I read C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel early in 2025 and have been looking forward to continuing with the series, particularly since in the intervening time I was consumed by the Chanur novels, which are incredible. thus far all of the Cherryh I’ve read has been basically perfectly tailored for me, specifically; surely this will not hold out forever, but I’m riding it as long and as far as I can.
Well of Shiuan picks up fairly immediately after Gate of Ivrel left off, but with a twist: where Gate of Ivrel was narrated entirely from the perspective of Morgaine’s bodyguard-assistant-minion Nhi Vanye, Well of Shiuan begins with a new character, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter. Jhirun lives in a dying world: its moon — or possibly moons; it’s unclear whether there were originally more than one — have shattered, and one of them — possibly a new arrival — seems to be on track to collide with the planet. Jhirun and her relatives, the Barrow-folk, the last descendants of thousand-year-old kings, eke out a living on a rapidly shrinking land base — sea levels are rising visibly year by year — by robbing their ancestors’ tombs, but everyone in her world is aware that the end is near. likely it will come within their lifetimes.
into Jhirun’s literal and metaphorical world rides a mysterious stranger whose likeness she recognizes as kin to the ancient kings. this stranger is followed by two others, a man Jhirun at first mistakes for the first stranger, and a woman she soon recognizes as Morgen-Angharan, a harbinger of destruction. the first stranger was, of course, not Vanye but the entity inhabiting the body of his cousing, Chya Roh. Roh promises the people of this world power and an escape from their destruction into a new, fresh world. Morgaine, of course, promises nothng: she is here to seal the Gate that Roh would use — the titular “Well” of Shiuan. the bulk of the novel returns to Vanye’s perspective. the first book’s anthropological tendencies are severely disrupted here, first by space, as Vanye finds himself literally removed from his world, and then by time, as it slowly dawns on him that everyone and everything he knew has been dead for, in all likelihood, about a millennium. while Vanye clings, then, to the social structures he once knew — his sense of honor, his duty as Morgaine’s ronin ilin, and the social worlds of clans, into which he tries to slot Jhirun and her relatives — this attempt is thwarted at every turn. the arc of Well of Shiuan is a slow but irrevocable shattering of what Vanye believes to be true about himself, against the stark realization that the only constant in this new world, the only thing he can rely on, is Morgaine’s absolute and inflexible commitment to her mission.
if it wasn’t obvious from the preceding paragraph, I love this. I’m also fascinated by the pacing of this novel. Gate of Ivrel was obviously also driven by Morgaine’s implacable determination, but Well of Shiuan complicates this by separating her from Vanye for much of the novel, forcing him — in accordance with his role as ilin — to attempt to determine how to act according to the demands of her mission when he does not yet truly understand what this entails, while slowly coming to the horrified realization that the world he has arrived in is a world that Morgaine is indirectly responsible for destroying, by bringing with her a conquering army whose impact lingers and whose descendants, it is implied, shattered their moon(s) with the power of the Gates, a power they did not understand. Morgaine has told him that she does not — cannot — look back, but only as Vanye finds himself trekking feverishly through flood and mud and rain, and then held captive by the last descendants of the alien lords who seeded humans on this planet, and then attempting to outrun flood and earthquake, and then, at last, put in an impossible position by Morgaine does he truly understand what she means. the best part of this book is that when Chya Roh tells Vanye that whatever her stated purpose what Morgaine actually does is destroy worlds he is entirely correct.
I do have one minor complaint, which is that I wish we’d gotten more of Jhirun’s interiority during the body of the novel. there was certainly a lot of necessary development for Vanye to move through, but after the tantalizing hint of Jhirun at the beginning I admit I was a little let down that she then falls into the background for most of the book — until the very end, when she returns in an absolutely exhilarating postlude that almost makes up for her backgrounding.
I was thinking, as I often do when reading older speculative fiction, about how I would teach this. one way of structuring an introductory course on fantasy and/or science fiction that I have toyed with in the past is to pair a recent novel with an older one, and I think it could be extremely productive to read this book alongside The Broken Earth, to think about fictions of shattered moons and climate devastation and also to think about Cherryh and Jemisin’s contrasting “solutions” to the problem — in Cherryh, the flight of climate refugees, a displacement whose results she recognizes will, one way or another, lead to violence, though she ultimately places the violence in the hands of the refugees rather than those unwilling to shelter them; in Jemisin, the tantalizing but also, I must admit, somewhat frustrating possibility of reconciliation with the planet. there’s a reading of Morgaine as effectively a climate doomer, which is funny to say and which I don’t think would actually hold up to serious argument.
there is another reading of Morgaine, though, as someone doomed by history. in another novel — in, I suspect, a twenty-first century novel with this premise — perhaps her purpose would be to undo the violence of colonialism, the devastation of anthropogenic climate change. in Well of Shiuan, however, these violences cannot be undone. what Morgaine and Vanye can do is tear down the tools that made these things possible — too late to change the past, only to destroy certain futures, across space and time, perhaps forever, hoping that out of the ruins in their wake something better might, however briefly, emerge but resigned to the possiblity — the likelihood — that it will not, and to the reality that they will never know. that what they leave behind is, whether through violence or the passage of years, death. that what lies ahead of them is a task that will always be completed too late to make a difference — if it can be completed at all — but which they must either do or die trying to do.
And this is the service I set on you: kill him, and carry out what I have shown you, without end—without end, ilin. Will you do this for me?
fuck.
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