Heavy Time

The Company Wars #4

by C.J. Cherryh

Asteroid miners Bird and Ben encounter an adrift ship in an asteroid belt that's inhabited by a half-crazy spacer named Dekker. When they tow the ship, they find their livelihoods--and their lives--in deadly danger. Proves that high-tech science fiction need not sacrifice literary values.--Publishers Weekly.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy, Audiobook

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cherryh returns to the Downbelow Station universe albeit around 50 years prior to the events in that novel and set in Earth space. In the 24th century, Earth's politics and most of its economy is in the hands of Earth Corporation or its affiliates, but Heavy Time focuses upon the asteroid mining economy located in the Belt. The corporation that runs the mining has gradually consolidated at the expense of former independent miners and such and most of the survey of the various asteroids is now heavily controlled by 'Mamma'; basically a strict monopoly/monopsony. While we get the big picture in dribs and drabs, this story focuses upon a handful of miners located at a refinery.

Heavy Time starts with Bird and Ben on a small spaceship; they have been out in the black for awhile, their mission is to assay asteroids they encounter for their mineral/metal potential for exploitation. If what they assay and 'tag' is economically valuable, they get a profit share. Nonetheless, these miners are basically living in a company town and most are in debt they will never escape. Bird and Ben receive a distress signal one day and find a battered mining ship with one survivor who is in rather bad shape, but they manage to get him and the wrecked ship back to the station.

On the one hand, Heavy Time is a detailed depiction of the asteroid economy, loaded with colorful characters. On the other hand, this is about the larger political/economic environment surrounding Earth Corporation as they labor to build a massive fleet to take back control of the far flung space colonies (yes, the same 'rogue fleet' that we find in Downbelow Station). What actually caused the wreck of the ship they found has large political and economic repercussions for the miners, and the Company wants to keep a lid on it and continue to basically 'enserf' the remaining 'freeriders' or independent miners. This could have been set in a 19th century company town!

Cherryh is always good with the nittygritty, day to day life on stations and such. This story does bog down a bit with the details, but I liked the class struggle aspects of it. Miners verses the company-- long history of that one! 3 stars!!

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read 10 of her other novels, I’ve grown quite accustomed to the demands CJ Cherryh makes on her readers to keep up with her, as she never holds our hands, and she plunges us into the intimate, moment-to-moment inner lives of her cast of characters. In this novel, she once again satisfyingly and believably centers her narrative on a traumatized young man, and surrounds him with several other authentically drawn characters. What she also does especially well in this work is contrasting the mundane, workaday lives of folks just trying to get by with the shadowy, manipulative, powerful forces in the background that are using everyone as pawns in a terrible game.

I will say that there are some aspects of the nuances of the politics of Cherryh’s richly-conceived universe that I am not certain I parse as well as I could in this installment, and because of that, this entry in her Company Wars books didn’t always resonate for me as powerfully as others have. But I remain deeply impressed by her bold, fearless approach, and I love and admire her ability to let complexity and tragedy and dark humor live and breathe on their own terms. I look forward to continuing to make my way through her vast oeuvre.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

The world of asteroid belt miners and others is presented with extraordinary clarity and detail. The physics and technology are superb, minus the 1980s view of computers compared to today, much less 100s of years in the future.

However, the story often badly bogs down in seemingly endless thoughts and worries in the characters minds. A good editor should have cut out perhaps 40% of the book. Although there is a good mystery and tragedy here, much of this impetus and energy is dissipated before the end of the book.

Many things do shine. Dekker's loss of Cory is a very real ache, Bird's humanity in the face of Ben's insane avarice, and the action in the last 1/5th of the book is fine.

So far my least favorite by CJ Cherryh but still better than most.


For Cherryh, the Alliance-Union universe books are (mostly) fantastic -
* In order to read:

Downbelow Station (1981) - Superb!!
Merchanter's Luck (1982) - Perhaps her best ever!
Rimrunners (1989) – Very good!
Heavy Time (1991) - good, but long winded
Hellburner (1992) - good, but long winded
Tripoint (1994) - very good
Finity's End (1997) – Superb
Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) - good but uneven, important for Cyteen and Regenesis
Cyteen (1988) – Superb
Regenesis (2009) - Superb

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in dept.
Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

The time: A generation or so prior to the events of Downbelow Station. The place: The asteroid belt. Ben Pollard and Morrie Bird are independents -- they take their little ship (the Trinidad) out (using charts provided by the Company, and using lightsails which are laser-boosted to speed and to deceleration using the Company's lasers), scan rocks, and assay and tag potentially profitable finds for the Company to come and harvest. But the Company really doesn't like independent miners; oh, no, very much not; so it makes things as miserable for them as it possibly can, pays as little as it possibly can, and keeps them on as tight a rein as it possibly can.

