Forge of Heaven has interesting elements but it isn't one of my favorite Cherryh books.

I felt the plot lacked payoff. The major characters are basically observers and mostly don't drive or resolve the plot. Yes, the governor and the chairman make calls and send people to do things. But whenever anything big happens, it's either being done *to* the current POV character, or the POV character is hearing about it from someone else.

For example, Procyon's big interview is a letdown. It's built up really well. Before the interview, Procyon is carefully coached to give away nothing and to learn whatever he can about his interviewer. So, during the interview either he should have made some fatal misstep or he should have learned something that would help later. But instead, the interview ends with dramatic action by an unknown third party, and Procyon only has a passive role for the rest of the book.

The antagonists only appear for a few moments before they are disposed of--especially one of them, who is named for the first time near the end of the book, and who is shot to death right after he appears.

Another thing I found disappointing... In most of Cherryh's books, my favorite part is how the worldbuilding feels multidimensional and characters have solid motivations influenced by their cultures. I didn't get that feeling so much from this book.

The Stylists are important but their motivations and organization are even vaguer than the ondat's. It makes sense for the ondat to be mysterious. I wish Ardath had been a POV character. ( )

TBR

The sequel to Hammerfall, set many, many centuries later. (Although it does feature of few of the same characters, effectively immortal as they are.) It's a much more interesting book than Hammerfall, and much more typical of a Cherryh novel. Lots of plotting and politics, high stakes and ambiguous motivations, with everything happening at the worst possible time and at least one poor innocent chump caught up in the middle of it all. And yet, I have to admit, I had some trouble getting into it. I think the problem is that the universe, backstory, and world-building details just never felt entirely comprehensible or convincing to me. There are a few reasons for that, but I think it's mostly that Hammerfall provided such a poor and cryptic introduction to it all, and it was hard to get past that. ( )

Superb. Vast improvement over Hammerfall, which wasn't by any means bad, but this is classic Cherryh. It could be written by almost a completely different author, it is very different.

Forge of Heaven opens with a Prologue explaining the universe in which Hammerfall was set, the how and why of human exploration and the politics that fractured humanities factions, and then the meeting of the ondat. This makes Hammerfall far more understandable, and even though at the time Marek knew nothing of it, should really have been included in Hammerfall.

The story itself opens centuries later than Hammerfall with Procyon, a watcher 'tap' on the third Concord space station that with an ondat presence, orbit's Marek's World. Marek himself still lives along with The Ila and Hati, but they are quarantined on the world, indefinitely, until the ondat are completely sure that their actions in Hammerfall have evolved all of the original First Movement nanotechnology that existed there beyond harm to the ondat. Procyon is one of Marek's watchers - in direct neurological contact with him, using a nanotech implant, only subtly different in scope form the tech that the ondat are scared of - which grants immortality if you can stay sane.

This immortality has scared Earth - hyper conservative Earth that permits no nanotech of any form within a vast region of space around it. When rumours reach them that illegal tech may have escaped Marek's world, they send an Ambassador to investigate. The narrative follows Brazis - an Outsider (non Earth) official in charge of Concord's interaction with Marek's world; Reaux - earth appointed governor for the station, and his daughter Kathy, along with brief exerts to Marek himself, who is on expedition to build a new relay station near some dramatic geological changes - consequences of Hammerfall. Unusually for Cherryh we jump about between the characters as the action dictates. It's a style of writing I always find jarring, but it does highlight the differences in viewpoint very well.

Concord station is delightfully imagined, various levels of sophistication and styles, legal and illegal nanotech mods for fashion, and the cultures and factions sparked by such diversity. Marek's world seems to changing, and stabilising far faster than geological epochs would suggest on Earth.

But the main criticism I have for this work is a major inconsistency with Hammerfall, written only a couple of years before. To start with Marek's second wife Norit, has disappeared. Vanished. Not a mention. Ok, she could have succumbed to madness and passed away over the centuries, but some explanation, or even a passing thought, would have been helpful. The other point is more subtle but also more grating. Immortality. The Ila had First movement tech and immortality, but her nanotech was overcome by Ian and Luz's who were Earth sent. If they also had immortality tech, why was Earth so concerned about it? and if they didn't, as their tech overcame Ila's how came immortality was retained? This annoyed me the entire way through the book and is never explained.

The rest however is excellent. Wonderful humans being humans and aliens being alien, the station is superb, and the plot masterfully believable, unguessably twisty and just gripping throughout. Skip Hammerfall if you like, but, read this!

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Nothing more to say. It's great fun.

Well worth the re-read ( )

Forge of Heaven, by C.J. Cherryh, follows, primarily, a young man in a prestigious, yet secretive position. He is a watcher in the heavens. The story revolves around Concord, a space station above a destroyed world. On board the station are three factions, the Earth representative, the Outsider representative (a human faction of outer worlds), and the Ondat, a mysterious alien race. There is a lot of back story to the entire situation, but the station is above this ruined world to watch a group of modified, and thus immortal, humans as the world evolves. There has been relative peace for some time, when an unscheduled Earth ship shows up. The inevitable chaos ensues.
I liked this book, but it did have some flaws. One minor flaw that I would first like to get out of the way is that it seemed to be lacking in some basic editing. I found numerous, at least enough to mention, grammatical errors, such as weird double words, missing words, or other oddities. It wasn't so bad that it stopped me from reading, but it did tend to cause a hiccup.
There were so many characters in this book, that hardly any of them really seemed fully fleshed out. None of the individual character stories were very deep; which is unfortunate, because I did like most of the characters.
The first half of the book was a little slow, a little dry, as it was all leading up to the intense climax. It was indeed intense, as everything had been building and building and then it literally exploded with an attack on the Earth ambassador. The climax lasted 75 pages or so and then suddenly ended. I found the ending rather rushed, though it was fairly cleaned up in the last 10 pages or so.
This book may have been better if I had read the preceding books in the series. That way I would have understood better the relations between the Outsiders, Earth, and the Ondat. The Ondat, in fact, were only lightly spoken of in this book, even though their role is seen as vital to the station. There is a handy reference in the beginning of the book, though not necessary. I would have preferred it be at the end, as it acts more as an index, rather than a prologue. 3.5/5 stars ( )