James Nicoll Reviews

1976’s Brothers of Earth is the first novel in C. J. Cherryh’s Hanan Rebellion¹ series. Let’s call it a planetary romance.

Endymion pursued and overtook fleeing Hanan starships, obliterating the enemy Although unable to escape the loathsome Alliance craft, the Hanan starfarers in turn obliterated Endymion.

The sole survivor? Endymion​’s communications officer, Kurt Morgan.

Morgan’s escape capsule lacks sufficient range to return him to Alliance space. Not that that matters. Endymion​’s final jump was made blind. Morgan has no idea how to navigate from the system he is in to any system with which he is familiar. He has no choice but to look for safe haven on one of the planets within reach. Not entirely coincidentally — the Hanan were fleeing to as much as they were fleeing from — a habitable planet is within reach.

The nemet who stumble over Morgan recognize his species. They are quite familiar with humans. What Kta t’Elas u Nym, who rather ominously addresses Morgan in the Hanan language, would like to know is if Morgan is of the Tamurlin or if he belongs to some other, more acceptable, branch of humanity. Kta accepts Morgan’s assertion that he is not Tamurlin and accepts Morgan into his household.

Kta hails from Nephane, an important city with on the east coast of the sea. Nephane has a fraught history. It was founded by pious Indras colonists from Indresul, a city on the west coast. The Sufaki who previously dominated the region were conquered, reduced to second-class subjects in their own land. Although this was centuries ago, tensions persist.

Three centuries ago, the Hanan stumbled over this world. Armed with superior technology, the Hanan had no trouble doing to the Indras what the Indras did to the Sufaki… at least until Hanan supply ships stopped arriving. Once it was clear that the planet was once again isolated, the Indras overthrew their monstrous conquerors and restored the natural order: Indras standing proudly with their boots on Sufaki throats.

The current situation is as follows: Nephane and Indresul are rivals. The Sufaki are still second-class, though recently Nephane has granted a few minor accommodations and the Sufaki want more. The remnant Hanan became the spectacularly barbarous Tamurlin. Nephane is ruled by a Hanan woman, Djan, who earned Nephane’s gratitude and her rank by taking the city’s side against the Tamurlin and her fellow Hanan.

Morgan is content to become part of Kta’s household. Although nemet are not human, they are humanoid enough for Morgan to fall in love with and marry a nemet woman named Mim. Provided Morgan does his best to emulate William Adams, educates himself about local culture, avoids vexing Djan, and works hard to fit in, Morgan could very easily enjoy a long, unremarkable life on the planet he will never leave.

Or, through ignorance and bad luck, he could reward Kta’s charity with a tsunami of misfortune, return Mim’s love with a cavalcade of misery, inflame local tensions, imperil Djan’s regime, and quite possibly bring about apocalypse, should Djan use her weapons of mass destruction.

~oOo~

This is where I would normally moan about the improbability of two unconnected species from different worlds being as similar as humans and nemet. However, Brothers of Earth is traditionally considered part of Cherryh’s Alliance-Union setting. Alliance-Union includes the Morgaine novels, which means I can blame every evolutionary improbability on the time-travelling qhal².

While there are parallels with Clavel’s Shogun³, I think these are either coincidence or because Cherryh and Clavel drew on the same source material. Shogun appeared in 1975 and Brothers of Earth in 1976, and I don’t think that’s enough lead time for the first to have played a role in the second. What Brothers feels like is Cherryh taking a run at classic planetary romance tropes from a more realistic perspective.

Brothers of Earth belongs to the specific subset of planetary romance one might call ​“and then reality ensues.” Like Adams (or Poul Anderson’s Gerald Robbins in ​“The Man Who Came Early”), being the product of a sophisticated civilization does not confer on Morgan any ability to reproduce locally any of the products of that civilization. Morgan’s only reasonable choices are to find some way to fit in or suffer the consequences.

Speaking of romance, it’s entirely consistent with the evidence we see that Mim, who has a horrifying background, is just making the best of a dismal situation and that she doesn’t love Morgan at all. Morgan thinks she does, but if Morgan is a keen student of human or nemet nature, he conceals it well.

Brothers of Earth is a tribute to how much havoc one well-meaning but ignorant man can cause. Morgan’s ineptitude and the carnage he leaves in his trail make a strong case that Kta should have assumed the castaway was the Hanan that Morgan appeared to be and run him though with a spear as soon as he saw him. It’s a good thing this energetic novel is so short, because I don’t think I’d want to stick with Morgan for four hundred pages.

I think Brothers is out of print, on its own and as part of an omnibus. This works as a nice segue into a recurring issue I encounter with Cherryh, which is that for many of her books it’s a lot harder to determine whether or not a particular Cherryh is in print than I’d expect for a Grand Master’s books. This may be the first time in this particular project when I have been unsure if a Cherryh was in print, but it’s not a novel experience⁴. It won’t be the last time this is an issue, either.

1: For the life of me, I cannot find a connection between Brothers of Earth and the other supposed Hanan book, Hunter of Worlds.

2: Alternatively, the Hanan books are set a long time in the future: the war between Alliance and Hanan has lasted more than two thousand years (!). It’s not clear that the Alliance Morgan hails from is the same Alliance from Downbelow Station, so all we can say is that this is set later than 4353 (Alliance founded in 2353 + at least 2000 years). It could be much later, in which case the nemet may be divergent humans no long able to crossbreed with humans.

Or alternatively, the nemet are lying about the whole infertility issue.

3: Also, the Foreigner series.

4: If there’s a way to shake this information out of Cherryh’s website, I cannot see it.