But then Ben & Bird respond to a distress call and retrieve a young guy named Dekker from a seriously smashed-up ship that's not even from their own sector, and Dekker is half off of his head and saying crazy(?) things about exactly how his ship got banged up and knocked half off to hell, and where's his partner, who was outside working ...?

Another first-rate Cherryh novel -- characters all damaged in their own ways, to greater or lesser extent, a series of almost claustrophobically-tight POVs, and tension ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level until everything finally starts going sideways at the end of the book.

Plus glimpses (never more than that) of the wider world against which the story is unfolding, and several cameos by names that will be very familiar if you've read Downbelow Station or others of the Merchanter books.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does your environment as a child shape the kind of person that you become? I think most of us would answer an unequivocal ‘yes’ to that question. Cherryh explores that notion, comparing Earth-born and Asteroid-Belt raised men, working in the Company environment of space. When you have different notions of what is moral or acceptable behaviour, how do you operate a small space ship together? When you’ve only known the morality of the mining company and never been exposed to literature or philosophy, how will you behave towards your fellows?

The Company is definitely placed in a ‘Big Brother’ role here, severely limiting the kinds of information that its employees receive and trying to drive out independent operators. It made me think about how companies these days are legally obliged to place the needs of share-holders above the good of employees and communities. The love of money may actually be the root of all evil, who knows?

Not my favourite book of Ms. Cherryh’s, but well worth a read.

Book number 278 in my Science Fiction & Fantasy reading project.

[Alex Bright · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded down

What a rather downbeat ending.

Cherryh's characters always jump off the page, fully formed. Perhaps that's not always a good thing. I spent the first fifth of this story thinking I might DNF it on account of how much I despised the sociopathic, narcissist named Ben. I spent the rest of the book twitching every time he was on the page, though the rest of the story was a captivating narrative with artfully drawn parallels to reality, even in our time. But I was still relieved when it was finally over... hence the lower rating.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story by C.J. Cherryh set in her Union/Alliance universe. She wrote it on the end of her run in this universe but it is actually the first book to read if you want to follow the story by the history timeline she has set up. This is not necessary in the least but it does seem the right way to go if you reread her books. The story itself is vintage Cherryh, by which I mean it is space scifi with good science and plenty of intrigue and action but she always tells her stories from the view point of people at the bottom of the social/economic/political spectrum. That doesn't mean you don't get a good dose of the big picture but she has a genius way of making sure you always find that out through the characters and they are not the leaders of the band. She also is one of the best authors at writing the story from the emotional angle of the characters while still keeping you on the straight and narrow of the plot. She makes you care about the characters, their problems, and draws you into the bigger concerns all at the same time. In this story you start off with an accident in the asteroid belt and a rescue and it just keeps getting crazy from there. Along the way you learn about 5 people just trying to make ends meet and how they are different people with their own issues but as the action steps up and the stakes for them get higher you are propelled head long into a fun exciting conclusion that pays off well in the end. A good story from one of my all time favorite authors.

[Anissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad I finally got to this one. While the characters weren't much to rave about (Dekker spends pretty much the entire book deranged, poor guy), Cherryh gets me with her setting. The main of the story takes place during the miners time on Refinery Two station between jobs (which is called "heavy time"). The description of the place and life on it were vivid and pulled me in. I was reminded of what I loved about Downbelow Station.

The political and corporate malevolence are there and come together well, because it's clear that there's a bigger thing going on than Dekker, his damaged ship and missing crew member/partner. That's really what propelled me through this story, finding out what ASTEX corporation's (Mama) bigger objectives are. The corporation's control is suffocating and that it's ever grasping for more is terrifying. This isn't a world where anyone with any sense can relax. Most everyone is mercenary and that makes for interesting interactions and relationships that often aren't what they seem on the surface. It's not a pretty world.

