherryh tries to be deep and fails miserably. Overall I prefer the fantasy stories to the SF, but that's personal taste. Long, but very few wasted pages.

[Groucho42 · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title says, a big collection. She's one of the few authors who can write both science fiction and fantasy and this collection shows it.

All of Sunfall, an early collection, can be ignored. The stories were simplistic and trite. The rest were hit and miss, great to annoying.

My favorite two were "The Scapegoat" and "Wings". The first is a wonderfully poignant look at war and misunderstanding. The second is a funny little ditty. Completely different emotions but both hit their notes perfectly.

[Myridian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I still consider Cherryh one of my favorite authors. These stories weren't bad and some of them were wonderful, but the majority were so good at evoking a bleak, sometimes macabre settings where larger forces ran over the characters and frequently made their lives miserable despite their own striving. This was definitely true of the Sunfall series of stories. It is true that as the collection progressed there were more moments of lightness. Another disappointment to me was that the interludes in which Cherryh wrote what is presumably herself into intersteller airplane conversations with another traveler came across as pompously self satisfied. Like by looking into the void and bringing some interpretation back to the masses the writing is above it all. So I guess we are establishing that the void is probably not my favorite place to begin with, but I'm also not so sure that we need more void than we already have in our lives.

[Ben Root · Rating 4 out of 5]

CJ Cherryh is a novelist through and through, her strengths lying in world building and political intrigue. However, I liked her short stories as I get to see her playing around with ideas without the need for perfect polish. Her seamless weaving between fantasy and sci-fi and every speculation in between was really rewarding, shifting from grand/mythic to quiet fables.

I like reading authors in exploration, the guard feels down. Would love to see more traditional novelists release their loosies

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immersive

Reading each of these short stories takes time, for the best possible reason. Each one takes you deep into a unique world. Submerge and resurface too fast and you risk disorientation from the change. Like a sort of me talk version of the bends. My only wish was that each was longer.

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wide range of fantasy and science fiction stories by the celebrated author. I think she works better in long form, but there are at least a couple of excellent stories here.

One in particular, 'The Dark King,' is interesting prescient of Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman.'

Three and a half stars.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the stories weren't what I expected, but still an enjoyable read.

[Reet · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF
4 🌟 The Haunted Tower
5 🌟 Companions

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories that I read I enjoyed, but it was too much all at once.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting stories, but the disjointed writing style made it difficult for me to enjoy.

[Mason Holter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not every story is a hit, but each is independently impactful. The best of which are very much so.

[Viridian5 · Rating 3 out of 5]

It only took me a few months to finally finish The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh. I really am not cut out for books collecting short stories, and I far prefer Cherryh's novels. The introductions in the Visible Light section still read like lectures to me and annoy me. Still, there are some standouts here.

"The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB" is a story about the people who do the lonely drudge work at the isolated parts of space. In the Sandman's case, he monitors a buoy. Their only social moments when they're not on a rare holiday is a kind of cyberchat room that will make some of you smile as you read it. In any case, a crisis comes that shakes things up and shows the Sandman that he's not as alone as he thought.

"The Brothers" can be seen as a kind of prologue to Cherryh's Faery in Shadow novel and shows how Caith made the deals that made his life hell. What choices can you make when all of them are bad? It's interesting how the story starts out in a distanced, omniscient, once-upon-a-time style then becomes close-third once Caith shows up and unsettles everything.

"The Last Tower" gets its point across quickly and economically. A lot is told in a small space.

"Sea Change" starts out light and grows ever darker.

In "The Scapegoat," Cherryh presents a clash of cultures locked in tragic misunderstanding--one of her specialties--where the solution seems insane.

Honorable mentions are "The Only Death in the City" and "The General." "Ice" has its moments but drags on forever. The Hugo-winning "Cassandra" still leaves me cold.

It amuses me that the Sunfall stories, written in the late 70-early 80s, read so much like most of the sci-fantasy/book work of the time did. There's an attitude of word-weariness, decadence, and choice of words and phrasing in common. If you've read Tanith Lee, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a review on The Threads of Time, which I give 3/5 stars.

This was definitely a story of two parts. The first part is about the qhal - who they are or what they look like, really, isn't given. My mind said 'humanoid', if not human. The general gist is that they found a Gate, and that Gate led to others and they're able to time travel - only going forward in time, mind through the Gates. And then that ALL of them are at the last gate (another end-of-time story) and they're too scared to go through it.

