When the Bucconeer staff graciously invited me to write one of these pieces on CJ, I suspect they meant something witty and anecdotal. Like the time we were sitting in a yuppie restaurant (you know, the kind that serves overpriced and undersized sandwiches—with sprouts) talking about gun-running and the price of an Uzi and discovered we had the only clear elbow-room in the building... Crazy Moments that happen to writers.

But, as I pondered the question of which Crazy Moments to immortalize, I found myself thinking: Why Carolyn? I mean, no GoH is ever chosen lightly, and a Worldcon GoH is an especially difficult choice, not to mention a tremendous honor for the choosee, so... why? What sets C. J. Cherryh’s work apart from all the other fine authors’?

I’ve had an opportunity to study CJ and her work in many different capacities over the years. In 1976, I was one of many readers for whom her Gate of Ivrel set a whole new standard for the term "Good Read." In college, I referenced her work for two research papers (one in cultural anthropology, another in linguistics). In the mid-eighties, I collaborated with her on the Gate of Ivrel graphic novel adaptation, a situation which led me to writing my own work with her as my undisputed mentor. In 1998, I find myself not only her friend, but her alpha reader and editor. It is a path which still holds an aura of unreality about it for me, but which does give me my own unique perspective on her work.

Why Guest of Honor?

Secondly, she’s gotten lots of awards—several Hugos, the Campbell, a bunch of other stuff you can find listed around, so she must be pretty good at what she does.

More importantly for a convention GoH, she loves conventions and SF fans. She’s extremely accessible, enjoys sitting around talking with whoever can find a square foot of open carpet in her general vicinity. Her interests are so varied and her knowledge so vast, one thing will lead to another and you can find yourself in the middle of next week before you realize you’ve been sitting five minutes. This is, after all, the woman who taught Latin and Ancient History for ten years and twenty years after the fact still has students throughout the country crossing restaurants to remember themselves to her.

(Keywords to trigger great stories: "Caesar + Queen + Bythinia", "Student Pyramids", "Hallways + Chariots", "Togas", "Camels + Dogpacks", "Finals + Machiavelli", "Roommates + Cadavers.")

And then, there’s the fact she looks great in the costume. Which costume? Well, depends on the time of day and ambient conditions. You see, she’s got these great cheekbones and wicked, sparkling eyes, and a very firm mouth thanks to years of getting a high A out of a flute. But it’s the hair that does the trick—and, yes, the curl is natural.

Coifed, left to curl naturally, and in full makeup, she’s Carolyn Cherry, Romance Writer extraordinaire (yes, she has been legitimately praised in Romance Times—for great Space Opera that doubled as great romance.)

But keep her up late, get the speculative science juices flowing, let the humidity rise, and she’s SF’s answer to Albert Einstein. (And here, consider her Hugo award-winning Cyteen that examines the ramifications of leading edge science with such deft murfling, it had even experts asking "how much (fill in blank) science does she really know?"—never mind she can’t add 2 + 2. Keywords: "Tau Cetian Math", "Galactic Screwdriver", "Grant.")

OK, so she writes a good book, she’s an award-winning party animal, and she’s cool-looking. What has she done that’s so unique that the SF community should honor her in this way?

With respect to space limitations and the sure sense that I’d overlook someone’s favorite book, allow me to hazard a suggestion which I feel ultimately covers all the others: viewpoint.

What? (you ask) she writes a simple, third person past tense, right? Nothing fancy about that. Nothing fancy; nothing simple, either.

CJ began writing when she was ten, but she began consciously considering the question of viewpoint several years later as a freshman in college. Back in that dark age of manual typewriters, CJ realized that her fascination with the complex interplay of perception, physiology, and culture required an approach to storytelling different from anything she had encountered, and she began working out her own guidelines for a style of viewpointing she calls "intense third person."

Those guidelines are so comprehensive and yet so simple, the ramifications so far-reaching, that they are rather like geometry’s postulates or the elements of graphic design. While I’d never say they were the universal answer to all storytelling, they nonetheless provide insights into the basic creator/consumer interface that are of value to any writer, of any genre, fiction, non-fiction, or technical.

This total immersion into character viewpoint is the underlying secret to her incredibly believable aliens as well as her lovable but nuttierthanafruitcake protagonists.

The scope of CJ’s body of work—as well as her everlasting gift to the SF world—is based on the inherent flexibility of this core approach. Cut free from the authorial voice, we explore the cosmos from the infinite diversity of individual minds. Combined with CJ’s incredible control of language (fluency in several languages doesn’t hurt), her vast imagination, her warped and subtle sense of humor, her sheer talent, and her incredible productivity (Cuckoo’s Egg, nominated for a Hugo, took two weeks to write. Cyteen—infinitely more complex, four times as long, and which won a Hugo—took only six months), you had all the raw materials for a Phenomenon.

But it takes more than the potential to create a phenomenon. CJ came along at a time when the field was rich with possibilities. The gridwork had been set, but the field was far from excavated. New authors were taking the free-wheeling concepts of the Golden Age, the great adventure story-telling of the Sword and Sorcery/Space Opera era, and expanding them to include human drama—turning stories increasingly toward the ideas of perception and cosmology, psychology and motivation—intense, personal stories that examine the nature of being human through their relationship to and interaction with that technology. It was a wide-open field, free for the bold and innovative to chart the course for others to follow.

And CJ is nothing if not bold and innovative.

The result of this interface of individual talent, social timing, and publishing support is a body of work the diversity of which will likely never be matched. A new benchmark in the art of storytelling, not just for the SF field, but all of literature, which will only continue to expand with each passing year as she adds additional facets to its infinitely expandable surface.

The downside is, it has also, over the years, given her the reputation for being a "hard read". No doubt about it: sometimes after reading one of her books, your brain hurts from the exercise it’s received. On the other hand, you’ll never see the world quite the same again once you’ve followed the convoluted intrigues and aggression-based attitudes of the Invader series’ Atevi, or considered the effect of the price of coffee on a galactic economy.