I'm going to read more in the series and Cherryh is still one of my favourites. Also, have to say in book likes it reminded me of The Expanse series with so close a look in at the lives of Belters. If I found out the guys who author The Expanse were Cherryh fans, I wouldn't be surprised. Recommended.

[Samantha (AK) · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Cher. Death is. Pain’s life. And there’s, above all, sons of bitches.” - Meg Kady

Meg’s a secondary character, but she sums up the emotional arc of this book pretty darn well. It was a slow-tilted ride of backstabbing intrigue… which I enjoyed, though a bit less than the other Cherryh books I’ve read.

This is Alliance/Union ‘verse, but you really don’t need the other books to grasp this one. Taking place well in advance of Downbelow Station, it follows a ragtag group of space miners working and living in the asteroid belt. Governed by Earth law and Company rules, in spitting distance of “the motherwell,” the atmosphere is different than either the Stationers seen in Downbelow or the deep-space Merchanters in Merchanter’s Luck. These are in-system, blue-collar workers, and it makes for a striking story.

It starts slow and claustrophobic, which seems to be a theme for Cherryh. Ben and Bird, two freelance asteroid miners, find another ship tumbling in space. Its pilot, Decker, is traumatized and half dead, and his partner is missing, dead under suspicious circumstances. Dragging him back to the Company station means taking a loss on three months of would-have-been work, and that’s only the start of trouble Decker brings.

Aside from the first chapters, the book takes place during “Heavy Time:” that time of recovery and preparation undertaken by spacers between outings. With a lifestyle that depends on zero-g labor, the 0.9g station recovery periods are essential for continued health. In the narrative arc, this also correlates to the recovery/preparation of the characters and the slow plot. We’re introduced to Dekker right as he comes out of a traumatic event, and his life really doesn’t improve from there. The incident that stranded his ship becomes a flashpoint that fundamentally alters System politics.

Bird’s an old-school spacer, the oldest miner in the Belt. everyone knows him, and most people like him. His Earthborn altruism is infuriating for his partner, Ben, who exemplifies the rulebound, educated class of kids raised and trained by the company Institute. Ben is, quite frankly, a self-serving snake. An opportunity comes along, and he doesn’t much care who he’s screwing over by taking it. As much as he frustrates Bird, he’s equally frustrated by Bird. Their whole partnership is built on tension: generational, cultural, and educational/class-based.

Meg and Sal, the other set of spacers we meet, have a similar tension. Meg herself is something like a space-diva anarchist, but Sal’s family are Shepherds (a kind of upper-class space-union that disapproves of ‘rab like Meg).

Decker is… a mess. And mental health resources apparently don’t exist, or have been diverted by corporate intrigue.

Where this book suffers is in its pacing. As much as I generally enjoy the circles of corporate machinations and internal character worries, the longwinded prose wore thin by the halfway point. The jacket on this edition calls Heavy Time as a thriller, but in my opinion it doesn’t quite earn that status, even with the substantial action pickup toward the end of the book.

I did like the attention to corporate politics, but that’s something Cherryh seems to do well--full-stop. We have company interests and increasing automation trying to drive the Shepherds (think unions) and free-runners (independents) out of business, we have Earth Company ramping up for the next era of war in the Beyond, and on top of all that we have the human drama. Ben and Bird, Dekker, Meg and Sal, various investigative parties (who DON’T have all the answers.)

And somehow, at the end, everything is okay. The end is also a bit startling, though, because while I knew that Heavy Time was before Downbelow Station, I didn’t realize just how long before. The clues were all there, but I must have had blinders on.

The ending is in the vein on “happy for now” which, again, is something I’m coming to expect from Cherryh. Hellburner closely follows Heavy Time, and I’ll admit I’m a little hesitant about the next book. Didn’t want to start it before I’d compiled my thoughts on this one, for example. Still, HT doesn’t end on a cliffhanger or anything, but it’s open enough that I think rolling into Hellburner should be straightforward.

[Cpt Skyhawk · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, I can't get enough of CJ Cherryh's world that takes place about 300 years in the future. This book follows the life of a group of miners who live their lives in the "Belt" here in our own solar system. The theme of "heavy time" -- necessary time they must spend in 1g gravity aboard space stations in between mining runs (there's no artificial gravity in this world) -- is ongoing throughout the novel.

