Carolyn Janice Cherry (1942– ), writing as C. J. Cherryh, is an influential US science fiction writer who lives in Spokane, Washington, and holds a master’s degree in classics from Johns Hopkins; Greek and Roman mythology have been a major influence on her work. She started writing fiction at the age of ten, after her favorite television show, Flash Gordon, was canceled, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1976. Cherryh is best known for her novels set in the Alliance-Union Universe, especially Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988)—both of which won Hugo Awards. The Alliance-Union novels are set throughout most of the home galaxy during the third and fourth millennia, during which period the Alliance, structured around merchant cultures that operate huge interstellar freighters necessary for trade, manages to survive at the heart of the more ruthless, expansionist Union. Cherryh has used this backdrop to good effect repeatedly, exploring ever more widely both the milieu and the socioeconomic implications of the situation.
Her first novel was Gate of Ivrel (1976), the beginning of the Morgaine series, which continued with Well of Shiuan (1978), Fires of Azeroth (1979), and the much later Exile’s Gate (1988). In these novels, Cherryh fused interplanetary intrigue with tropes more usual to fantasy, including a romantic heroic quest. An underlying rationality counterbalances the stylistic flourish of the series; Cherryh could be said to have renovated and modernized the planetary romance with the series.
Cherryh’s first short story, the much-anthologized “Cassandra” (1978), won the Hugo Award. Eventually she published enough short fiction to release The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004), comprising her prior collections Sunfall (1981) and Visible Light (1986) plus sixteen additional stories.
“Pots,” which first appeared in the anthology Afterwar (1985), is anthropological or archaeological science fiction and fairly unusual in its approach to that subject. It showcases in very interesting ways the author’s many virtues, including a flair for the dramatic and her gift for fusing both modern and traditional impulses in science fiction.