Book review: Hammerfall

Yet more SciFi slop, this time from C J Cherryh.

Having asked myself "Should I just put in a bit more effort and read better books?" while reviewing The Devils, I find myself on this. In my defence I was pretty damn sure I was going to find it tosh; but perhaps unusually for such a prolific author I've not read any of hers before, so gave it a go. Also, it was a fairly easy not-brain-taxing read on a weekend.

The plot is reminiscent of The Memory of Earth in some ways, or at least I found it so (distant planet, forgotten beginnings, overseer, voices in the head). We encounter Our Hero in chains; he is freed and tasked by the Immortal Ruler of the planet to Go East and find out what is there, because A Time Of Trouble Is Coming. And so he sets out on a long weary trek across the great desert, and in the Farthest East he finds a mysterious tower and mysterious people. Unfortunately the plot then requires him to wearily trek all the way back again to the Immortal Ruler, gather all the peoples of the world and then, FFS, he treks wearily back across the desert yet again.

Laid on top of this is the actual point, that the Immortal Ruler has fled to the planet after doing naughty things elsewhere; that the nice people in the tower are trying to help, and that there is a Mysterious Alien Race who are a bit pissed off and will fling space rocks at the planet in order to sterilise it. Our Hero and those similarly afflicted receive Mysterious Visions that the space rocks are going to come, but for my part it was Bleedin' Obvious from the title of the book, so there were no surprises. To be fair, the characters don't get to read the title page I suppose.

The said characters, despite being desert folk on a distant planet, remain resolutely suburban USAnians. Token example: when in the depths of storm the captain of the guards' wife is giving birth, it is essential for Our Hero to go off and find the said captain of guards, for how could a women possibly give birth without her husband present? And Our Hero's inability to concentrate on the big picture unfits him for leadership. Related to this, there is the oh-so-common failing of such books: only the main characters are of any interest to the author, so the main character goes off alone, doing <interesting> stuff, even though he would obvs have a retinue.

I finished it, but only by skipping page after page towards the end, where nothing happens except yet more sand.

Oh, and another irritation, also a rather common one: because of the nature of the plot, piles and piles and literal heaps of people at the end of the caravan are going to die in various hideous ways in the desert. Our Hero knows this, but - despite plentiful lardings of "the law of the desert" whenever the plot finds it convenient - he is obliged to be sad about this; not just sad, but demonstratively sad, and do some pointless things to make this clear, as a suburban USAnian politician would have to weep crocodile tears in a similar situation.