It's a story set in the time before the Company/Union wars, when life was tough for those ruled by the Earth Company, and personal ships in the belt were largely at the mercy of directed "beams" of energy (caught by large sails) sent from mining station HQ's. The people are hesitant about the future -- they know the strength of the Union that lives in the "Beyond," as they call it, and they live in constant fear of some great big rock being dropped into their system at relativistic speeds, aimed straight towards Earth.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy Time is Cherryh's fourth book in her Company Wars series of the massive Alliance-Union book continuity. Like most of the Company Wars books, Heavy Time needn't be read in publication order though a few characters from Downbelow Station make cameos.

Heavy Time is a military-industrial thriller set against the backdrop of Earth's outer solar system. As the Earth Company and the United Defense Command gear up for war against breakaway extra-solar colonies, corporate contractors are scrambling to fill orders for raw materials. Enter ASTEX, Asteroid Exploration, a large public company in the midst of tense disputes with their freelance miners and ore handlers. Two independent spacers, Morrie Bird and Ben Pollard, are working to hit their next big mineral score in the asteroid belt when they stumble across the wreckage of another scout ship and its sole inhabitant, Paul Dekker.

Bird and Ben deliver Dekker to their home port of Refinery 2 and file a salvage claim on Dekker's ship and what seems like the big break of their career turns into a bureaucratic nightmare. Dekker's late partner was the daughter of a distraught MarsCorp executive who wants Dekker's head and Dekker's so-called accident may have been financially motivated.

Cherryh's writing is crisp and minimalist without sacrificing interesting details about the harsh life of industrial space. The mature, soft-hearted "blue-skyer" Morrie Bird is contrasted by Ben Pollard, a child of space station and company life who cares more about math and finances than altruism. Cherryh also provides a glimpse into the Earth-side politics that are only hinted at in other novels of the series through the characters of Meg and Sal, Bird and Ben's lady-pals who are also former political agitators.

Fans of the military sci-fi sub-genre who are bored with redressed Horatio Hornblower novels and ultra-conservative manifestos are encouraged to read this book.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been variously and accurately described as a claustrophobic book. It all occurs on a space station starting with a mysterious crash and ending in a firefight. But in the middle, it is like sitting through union meetings. Well, actually most of it is union meetings. This is MilSciFi, but not the most exciting, page-turning variety. It is critical to read this one before the much more interesting and exciting Hellburner, because the survivors of this book return in that one - this is the unique case in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe to have a book and a sequel. If you are unfamiliar with Cherryh's work, she, like Le Guin before her, created the Alliance-Union universe and scatters stories around that touch on various themes and planets but with no attempt at a chronological order and no attempt at exhaustive explanations either. The reader is left to cut and paste the pieces and parts to create his/her own picture of this splitting of Earth from her children and the consequences of politics and money. But, those themes of power are more important in the sequel than here.
The importance of this book is in describing the Belters and Shepherds in ways that will later be expanded upon by the Corey team in The Expanse because that show/book series definitely derived a lot of Belter lingo and mythology from Cherryh and the OPA is definitely related to the Shepherds.
Highly recommended for these reasons to fans of The Expanse.

[PeteyPablo6969 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started at the third book because conformity is for squares. The book was good, had interesting character development and plot build. The ending was a wet noodle. I liked it enough to want to read the others in the series.

[David Kerschner · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, to begin with, this book is very very slow to start. We literally spend 180 pages with one character in the hospital refusing to sign forms, and two others trying to get forms in order. However, this is a rather good read.

The feeling of claustrophobia in the beginning where the three characters are stuck in one small ship is palpable. As the book continued, I got the impression of the interminable slowness of space travel. Given sub FTL drives, this is probably very accurate. After the initial pleasures of space travel wear off, the vast distances, which take a great deal of time to traverse, would make space travel a rather boring experience, something along the lines of travel by cruise ship I imagine. With a small ship, there would be little to do to pass the time.

I'm not entirely sure if the slow buildup was intentional to create the feeling of the slowness of space travel at sub ftl speeds but it certainly felt that way to me.

The book eventually picks up the pace and I understand this is Cherryh's style, long build up with a rapid payoff at the end.

