Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1982
There was a time when I made a point of reading Hugo Award winners as soon as a given year’s WorldCon results were announced. (Assuming I hadn’t already read that book – which was a rare thing.) That’s a habit I’ve lost over the past twenty or so years, and with a very few exceptions, I haven’t really been keeping up. But in the late 1970s, and all through the 1980s, I picked up copies of Hugo winners as soon as I could after the awards were made.
Award-winning novels did not, of course, make up the bulk of my sci-fi and fantasy reading. I was also, in that time period, beginning to pick up on authors I would follow through the years to come. This was facilitated by a relocation from a small town, with no bookstores in easy reach, to a major metropolitan area that held many such establishments. And so I was better able to indulge my appetite for fiction. Of the authors I discovered as a result of this easier access, few have provided me with as many enjoyable reads as C.J. Cherryh. I read Gate of Ivrel the year DAW Books published it, and in quick succession read Well of Shiuan, Fires of Azeroth, and The Faded Sun Trilogy. The author’s writing style and detailed depictions of exotic civilizations and their peoples had a very strong appeal, and so I was willing to take a chance on a new and longer work by this author when it became available. That’s how I came to read Downbelow Station before it won its Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1982.
Downbelow Station raised my interest in C.J. Cherryh’s work to a new level. The prologue that sets the stage reads like an excellent bit of narrative history – a genre of nonfiction that has always appealed to me. The story launches from those pages with an immediacy that drops the reader straight into the tension-filled plot while introducing the main characters as they each deal with a sudden, and then rapidly worsening, situation. The war between the Earth Company and the colonial worlds and stations of Union – which has raged for many decades – is coming to an end. The fleet of warships loyal to the Earth Company are too few in number to win, and Union is poised for victory. Star stations belonging to the Company are falling to Union, generating a flood of refugees for whom Pell Station (orbiting Pell’s World) is a final, if desperate, last stop. The station, overburdened by this sudden increase in population, is pushed to its limits. To make matters worse, the Company ship that led the refugees in warns of more to come. Each major character is introduced during this massive surge of refugees, their roles and respective subplots established, and the story expands from the event of arrival and the unrest it immediately creates.
The multiple subplots never lose sight of each other, and the pacing is carefully balanced between rapid action and introspection. The characters are believable, and their actions and reactions drive the braid of subplots that combine to create the overall tale. Complications increase as the overall plot pushes the characters into ever more dire situations, creating a conflict that appears irresolvable. And yet, there is a resolution, one that not only makes sense but lays the groundwork for the many novels that have since been set in the Alliance-Union universe for which this author is so well known.
More than most of the Hugo winners I’ve discussed here, rereading this book really took me back to that time when science fiction was more than just escapism for me. It was more of a way of life, and had become the keystone of my social life, associated as I was with fannish groups in the Phoenix metro area. I was even involved, in a small way, with the running of a local sci-fi convention. In 1981, I found myself volunteering to be overnight security for the dealer’s room of this “con.” This involved spending the night in the room housing the various tables and their wares, a task that appealed because I couldn’t afford a room at the hotel. I first read Downbelow Station – almost all of it in the two nights I was needed as a guardian – instead of sleeping on the row of chairs that I was instructed to put in a line just inside the door to block entry. It was assumed that I’d stretch out and sleep there, or at least doze. It was, as I recall, the only way in or out of the room, so any thief would need to fall over me to get in. Sleep? I wasn’t even comfortable enough to doze very often. So I left a light on and read. The book with me was Downbelow Station.
When the event was over, the first thing I did was finish reading that book. Afterward, I recommended it so often I drove a few friends to distraction. (The tables were turned, a couple of years later, when one of these friends discovered Startide Rising by David Brin, and just would not stop talking about it.) Only a few months passed before I read it again, when in 1982, it won the Hugo Award for best novel. I was enormously pleased to see that a book that had hooked me so solidly took top honors that year.
In the decades since, the period during which I was so active as a fan has become a source of (mostly) pleasant memories. Except for participation as an author guest at local Tucson and Phoenix conventions, and a WesterCon held in Tempe a few years ago, I’ve left that part of my life behind. Rereading this particular Hugo Winner brought that time back to life for me, even as I enjoyed rediscovering the book that turned an interest in an author’s work into something more like admiration. Science fiction has seen few authors who have been as prolific, or produced such consistently fine work. And fewer still that I follow to the extent of buying and reading every book, as soon as it’s available. Downbelow Station found in me a reader, and turned me into a fan.
Under Desert Stars 