Story Plots
The stories in this collection cover a broad range of genres from science fiction and space opera through to fantasy and magic.
Sunfall is a collection of stories set in the far future on an ancient Earth under a dying Sun that is emitting dangerous levels of radiation. Each story deals with a city and how it has evolved to cope with the fading Sun. Paris and New York City have become single self-contained structures with no "outside". In "The Only Death in the City (Paris)" this closed biosphere has resulted in no "new births": everyone who dies is reincarnated again in the city with all the memories of their previous lives. In "Nightgame (Rome)" the nobles while away their boredom by dreaming dreams captured from less fortunates using an apparatus no one knows the origin of.
"Cassandra" is a story of a woman cursed with the ability to simultaneously experience the present and the near future. "The Threads of Time" revisits the Gates in Cherryh's 1976 novel Gate of Ivrel. "Companions" is a novella about a ship stranded on a planet with Warren, the sole survivor, and Anne, a computer whose job it is to "protect" him (not unlike HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey). "The Last Tower" is set on the edge of the land of faery where an old man lives in an old tower, the last bastion of magic against the onslaught of the Empire of Men from the East. In "The Brothers", Caith is damned by faeries for committing patricide and is cursed with Dubhain, a shapeshifting phooka, as his perpetual companion. Caith and Dubhain continue their journey in Cherryh's 1994 novel Faery in Shadow.
"Willow" deals with temptation and lust, and concerns a knight returning home from a ten-year war who has his battle-hardened indifference and contempt changed by a beautiful women and her daughter. "Mech" looks at high-tech policing in the future. Two of the stories are set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe: "The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB" takes place in the vicinity of Pell Station and concerns the crew of space prospectors and miners and their encounter with an inert rogue missile fired by an unknown warship in a decades-ago war; "The Scapegoat" sees an unusual truce formed between the Union, the Alliance and Earth to deal with the Elves, a technologically inferior alien race that insists on launching suicide attacks on any human ship in sight.
Read more about this topic: The Collected Short Fiction Of C. J. Cherryh
Famous quotes containing the words story and/or plots:
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“Nothing aids which may not also injure us.
Fire serves us well, but he who plots to burn
His neighbor’s roof arms his hands with fire.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)