I almost quit reading due to how long it took for anything to happen, but I'm glad I didn't.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I am certainly glad for the most part to be born at this particular point in human history (as opposed to the point where getting killed by a saber-toothed tiger was going to be my likeliest fate) one of the suckiest aspects about being tied to a finite lifespan is not getting the chance to see if all the predictions futurists made about expanding into space and whatnot are ever going to come true.

Fortunately CJ Cherryh has a way of soothing that sting by demonstrating now in the future giant corporations are still going to control everything and ferret out ways to legally screw people over. So it seems I won't miss all that much.

Her Alliance-Union setting is ridiculously sprawling, with lots of moving parts that often can't be seen in full until you read a whole bunch of them and get a sense of the larger sociopolitical backdrop she's putting together. As such there's no real ideal entry point other than diving in and paying attention to the background details until it all comes together in one of the cornerstone novels. In that case this one and follow up "Hellburner" (which I think I have around here somewhere) work as prequels to "Downbelow Station" which a lot of the stuff percolating here and presumably in the sequel finally explode.

This one, however, might be tough unless you've already read a bunch of them because it can take some time to get used to the setting and the style. In fact, I'd say its one of the least user friendly entries into the setting. It takes place in the asteroid belt, where one of those giant corporations that only have good intentions for everyone, ASTEX (known by the miners as "Mama") controls pretty much all operations and while miners are able to make a living its clear that the deck is pretty much stacked in Mama's favor. Two miners in partnership, Ben and Bird, are out prospecting likely claims when they come across a damaged ship that shouldn't be there. There's one survivor aboard, Paul Dekker, but he's in shock and out of his mind, screaming about a lost partner and not giving much insight into what damaged his ship in the first place. The obvious explanation is that he was struck by another ship but nothing was marked as being out there and of course Mama's records are always accurate. Or are they?

As far as the mystery goes its like watching a movie on Watergate, if the conspiracy oriented theory isn't the right one then what the heck are you doing here. "Oh it was a random accident" would certainly be a twist ending but not exactly thrilling. So the question isn't what exactly happened but the "why" and when everyone else is going to figure that out. Which is a fine plot to hang on the book.

The problem here, unlike a lot of her books, is that the rough around the edges characters are tough to identify with. Dekker spends most of the book either out of his mind and when he's not insane he's mostly confused as different forces seek to use him for their own ends. One of the men who rescues him, Ben Pollard, is uniformly abrasive, and while you can understand that he's trying to work the corporate angles and increase his livelihood it doesn't give him a lot in the way of narrative drive. He's not keen on solving the mystery, he just wants Dekker to go away so he can claim his ship as salvage. He and his partner spend most of their time arguing over Dekker so it seems like a chunk of the book is two men shouting at each other in an enclosed space while a man off his gourd wails in the background. And while that sometimes describes my workday more often than I'd like, its not gripping reading at times. The addition of two ladies that work with the boys and perhaps have their own agendas helps but large sections of the book are just everyone going about their hustling while all the stuff with Dekker burbles about in the background waiting to explode.

What's fascinating about this book and speaks to one of her greatest skills as a writer is how she gets what it would probably feel like to scrabble about working for these people. From the texture of the dialogue with its casual slang (but not even just the slang, but the basic cadence of it) to the systems and rituals and structures that have come into existence out of necessity, the setting here has a gritty and lived-in feeling that novels about actual present day miners doesn't don't ever quite accomplish. The sheer feel of the rhythm does nine-tenths of the work in making the story immersive, which is why its a shame that the characters can't bring it all the way home.

Maybe they exist too far on the political fringes. When things do eventually erupt its hardly due to anything that the main characters do so much as events that they're only partially paying attention to because they have their own more immediate problems suddenly get shoved into the foreground. Like real politics, Cherryh's characters often don't show their hand (or even their faces) until they absolutely have to, choosing to work through asides and intermediates. It can make the proceedings somewhat opaque if you're not totally keyed into what she's doing, or have a good working knowledge of the background. But no one encapsulates the feel of future political maneuvering quite like she does and her ability to move from everyone trying to jockey for advantage in the background while the people affected scramble for cover in the foreground is really unparalleled. The layers involved in the density of what she's doing is striking but I think she might have been too good at her game this time out, with understanding not really arriving until its explained to us. It makes this book feel like another small piece in the much larger puzzle she was assembling in the runup to "Downbelow Station" and if you care about her vision of military SF then this is a great example . . . but the meshing of the gears is what's the star here and the characters, well-meaning, over their heads or otherwise, are just caught up in those gears and if there's anything compelling about them, its whether they're slippery and flexible enough to get through or hard-headed and stubborn enough to be ground to bits.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