I had some questions with this. Firstly, if one's not allowed to go back in time but only forward, one's never going to know what's beyond the Gate you're about to go through, so how do they know it's the final ever Gate and how do they know there's nothing beyond it? This is assisted by my second curiosity, and that is that the time-menders cannot discuss their knowledge outside of their circle of time-menders, so they cannot have created the fear of the last time-Gate that is in the general populous. Oh, and anyway, no-one apparently returns from beyond the last time-Gate, I guess this includes time-menders, so perhaps THEY know that it's a dead end gate.. Still.

This first part of the story is very disjointed, making it quite difficult to sort out what it is I'm meant to be taking in.

The second part of the story focuses on a single qhal, Harrh, and his family. Harrh is a time-mender, an agent who is able to travel back and forward in time. He is looking forward to time with his family, when another agent appears. From there, things unravel.

The second part of the story is more coherent, makes more sense, and flows more easily than the first part. A connection with Harrh was made, one sympathised with his wish to spend time with his family before disappearing again on his travels.

Overall a thought-provoking read, but not easy, initially at least.

[Frederick Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, to begin with, I'm a huge C.J. Cherryh fan. Her novels, and stories, fall right into the categories that I am a huge fan of (Sci-Fi and Fantasy). However, unlike many authors who do this, her novels have a style and thought in them that many of the more prolific writers lack.

This book is a collection of her Short Fiction, and it is one of the best collections I've read. I am not going to review each piece as this book is as long as 3 novels of the same style. There were a few stories that I felt dragged a bit, but overall they were great, fast reads and thought provoking. In addition, if you have read some of her longer fiction you get glimpses into how her novels emerge, or even proto-stories that eventually were turned into longer books. My particular favorite was "A Briefer History of Time." It's one paragraph and it might just be one of the funniest and, arguably, accurate pieces of storytelling written.

If you are a fan of Science Fiction, Fantasy, or good writing than I highly recommend this book; and if you've never read a C.J. Cherryh novel than this is an amazing introduction to a deservedly award winning writer. Check It Out!

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a mixed bag, like any anthology. I will say the range is great - high fantasy to urban fantasy to space opera and hard sf. Cherryh says in her forward that she is not a short story writer, and that's kinda clear by the dominance of novellas in the collection. I also got a bit of a feeling that she likes to take her time with long openings and her endings seemed rushed in comparison.

Still a fan, but I'd say about one-quarter of the stories just didn't thrill me, one quarter really did, and the rest were neither memorable nor disappointing. I liked the last story, about independent operators on a space lane communicating via chat and banding together to save their home planet from a missile, inbound debris from a long-dead war.

Also liked the story about a far-future New York maintenance worker and the story about a cop in a hard-suit making a split-second decision. Yeah, guess those were my favorites.

[Buzz H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An outstanding collection of short tales from one of the best fantasy and SF authors alive. I particularly recommend Pots, a tale of alien archeologists arriving on a future Earth. I loved this one so much that I have re-read it a dozen times.

My other favorite in this collection is The Last Tower. This is a little gem of a tale with a great origin story of its own. While at a science fiction convention Ms. Cherryh was challenged on a Friday to write a short story on the back of a postcard (!) that would be read aloud at the closing gathering of the convention on Sunday. The story is only about half a dozen pages (she says that she wrote it with a micropoint). It is a work of art. A craftswoman at the height of her powers, under pressure, who really delivered! I read it aloud to a group of my neighbors a few months ago at a community gathering. They loved it. I imagine many of you would too.

[Marti Dolata · Rating 5 out of 5]

A permanent addition to my home library.

Two stand outs:
Scapegoat - If I were publishing an anthology of military SF, I would absolutely include this. Thoughtful, gritty and moving. I'd also include it in one about alien contact.

Cassandra
If you ever wondered what it felt like to be a teen growing up during the cold war years, this story captures the emotion, so, so clearly. The fear and dread. I just reread it in Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories and it all came back to me. It is also included in this volume.

[Vince · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've enjoyed a number of Cherryh's novels for her rich characterization, world-building, and artistic use of language. These short stories showcase more of these skills, but I just found that the length of the collection and my limited time...well, for whatever reason it just wasn't compelling me to come back and move past about 1/3 of the way through. I'm sure I'll dip into this again over time...but for now I want to clear this off of my reading list as I haven't dipped into it for months and have moved it from my bed-stand back to my bookshelf. I'm giving it 2 stars because I just didn't find it compelling enough to finish as a collection. Some of the individual stories are worth 3 or 4 stars.