I am frequently amazed with how a writer that I have known and loved can amaze me with the skill with which she/he puts words together. I have read and enjoyed C. J. Cherryh’s works since she first started appearing on the sff shelves at the bookstores. But I had not read anything by her or reread anything in several years. Life and its complications, new authors, had intervened.
So last week I picked up a paperback of her collected short stories.
One paragraph and I was enthralled. Aside from her skill at creating characters, of her worldbuilding, of her mastery of both pure fantasy and hard-core science fiction, her ability to write, to take words and put them together, place her in the top rank, not just of sff writers but of all writers of the English language.