When industrial accidents turn out to be murder... I love that kind of crime story. Throw in an uprising and I am very happy. What I really like about Cherryh's Union-Alliance stories though is of course the spaceships and space stations and all that. Characters that have never been on a planet, don't really understand what people who talk about mountains and forests are on about... Cherryh also gets a lot of technical stuff about the weirdness of living in space without bogging the story down: The "Heavy Time" of the title refers to time experiencing gravity, getting used to having weight again. There are some elements in here that appeared in the other two books from this series that I've read: people's personalities being broken down with drugs, and haunted PTSD space pilots. But this one feels much slower-paced, more time spent on character development. I think it pays off, everything seems much more real and grown-up than in Downbelow Station, for example. She's still doing this thing though, where 'courtship' for lack of a better word, 300 years in the future, is a lot like it was in the 1970s.

There was also some politics stuff I found really interesting, speaking of the 70s. There are several mentions of a burnt-out social movement called "the rab." The feeling is that a few years before the story takes place, there was this big movement, with its own slang and way of dressing, that was very political and ended more or less with a big show-down massacre. Some of the characters are trying to negotiate a life where they can acknowledge their past affiliation, show that they are still true to at least some of the ideals but, like, still be employable. Others reflect on their rab-past as some childish thing they regret. You know I loved that, and I really feel that Cherryh nails it. The whole book is just brilliant.

[Lauren Stoolfire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy Time (Company Wars #4) by C.J. Cherryh is a book that I just happened to stumble upon. I'm going to be honest when I say that the cover really caught my eye. I just needed to know what was going on there if you know what I mean. Somehow I'd totally missed out on this author before now, but I thought that it was pretty good. I'm just glad that with this series you don't have to read it in order. I think I might have to try more from this author in the future.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the "ghetto" of science-fiction, as Philip K. Dick once called it, there is room for the prophetic ramblings of visionaries who can not be bothered to become really great writers. Sometimes the inner voice is too effluent, too impatient. Cherryh's, like Dick's, is the hard-scrabble rattle of the human machine chewed up in the winepress of bureaucratic nightmares. But where Dick's oracular disposition is drug addled mysticism, Cherryh's is the Protestant Work Ethic. Both of their oeuvres are chock full of technical and stylistic failures, but so are pop music and the Prophets. I'll take vitality over heartless emulation.

And vitality is on display here, in a book I think is more mature and more effective than her Hugo winner Downbelow Station, reviewed elsewhere. I won't concentrate on my criticisms of her execution as I did so volubly in that review, save to say that they are somewhat attenuated, but still enervating. The intercession of many years and a critical publishing success no doubt contributed to a more refined working out of the themes worth treating in the sub-series that came from that earlier novel, now known as The Company Wars, of which this book is a prologue. Pertinent too, I think, was the intercession of two Reagan administrations and the slow decay both of the Soviet Union and the post war industrial and labor policy consensus of the United States. This novel feels more contemporary to the present reader not only because it is set in a more proximate future, but because it is informed by an awareness of what proved to be the new state of affairs for the economy and culture we ended up inheriting and the concerns of those living through it.

[Luke Burrage · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nostalgia read for me, but one worth my time. Is it for other people who didn't read it first in the mid-nineties? Maybe not, as the same kind of thing has been done better since. But it holds up as interesting character-based drama set in an expertly crafted science fiction world.

