World Building
Cherryh's works depict fictional worlds with great realism supported by her strong background in linguistics, history, archaeology, and psychology. In her introduction to Cherryh's first book, Andre Norton compared the effect of the work to Tolkien's: "Never since reading The Lord of the Rings have I been so caught up in any tale as I have been in Gate of Ivrel." Another reviewer commented, "Her blend of science and folklore gives the novels an intellectual depth comparable to Tolkien or Gene Wolfe". Cherryh creates believable alien cultures, species, and perspectives, causing the reader to reconsider basic assumptions about human nature. Her worlds have been praised as complex and realistic because she presents them through implication rather than explication. She describes the difficulties of translating/expressing concepts between differing languages. This is best demonstrated in both the Chanur and Foreigner series.
She has described the process she uses to create alien societies for her fiction as being akin to asking a series of questions, and letting the answers to these questions dictate various parameters of the alien culture. In her view, "culture is how biology responds to its environment and makes its living conditions better." Some of the issues she considers critical to consider in detailing an intelligent alien race include:
- The physical environment in which the species lives
- The location and nature of the race's dwellings, including the spatial relationships between those dwellings
- The species' diet, method(s) of obtaining and consuming food, and cultural practices regarding the preparation of meals and eating (if any)
- Processes which the aliens use to share knowledge
- Customs and ideas regarding death, dying, the treatment of the race's dead, and the afterlife (if any)
- Metaphysical issues related to self-definition and the aliens' concept of the universe they inhabit
Read more about this topic: C. J. Cherryh
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or building:
“You are a thousand times a properer man
Than she a woman. ‘Tis such fools as you
That makes the world full of ill-favored children.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)