Review: Sunfall

Sunfall by C.J. Cherryh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A series of short stories connected by the theme of being set on an Earth where sun exposure is dangerous, each told in a separate location about unlinked events. Apart from the scifi setting these stories have more of a paranormal vibe and while the writing was marvellously descriptive, right from the prologue, the actual plots of the individual stories were fairly mundane and didn't appeal to me.

The stories all started with a description of a city and then veered off to tell an unrelated mild horror short story. I made brief notes for all but two of the stories. The two I haven't commented on were set in Rome and Peking and were about as enjoyable as any of the others in the collection. My favourite was probably Highliner, but only by a narrow margin, and it was perhaps one of the least scifi stories in the set, certainly one of the least paranormal.

The Only Death in the City (Paris).
This starts off really cool. It describes Paris as an enclosed city, essentially self-contained, (apart from the river Sin that runs through it), and cut off from the outside world; the inhabitants never venture out of the city and in fact never really consider that anything exists outside.

After the interesting set up though, the actual story doesn't really use the setting at all. We meet some of the locals and learn that they don't actually die when they die, they are reborn in the city. And then the story is actually a love story that involves a deal with the devil, or in this case, a deal with Death.

The Haunted Tower (London).
In London most of the townsfolk believe in ghosts apart from some "unbelievers inside the walls [who] insisted they were manifestations of sunstruck brains." I noted that the Thames wasn't renamed like the Seine was in the previous story.

You get the impression that London is also closed off but it didn't mention walls specifically this time. London does have a spaceport though.

"I'm not sure I believe in you."
"You're not sure you don't, and that's enough."

Again the story doesn't feature the actual city much after the introductory paragraphs. This time we have a lady imprisoned in a high tower and seeing ghosts.

Ice (Moscow).
Moskva is another city on its own, out of contact with all other cities since around the time that spaceships stopped returning to Earth, we are told. All the old stone structures have been left to wear the weather of time while modern architecture has returned to using colourful wooden designs. The rivers here were thawed only for a few weeks a year. Werewolves?

Highliner (New York City).
A city of connected high rise buildings. Liners work on the outside of the skyscrapers and this story is about a workplace accident. The corporation who own the building want to cover it up but Johnny gives them hell. If you're afraid of heights, I suggest you don't look down for this one.

View all my reviews