Full review on my podcast, SFBRP episode #555



After diversions on buying and reading the hardcover version of the book, Luke and Juliane talk about Heavy Time by C J Cherryh, the first Company Wars novel by internal chronology.

https://www.sfbrp.com/archives/2295

[Adam Kopcinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the characters and the story was engaging, but having now read both this and Hellburner, the interjection of worldbuilding and politics into the narrative can, at times, feel a bit out of place. I'm not sure how prevalent this is in the rest of C.J. Cherryh's writing - perhaps it's just an attribute of the Company Wars series- but it does get a bit distracting at times, and slows the pace of the story down - although it's more tolerable here than in Hellburner. This might sound like an unwarranted complaint, considering nearly every science fiction book set in the near-to-distant future tends to lay down a thick layer of politics and worldbuilding, but here, it's not blended into the story quite as skillfully as a Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, or Le Guin might do. Still, this book is worth reading for the strong first half, which is a page-turner, and sure to keep the reader engaged. Your fondness for either Dekker, Bird, or Pollard should be enough to carry you through the second half.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was one of the lousiest books I have ever read, and I've read some lousy books.

1) There's no science fiction - as in, there's no cool technology. It's just 60's-era space technology...in the asteroid belt -- and it's pretty much just a backdrop. The whole dang story could have occurred in Detroit with no significant difference. Unless you count random hair & clothing styles, bad language, or a general lack of morals as sci-fi.

2) The plot stinks: 1 person killed, 1 person injured due to company breaking laws. Company tries to cover it up. Injured person found -- 90% of the book passes with people waiting in bars arguing over injured person's property while said injured person is recovering so that it can be discovered what the company did. Truth becomes public. Government takes over company. Some main characters senselessly killed in the transition. Nothing will be better, except the government is slightly more sane than the company. The end.

3) The writing stinks. When the writing isn't pages and pages of disjointed stream-of-not-so-consciousness of the injured guy, it's profane gutter-trash talk that is written in really bad english, spanish, russian, french, and portuguese, from what I can tell. With absolutely no indication given as to what the foreign words mean. I happen to know english, russian, and spanish, so I was able to parse most of it, laboriously. But...seriously?

4) When you put the whole thing together, it was just boring, slow, and offensive.

I picked this up in a pile of books being given away for free, but I transferred it to my garbage can to try to avoid inflicting it upon anyone else.

[Mars · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 40% book were actually really good - but then it slogged down to the point where reading it was a chore. (The exact moment this happens is when you first hear rab-speak)

It picks up again near the end, but by that time the aftertaste is so foul that it doesn't really help.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pair of freerunners, independent asteroid taggers as opposed to the ASTEX corp-rat mass drivers, have found a large iron asteroid but some sort of accident has left their ship crippled and the pilot Dekker’s partner, Cory Salazar left adrift, presumed dead. Two other freerunners hear Dekker’s mayday and rescue him from the crippled ship. Dekker is completely unstable after the incident and still thinks it is 2 months earlier and keeps flashing back to the disaster which he insists was caused by a rogue mass driver crew poaching their asteroid. The rescuers, Ben and Bird, discuss the salvage of Dekker’s ship. Ben wants it but Bird is more considerate of young Dekker who has lost almost everything. Back on a space dock, doing Heavy Time (under gravity), Bird and Ben liaise with a couple of shady women, Meg and Sal, who also have designs on becoming freerunners in the new ship. Dekker is hospitalized and interrogated under drugs until he is uncertain as to what really happened. It seems that Earth Corp don’t want any waves made with rumours of rogue ‘drivers. Once released from hospital, Dekker, angered at his new status - unlicensed, shipless and alone - is offered a guilt job as a crew member, which he ultimately accepts. Things seem to be settling down until a body turns up in the gravity well where the mass-driven ore is sent. It is Cory and it just may be the trigger for a revolution! Gripping stuff from C. J. Cherryh and part of her Company Wars series.

[Excel Lifestyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Space miners vs The Man!

A prequel to Cherryh’s Downbelow Station showing how earth built their fleet. The Earth Company and independent miners mine out our solar system’s asteroid belt, while the company squeezes every penny and fights for as much control as they can get. Meanwhile two independent miners rescue a stranded ship that was damaged in mysterious circumstances that lead our heroes in over their heads. Really an ensemble cast of 5 characters:

Bird: A veteran miner who’s seen it all. A good man trying to make ends meet while also doing what’s right. He’s the moral compass of the group.

Ben: A young man that’s much more concerned with making money than doing right. Got a real talent for numbers and knows how to work the company system.

Meg: A counterculturist with a record. Doesn’t always work entirely within the law, but is probably the most ethical character besides Bird. Wants to take down the man but has seen enough to know it probably won’t happen.

