Series Review: CJ Cherryh's "The Faded Sun"

Author: Carolyn Janice Cherry(pen name: CJ Cherryh)
Series title: Faded Sun (aka Alliance-Union Series)
Included novels (3):
Kesrith (1978)
Shon'Jir (1978)
Kutath (1979)
also available in a combined paperback (2000)

Website / Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faded_Sun_Trilogy

FLR Rating: **** (4 stars of 5)

Review:
A brilliant story despite having a tiny cast of characters for much of the trilogy, Cherryh invents fascinating characters, intergalactic politics, and a detailed, three-caste alien society in the Mri (which is echoed years later on Babylon 5 in the Minbari) that is in the twilight of its existence, but doesn't know it.

The Basics:
Humanity has expanded across the galaxy and encountered an alien race called the Regul, intergalactic businessmen with perfect memories and, therefore, an inability to lie. A forty-year territory war breaks out between the two; the Regul, not themselves a fighting species, contract the Mri to act as their mercenaries. Humanity slowly wins world after world, and the Regul sue for peace; they suddenly decide that the Mri are no longer useful to keep around, and betray them. Whittled to nothing and hated by all, their only hope to avoid extermination is one human who befriends one mri on a cold, harsh, Mars-like world--and joins them as they flee through space back to their original homeworld, impossibly far away.

The Characters:
After a chance encounter, Governor Stavros, a human placed in charge of Kesrith--the world given to the Mri by the Regul, but now ceded in the peace treaty--sends his one trusted underling, Sten Duncan, to meet the remaining Mri on-world. Sharing only a respectful distrust for each other, he befriends Niun, an adeptly trained warrior never allowed into battle. Niun's sister is the heir apparent to the leadership role of the tribe.

The Author:
CJ Cherryh consistently writes stories that generate real empathy for 'the outsider'. Like Tristen in the Fortress series, Sten Duncan in Faded Sun is the lone human who cares at all about the alien, enemy Mri; Niun, the one Mri warrior never allowed into battle is equally an outsider among his own people. if she has a fault, it's for a Tolkeinesque love of inventing words that can hardly be pronounced in order to make a place or culture appear different; one can get by this issue, though, without too much trouble, because we care so much about what happens next to her characters. This also enables her to alternate between works of Fantasy and works of Science Fiction.

Cherryh can really, really write.

I'd love to hear your comments!