C.J. Cherryh has always been an author I struggled with. I gave up on The Faded Sun trilogy and Merchanter's Luck, putting them in a very small list of book I've abandoned midread like Infinite Jest and Crime and Punishment. Having stuck through all of Downbelow Station, I think I would've rather picked the dead Russian.

Cherryh writes in a genre of deadly serious space opera. There are starships and battles and heroes, but the tone here is historical drama. Downbelow Station is set in a crisis point in this future history, where the forces of Earth, the deep space Union, and the independent merchant Alliance, reach a new balance of power around the vital Pell Station and it's planet. The first chapter deserves Ken Burns-style narration and slow pans, but after that Cherryh introduces characters, and the story rapidly becomes confused. The initial drama is a refugee crisis as ships full of people from a destroyed station dock on Pell, and the authorities have to find room to house everybody. The refugees are a stalking horse for the strategic ploys of Union and Earth Company fleets, which appear and give battle as Pell decays into a state of riot, siege, and martial law. Our heroes, the kind and liberal Konstantin family, try and protect their people from the shadows, while hard-edged types maneuver around them.

This story repeatedly asks the question "who are you loyal to?" and "what sustains you?" Occasionally Cherryh has an interesting answer. Her universe is broken into a few broad classes of people. Earth Company is centered around the billions of people on Earth, insular and unaware of what is happening on the fringes of space. It's warfleet, lead by the charismatic Conrad Mazian, is a rogue piratical force. Stations are loyal to their leading families, mostly. Union is a group of stations centered around distant Cyteen that uses banned technologies like cloning and behavioral programming to produce a perfect fascist army to break free of Earth. The Merchanters are the independent traders of the galaxy, carrying news and goods between stations and jealously guarding their neutrality. Cherryh's setting-building assumption that both Station and Merchanter leadership would center around the first families of whatever respective tin-can people live in is a sound one. Space feudalism is fascinating; Dune is one of my very favorite books.

The problem is that the 'families' aspect is almost entirely dropped as a source of drama. Konstantins are good, their opponents are bad. And this is ludicrous on the face of it, because as much as the Konstantins mouth platitudes about democracy and the will of the people, they have no problem holding all the important offices on Pell Station, with the assumption that son will succeed father. The Konstantins are kind to the native Downers, a neolithic people from Pell, but complicit in their exploitation as labor downworld and on station. I'm not sure that a spacefaring people can ever interact fairly with a neolithic one, but the best I can say of the Konstantins is that they don't seek outright and immediate genocide. There is shockingly little tension within families, just wives and husband separating for safety's sake.

The second question, "what sustains you?", is vital given the literal physical presence of life support systems on station, but also obscured. As vital as trade is to the idea of the Stations and their linkages, Cherryh never talks about what exactly is being traded between the stars! Solar systems have plenty of raw materials, and once you have a self-replicating industrial base, you replicate it to make consumer goods and new technology... so why are traders worthy of a capital-M Merchanter culture and not mere courier ships tied to stations? Weak answers to these two key questions mean that the plot never really goes anywhere, or rises to drama. The appearance of "people power" against the brute militarism of Mazian and Union seems like a cop-out, relative to the power of fast military starships.

The Downer culture is a relative bright spot. With their sun worship and unique speech patterns, they were only slightly annoying. Having read this novel, I can see Cherryh's fingerprints over a ton of subsequent space opera, but I'm not sure if she had the ideas first or merely standardized on them. Overall, this book was a joyless slog. While technically competent, I have no idea how it won.