Sal: Meg’s partner but has high connections within the independents. She wants a life beyond mining but the independents want something big from her if they are going to uplift her.

Dekker: the man involved in the aforementioned mysterious accident. The company is trying to convince him he’s insane and he’s not sure they’re wrong.

All the characters are interesting and the world building is top notch. A very realistic look at space mining. This is the fastest moving Cherryh novel I’ve read but by far has the most profanity which was very disappointing. Will not be reading the sequel.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another novel in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe that focuses on the lives of average working people not the big players at the large space stations. This one is set the closest to Earth (so far as I've read) and the earliest chronologically. Cherryh's writing, as always, is superb - the dark, gritty atmosphere almost jumps out of the page and the characters are so vividly drawn and fleshed out they instantly become familiar. That said, Heavy Time might be the weakest book in this series for me but they're all so damn good it hardly matters.

[Xabi1990 · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10. Media de los 13 libros leídos de la autora : 8/10

Me llevo yo bien con la Cherry. Casi siempre entretenida de leer, me quedo con “Hermanos de tierra” o “Paladín”. Y de series la de Citeen (la de Chanur tb está bien). La chica ha ganado creo que 4 Hugos, que no es poco.
Solo me ha defraudado suyo “La puerta de Ivrel”. Este tampoco me gustó demasiado, con una mala traducción y aventurita descafeinada de superviviente y compañias mineras.

[Stefan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not her best, but still interesting as a look at the earliest stages of the Company/Union universe. I wonder if this was an inspiration for the authors of the Expanse series, with its description of life on a mining station in the asteroid belt complete with its own internationally flavored Belter cant.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard one to rate, but I think I'm ending up at 3.5 stars, rounding up. I don't believe I've ever read a sci-fi quite like this. Full review later today.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the sequel to this book some years back, so this was kind of anticlimctic. Good fill-in, in the storyline.

[Nathan Trachta · Rating 4 out of 5]

CJ Cherryh has been a long term favorite of mine, going back to my college days. Recently I’ve been going back through some of her works and this time Heavy Time struck me as the perfect book to take on a road trip.

As with many of Ms. Cherryh’s works characters are a premium in Heavy Time; this comes from her writing style and in this case giving us multiple characters to follow (Dekker, Bird, Ben, Meg, and Sal). Each is unique and brings their own observations/experience into the game. For Heavy Time the primary characters are Dekker, Bird and Ben for most of the book with Dekker being the focus (note: many of Ms. Cherryh’s books have a character that is different from others and the book deals with the blending between them and the other characters). There is some change to Ben becoming the focus as Ms. Cherryh describes Ben’s actions on R2 (a space station where miners from the R2 Sector go) and his forcing of issues. Something that I really noticed in this reading was the similarity of Ms. Cherryh’s Belters and the Belters in the Expanse series making me wonder how much Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (aka James S.A. Corey) were influenced by Ms. Cherryh.

Rating wise this one is tougher than many of Ms. Cherryh’s books. I enjoyed it and there was much that needed to transpire in the story line but there’s also much that feels as either wasted time or more needed. An example of wasted time/more needed includes the time from rescuing Dekker to getting him to R2. It’s drawn out and made so Dekker kind of wears on us but I was also fishing for Bird and Ben providing us more working to heal/recover Dekker. Instead we get Dekker effectively the same throughout the return trip, Bird and Ben disagreeing on things which I have a little bit of a problem with given they’re a team and work together (yes, teams can disagree but this one seemed a little extreme making Ben and Bird seem more of a recent team rather than a team who’d been together for a few years. I also had minor problems with Meg and Sal because we don’t have enough info on their background, something I think should have been present when Meg and Sal had private talks. All of this makes me lean toward a 3 star rating (really 3.5) but I’ll bump it up to 4 stars because of the ending. Bird comes through with flying colors! Actually the entire team steps up a notch as the situation and description becomes more confusing. What I particularly loved was Ms. Cherryh does come out showing corporate greed (another similarity between this book and Leviathan Wakes and the rest of the Expanse series Mr’s Abraham and Franck) and the eventual heavy hand of parts of the Earth Company. If anything the ending does a great job setting up the entire Alliance-Union universe as we see tertiary characters who are important in other Alliance-Union books.