James Nicoll Reviews

1979’s Kutath is the third and final volume in C. J. Cherryh’s Faded Sun trilogy.

The mri are humanoid alien mercenaries who were, until recently, in the employ of the alien regul. Following the end of the war with humans, the regul decided to exterminate the mri to prevent them from working for the humans. This almost succeeded.

The last two mri on Kesrith (priest Melein and warrior Niun) fled in the company of human soldier Sten Duncan. Pursued by a regul and human fleet, the trio traced a chain of dead planets leading back to the true mri home world, Kutath.

Why did the mercenary mri leave a wake of dead worlds? And is Kutath about to join them?

The regul began to bombard some of Kutath’s cities. Many mri died. As the regul (and human) military conventions are very different from those of the mri, the mri are ill-suited to defend themselves.

Duncan, who after years of travelling with Melein and Niun has become as mri as a human can be, has managed to buy some time for the mri. He met with the regul/human fleet orbiting Kutath and succeeded in killing the regul leader bai Sharn Alagn-ni. He then escaped and returned to the surface of the planet.

The regul are relentlessly hierarchical. With no senior to command them, the juniors will not take action. This is only a temporary respite; irresistible biological forces will compel some of the young to metamorphose into adults, who will then take command.

Down on Kutath, chaos reigns in the wake of the bombardment. The mri are not quite as helpless as they seem, for they share their world with a culture about whom the regul and humans know little or nothing, the elee. The elee are more technologically advanced than their mri cousins. The elee are also hopelessly decadent. Not a group to whom one would trust planetary defense.

The humans in orbit would accept peace with the mri. Unfortunately, humans have short attention spans. Regul live centuries and do not forget anything, especially grudges. Can the mri be saved from the regul or can an alliance with humans only delay final extinction?

~oOo~

Actually, that last question can’t be answered. I don’t think the mri are ever mentioned again in the other Cherryh books, The reader can’t be sure that the regul didn’t wait a couple of centuries for the humans to get bored with mri and betray them. Every one of the mri’s previous hundred-plus employers eventually turned on them so why should humans be an exception?

This volume has the best cover of the three Faded Sun books.

No surprise that the omnibus uses this stunning Michael Whelan cover (although flipped 180 degrees) because why wouldn’t a publisher hire Whelan if they could afford him? These days, I suppose art budgets do not stretch that far¹.

What bothered me about this trilogy: nothing we see about the mri suggests that they could be the fearsome foes the humans and regul believe them to be. They’re violent illiterates who find mass warfare morally offensive. As modern warfare is mass warfare, how were they contributing to the regul war effort? Did the regul air-drop millions of sword-waving mri onto human worlds?

The mri seem to be garden-variety austere, hyper-conservative barbarians² with whom the reader is supposed to have sympathy (I didn’t). They’re not terribly alien. The regul, on the other hand, are truly alien, bound by biological drives unlike those of humans. The regul get a lot of page time, so the reader will have ample opportunity to appreciate them.

Another odd detail I never noticed on previous reads: humans and regul are monolingual. The mri are only multilingual in the sense that they prefer to speak foreign tongues badly rather than allow outsiders to learn the mri language. The mri wars span forty years in the 28^th century. That’s not very far in the future. Where did all the human languages go? Monolingual futures aren’t unusual in SF (easier on the author), but given Cherryh’s academic background, it’s odd that she’d take the lazy way out.

The mri may be Cherryh’s answer to Dune’s Fremen. Kutath seems to be her answer to the old, dying Mars of Brackett and Moore. It’s an interesting take. If anyone wants to put together a Moore-style old-Mars shared universe, consider inviting Cherryh.

Reading this volume was a bit of a chore. Perhaps this was because I read the three volumes over a long span of years. The three books in the series were published initially published in 1978 and 1979; they’re really more of one long story than they are a proper trilogy.

The Faded Sun: Kutath is available as part of an omnibus here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

Yes, that’s fewer bookseller links than I used to have. Can’t stop major companies from genuflecting to Nazis, and I can’t stop people from buying from those companies, but I don’t have to actively send them customers.

1: Something I never find time to do: check to see how many award-winning novels had Whelan covers. Can’t win awards if people do not notice your book, and a Whelan cover is a good way to catch attention.

2: The mri would seem to be slow learners; they do have a goal in their space migration, but their methods aren’t helping them get there. They’ve failed over a hundred times, but they keep playing rock, never paper or scissors.