I don’t see Cherryh as an out of left field choice. She has had a huge impact. But when you have a ten best list by one person I wish they would call it more of a ‘ten books I think are really great and think you might enjoy’ kind of thing.

She’s absolutely wonderful. She doesn't seem to be put on lists or given the awards she deserves though.

For a genre ostensibly concerned with looking at the future, there sure are a bunch of SF fans who insist on prostrating themselves before the same group of icons. Most other literary genres respect their forebears, but I don’t think any others deify them to this extreme.

If Mieville’s Embassytown is anything like The City and the City (that i just finished to read) it should be great. Putting it next in my reading list, Perdido Street Station was another good precedent of the same author.

I’ve never really understood why C.J. Cherryh is so invisible in discussions of SFF. She’s been writing pretty high quality stuff for such a long time, but I don’t recall seeing her get that many mentions in retrospective articles, compared to Ursula K LeGuin or even Anne McCaffery.

I mean, I understand the why she’s…

Yeah . . . you really do have to start at the beginning unless you grew up reading series out of order. (The library never had the books in at the time I wanted them, or only had the second or third. I got really good at throwing myself in in medias res and picking things up from context. I started the Foreigner…

Totally agree about the excellence of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series. Unlike many others, the quality has stayed high as the story has evolved and deepened over the entire series. These are some of the very few books I preorder when I see that a new one is coming out. For a new reader: start at the beginning.

C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series is brilliant and so so underrated. Although, Foreigner itself is a bit of a rocky introduction because the pacing is weird. But seriously, I’ve been rereading the series lately and it just moves from strength to strength.

Is C.J. Cherryh out of left field? I fucking love her work. The Foreinger series is probably my 3rd favorite series of all time. (Behind Foundation and the Deathstalker series.) And her other stuff is great too ...

Actually, again, and please forgive my directness, you miss the point of Catholic doctrine - the non-interventionist God leaves one, as Milton put it, "sufficient to (stand) although free to fall." This sort of belief system is predicated upon the notion that we have free will, and this was one of the central…

The only thing you did to elaborate on why the Church's position "falls flat" is say that Darwin's theory doesn't need "Deus ex Machina" divine intervention. As if just because a man, Charles Darwin, says God wasn't involved, that fully negates what any reconciliationist would propose. You fall even more into fallacy,…

Evolution doesn't forbid the possibility of God, why is creationism even necessary?