I first read it many years back not realizing this. This book really reads best after becoming comfortable with the Alliance-Union Universe. Cherryh has given us a philosophical treatise on political ‘reality’ which, while interesting, is a pretty hard (and confusing) slog for the most part. Waden does not see in his reality that the Others may have designs on Freedom that don’t include him and a decision point arrives where the struggle between individual realities and an objective Universal reality must be decided. Into this strange scenario come the Others - spacers, pirates and military from other planets, who the people’s consensus reality refuse to see (like the natives) and are called invisibles. In Waden’s reality, however, he sees Herrin as a dangerous rival and he eventually has him banished after a physical altercation. When Waden’s father dies he becomes First Citizen and employs Herrin to create a huge sculpture in honour of him. The most talented human minds attend University in the city of Kierkegaard, among them: Waden, the son of the planetary First Citizen, a specialist in political manipulation Herrin, a gifted artist and sculptor and Keye, a young woman who specialized in ethics. The humans are all educated in existential dialectic which makes for a strange sort of consensus reality, or even competing solipsisms. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.įreedom is a planet inhabited by the native ahnit and humans. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography.

She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She is the author of more than forty novels.

Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J.

Wave Without a Shore by C.J. Cherryh