Downbelow Station

As a child I was tremendously fond of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a TV series that ran for several seasons in the 1960s. Those were Ye Olde Days of course, well before VCRs (let alone TiVo) and as the decades passed by I just figured I'd never see Admiral Nelson or Captain Lee Crane again.

Then came the internet. One of the unsuspected joys of google and wikipedia has been looking up all those old TV shows, the ones you would never admit you liked to all your educated, sophisticated friends, and discovering there are legions of fellow David Hedison fans still out there. The Seaview! Chief Sharkey! The Flying Sub!

I got to thinking how good it feels to google something - a favorite movie, a TV show, a book - and discover that plenty of other people like it, too. A sort of personal validation via the internet, a corroboration of your taste and of the things that have been meaningful to you throughout your life.

We need a term for this.

But I'm really supposed to be talking about Downbelow Station, a science fiction novel by author CJ Cherryh. Downbelow Station is one of her best-known works, a Hugo award winner in 1982, and the novel that got me started on all her other stuff. I would describe it as a great read.

And there are--inevitably--a few people on amazon who don't like it.

Here we have the opposite phenomenon to validation-by-google: you look up your absolute favorite book, the one you finished at four in the morning with tears in your eyes, the one you can still quote pieces of dialogue from - and although most reviewers like it there is always somebody, somewhere, who couldn't get past page three.

It's annoying.

Downbelow Station is written in classic multi-character style; we follow many individuals for short bits at a time, coming back to each one as the story progresses. One reviewer claimed that none of these characters is particularly memorable, and here I must strongly disagree. Captain Signe Mallory of the starship Norway is one of the strongest sci-fi heroines ever, and Cherryh describes her cleanly, unflinchingly, and indelibly.

Because although Mallory is a heroine, she is not a 'nice' person. When we meet Norway's captain, she's keeping a prisoner in her cabin and sleeping with him; she drinks, she gets drunk, and toward the end of the book - in a powerful scene, part of the climax to the story - she rips her ship loose from the space station, killing any number of people in the process.

And yet she has integrity, she is loyal to her crew and adored by them, she goes out of her way to save one innocent man - and one who is not quite so innocent. She is, in short, a person and not a character.

Downbelow Station has a complicated plot; it is a book to read when you have time. For those who want to be immersed in another (future) time and another place, I highly recommend it.