Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Short stuff and author musings.

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1694:

Monday and Tuesday, I was happy to achieve both my walking and writing goals, as well as each day I had at least two phone calls with friends, and I finished reading the third book in the Chanur series by the multiple science fiction award winner, C J Cherryh (and probably my favorite science fiction writer.)

This series was written over 40 years ago, and I am rather enjoying noticing the ways in which it feels like the work of a writer who is still working on her craft, something that is more obvious when I compare these books to her Foreigner series, (my favorite of hers) since both series have a lot in common in terms of themes—like interspecies interactions. In the Chanur series there are 6 different space faring species who have come to an uneasy balance, and the whole series is set off when a seventh—humans—come into the picture in form of one individual a man called Tully. The main characters in this series are the Han, who are bi-pedal sentient beings who are described as looking like lions who walk upright, as species where the females are seen as the dominant sex.

In the Foreigner series, there is a world where there is a sentient species (the Atevi), who appear on the surface very similar to humans from earth, but their culture, psychology, and very brain-wiring are significantly different. This long series is set off when humans from Earth arrive in the Atevi solar system. The books are told initially through the eyes of the single human who is permitted to live among the Atevi as the translator and mediator. Eventually the reader gets a point of view from a young Atevi character as well.

Not surprisingly, if you have read my own science fiction Caelestis series, you should notice some of the ways both of Cherryh’s series inspired my own—both in terns of the interaction of two groups of people who look similar but have profound differences—in my case one group as psychic abilities—as well as my introduction of sentient non-human characters, particularly the snowcat Silence.

Anyway, in both series the themes of how physiology, interacting with culture, can cause very different reactions and behaviors, which in turn can cause problems unless some sort of common understanding can be achieved, is played out in a fairly standard space opera setting (feuds, battle scenes, space ships, spies, etc.), However, Cherryh simply doesn’t pull any of this off quite in this first series than she was able to accomplish in the Foreigner series she started about 10 years later.

In addition, Cherryh wasn’t as skillful in the Chandur series as in the Foreigner series in ending each book with a satisfying resolution of the immediate crisis, but leaving enough loose ends to get the reader looking for the next book. It reads, as a result, more like a serial than a series.

This was a particular problem back in the 1980s when the Chandur series was written, and the next edition never came out earlier than a year or two after the previous one. Even worse, if you found one of the books that came later in the series (and these are series that really do work best if read in order) the earlier books could very well be out of print, which was very frustrating for a reader such as myself who like to binge read a series!

Anyway, rereading this early work has been fun, and frankly, it has made me feel more confident in the ways my own writing has improved over time.

Enough of my author (as reader) digression. Today will be pretty much a duplicate of the past two days. Yoga was canceled, but I had a little more laundry to do, I’ve journaled, and I am about to take the first of my walks after publishing this post.

Each walk I find more flowers to photograph, but I am noticing that now many of the blooms are starting to get to that blowsy stage, just before their petals fall, so I feel like I have to keep taking more and more pictures before they all fall away.

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