So I recently dove into an oft-unmentioned book by sci-fi great C.J. Cherryh called Hammerfall. The first in a duology, I was excited to get into it and read something obscure she wrote - something new an interesting I had missed somehow.

I do, sadly, see why it was obscure and unmentioned.

The premise? Very cool. Marak has visions and after being betrayed by his father, he is sent to be taken before the immortal god-ruler called the Ila. Marak suffers from what's called "the madness" where a person is plagued by repeating visions and hallucinations, all of them suffering identical ones about a tower followed by the relentless compulsion to journey east. The Ila, strangely, decides Marak has enough of his faculties that he should just... follow them. See what happens.

So after bartering for his fellow madpersons' freedom to join him, Marak ventures across a desert as his visions intensify. During their travels, we see them weather storms, a power exchange, his budding relationships with two women who become his wives, Hati and Norit. Finally, after months, they come upon the tower. We learn about a galactic war between the Ila and these mysterious creatures and how the Ila has rebelled by creating things she wasn't supposed to and putting life on this planet. Luz and Ian, the two figures manning this tower, warn Marak that the end of the world is coming and they have to return and get as many people as they can to the tower for safety.

That's about where the interesting stuff stops.

After our journey through the desert, we then have to... journey back through the desert. Where we argue with the Ila, but then she rallies the tribes to go across the desert. Then... we go back across the desert. Again. Racing time as the "hammerfall" or apocalypse arrives.

I can only read so many passages about getting off and on a pack animal, resting in midday tents, and walking before I am skipping pages begging something to happen. To and fro. That is all the journey was. Just... coming and going.

It's a shame because Cherryh is a beautiful writer, her prose is fantastic and remains so strong in this. It was just so ceaseless in its monotony that I couldn't bring myself to be anything but annoyed. I skipped and skimmed so much hunting for when things would happen only to annoyingly discover they never did. We never got clarity on the ondats and what they are, very little came out about the nanotechnology other than it lets them live forever if they're infected with it, and Marak got closure by killing his dad after his dad killed his mom.

This all sounds extremely exciting, I know, but let me tell you that it was not. Somehow, we made it bland and tasteless and boring. I love weird sci fi, but there's a line between weird sci fi and pointless sci fi and Hammerfall was unfortunately the latter.

This got me thinking about a bigger picture item, mostly because I just finished Throne of Glass and there's a lot about the weakness or "bad writing" in the series' early installments. Even the greatest writers stumble. That's the nature of writing. Some big, colossal, genre-defining names have had bad or weak or forgettable books. Not every book is going to be a masterpiece and that's just fine.

We put so much pressure on authors to always produce masterworks, always getting better and better. Typically, they do! This is the nature of repeatedly flexing a talent! But sometimes, even masters of their craft slide. The true test of greatness is what they do with that slide, that reminder of the kind of author or talent or creator they used to be and how far they have come. Cherryh is a powerhouse in sci fi. She will always be. It's because of this folding-in of a less than ideal series that she continues to be known as a great writer. It didn't stop or deter her, she just folded it in and went back to her desk.

We have to let our favorites fail sometimes. They're humans. The beauty of human-made art is in the occasional failure of that art to connect. There is something painfully real about pushing through a book I should've put down and getting to the end, to seeing it through. It reminds me of fallibility, of how much we can change and still fall back a few steps, of how everyone including these colossi of their craft can miss sometimes.

So Hammerfall was not what I wanted it to be, but it was also a reminder that it doesn't make Cherryh any less of a great. That, alone, was worth finishing for the reminder.