11/26/25: rimrunners

Thinking a lot about CJ Cherryh's novel Rimrunners lately. When I was in my late 20s, I got back into science fiction in a big way and I initially started buying books based on covers. I looked in little free libraries and thrift stores for the craziest, tackiest, most psychedelic, trashiest covers I could find. I read a lot of duds this way because a lot of sf is given a lurid cover to hide very staid, conservative storytelling. But I also found some legit gems this way. One of those was Rimrunners.

The cover shows a woman with a mullet in a jumpsuit running down a hallway in heroic posture, while behind her, a man trapped behind glass raises his arms in dismay. It is a very bad cover, imo. But I liked it. I was starting to get a sense that I liked late-70s - early-90s scifi and fantasy by lesbians. I had read Elizabeth A. Lynn's absolutely unhinged gay space opera The Sardonyx Net just prior and this book with a soft-butch woman in mechanic's coveralls completely disregarding a man in obvious distress told me I might find similar content inside Rimrunners. I read the copy on the dust-jacket, which promised interstellar action and intrigue: the main character Bet Yeager is a former Space Marine. Her side lost the war. Now she's trapped behind enemy lines living under a false identity and takes a job on a scout ship whose job is to hunt down the remnants of the very force that Bet was recently enlisted in. If they find out who she is, the consequences will be deadly! Oh no! It sounded very Heinlein. I think I was expecting a trashier Starship Troopers or something.

I was very confused for much of it. After a brief and rather cryptic prologue, we are launched into a bewildering science fictional universe. Bet is not a commando lurking behind enemy lines, she is unemployed and living in a bathroom. Right away, the book delivers on Cherryh's power: Bet lives in the women's toilet because if a woman comes in, it's not uncommon for someone to be in the stall for a long time, so she can just lay low and arouse no suspicion by being in a stall for the entire time the other woman is in there; if she hears a man's footsteps enter the women's restroom, then she can expect trouble and should get her guard up. So she spends her days at an unemployment center waiting for a ship to come in and her nights secretly sleeping in the toilet down the hall. For a while she lives with a man but he turns out to be violently dangerous and sexually abusive and she must once again take refuge in the public toilet. I was absolutely gripped. I had never encountered anything like this in science fiction before. Cherryh's concerns were so visceral, so real, so much more grounded and well-observed than any science-fiction plot I had encountered before.

Then Bet gets a job on a ship. OK, I thought, here we go with the intergalactic intrigue and action. Not so. Instead, Bet gets assigned to the night shift (ships run on a 24-hour cycle and must be crewed at all times, so they have alternating shifts) and begins a contentious fuckbuddy relationship with NG Ramey, a coworker 10 years younger than her (if I recall, Bet is in her late-30s). Like her, NG is also an outcast for reasons no one will explain to her but are implied to be serious. Most of the book focuses on day-to-day life aboard the ship and the strife between the fuckbuddies: when Bet feels threatened or insecure, she goes on the attack; when Ramey feels threatened, he gray-rocks and sneaks off to some hidden corner of the ship to lay low. So when they fight, he wants to run away and she wants to grab him and fight it out. We spend most of the book watching these two damaged people struggle between their desire to be close to one another and their inability to trust each other and do so.

While this is going on, we are given no explanation of the conflict in which Bet was so recently a combatant, no information about what was being fought over, no idea of what the sides were or what they wanted. We get next to nothing about Bet's past. We get no description of the spaceship. We see everything in a claustrophobically close third-person. Bet went from space station to the ship, she never saw it from the outside, so neither do we. We are not out in expansive zip-zip rocketship outerspace, we are in a stifling tin-can dealing with interpersonal problems. The ship goes into hyperspace sometimes, a harrowing experience during which the crew must be put in brief drug-induced comas. When they wake up, fingernails fall off and people pee their pants. How does the hyperdrive work? WHO CARES.

Rimrunners was my introduction to CJ Cherryh, and I think it is a great introduction to her, at least for readers like me. Readers who like exhaustive worldbuilding might find it extremely off-putting but I'm not the type of reader who wants questions answered. In my view, life is full of unknowns, arbitrary happenings, inconsistencies, contradictions... When a story's worldbuilding lets me understand exactly how the political econonomy of the star empire works, I tend to roll my eyes. I don't expect to be able to grasp, beyond generalizations, what is happening politically and militarily in Sudan or Syria, so why should I understand what is happening in space? If you can explain to me the last 15 years of goings-on in Rojava, I will be suspicious that you are generalizing or painting an inaccurate third-hand picture. So why would I expect a science fiction or fantasy author to give me all the ins and outs of how the Empire fought the Goblin Hordes over the succession of the Throne of Knives or whatever? What relevance does that big-picture worldbuilding have to the lives of your characters? I talked to a Nigerian guy at my job. He was from Lagos and I asked him about that city. He did not give me an explanation of colonialism and boko haram, he told me about how fun it is to go clubbing there and then he complimented my shoes and we talked about Jordans and how nobody wears Yeezies any more. Maybe I'm digressing and should write something to try to sort out my position on worldbuilding in the future.

Back to CJ: reading Rimrunners was absolutely bewildering. I spent much of the book having no idea what was going on, but once it clicked I was deeply invested. I found it so moving. I wanted more Cherryh. I have since come to admire her work deeply and have read another 6 or 8 of her novels. All her works are distinct and razor sharp. She has tendencies, for example, that close third-person, the way she launches you into events without any preamble or explanation. Why would you know things the characters don't know? Why would the book contain explanations of things that the characters already understand? The verissimilitude is striking, even in her most far-out work like Hunter of Worlds or the Faded Sun trilogy. Her sentences are terse, she writes like a hardboiled noir writer more than a sff writer. Her characters are often complicated mixtures of intense, tough, fragile, angsty, sad. Often her work simmers with rage, though that rage belongs to the characters while Cherryh herself is cool as a cucumber, almost dispassionate. Her emotional distance does not make her books cold, it actually heightens intimacy because she observes her characters with no judgement and lets them play out their personal dramas as they will, without telling the reader how to feel about it.

And she is one of the most perceptive and powerful writers of men I have ever read. That was what hit me hardest my first time through Rimrunners. Ramey's behavior is so expertly observed. I happen to be a rather timid, avoidant man in a relationship with a headstrong older woman who believes in pushing through difficulties, not ignoring them, so the dynamic between Ramey and Bet felt so real and so poignant to me.

Aesthetically and from the perspective of craft, my respect for Cherryh runs deep. It's not just her prose-level construction of individual novels, it's the total picture. Rimrunners, I soon learned, was a part of a huge non-linear series, the Alliance/Union sequence, which isn't so much a conventional sf series as one huge novel composed of stand-alone fragments, small in scale individually, that mosaic together to create a total much more grand than any individual epic could hope to be. You can read them in any order. No starting point will be less confusing than any other, though some of the larger works like Downbelow Station or Cyteen might work best. It's an ambitious project and absolutely singular. I think Cherryh's A/U novels are the best in science fiction and might be one of the literary achievements of the 20th century. I'm not exaggerating.