Cloudrock U/P [Paperback]

On Cloudrock the penalty for imperfection is death: death by the long fall into the void, through the poisonous mists and gases that rise from the deadlands far, far below.

The two tribes who survive on the Rock, the tribes of Day and Night, keep their families tight, their bloodlines pure and true, by incest, by cannibalism and by murder. Parcelling out their tiny world in measures of light and time, they wrap themselves in ritual and taboo, each family denying the presence of the other.

THEN CAME THE SHADOW:

born to the matriarch Catrunner, the Shadow is deformed - a neuter dwarf - a natural candidate for instant death. But for this mutant, fate intervenes. The Shadow may live - on the condition that none acknowledge its presence: one word, one glance, and the Shadow will join its luckless kin in the long death-flight.

Surviving on the outskirts of the family, the Shadow's very existence creates an unspoken question that challenges the ties that bind.
This is the Shadow's tale...

The new thought-provoking novel from the author of THE SONGBIRDS OF PAIN, A THEATRE OF TIMESMITHS and WITCHWATER COUNTRY.

Some elements of the book reminded me of a couple of other books. Larry Niven had in one of his books, a planet called We Made It, where people live on top of a tall mountain that is above a lot of poisonous mists. The environment of the two families is like that, they live on top of a tall mountain that sticks up above poisonous clouds. In some ways, the situation of Shadow was like a book by C. J. Cherryh called Wave Without A Shore, where the inhabitants of a particular planet don't acknowledge the presence of certain shunned people right in their midst.

I thought that the Shadow was a very unusual choice of main character and first person narrator: It is a neuter dwarf who is shunned and turned into a virtual ghost by its entire society/family group. And yet, Shadow is even loved in a way by people, its mother and its brother, who will never talk to it, never acknowledge it in any way. It has a very strange relationship with other human beings, very strange.

There were a lot of plot twists in this book that I didn't expect, very unusual developments that I didn't see coming and really enriched the plot/story, made it very compelling.

I would like to have seen some more interior exploration by Shadow of its genderless state, the fact that it is neuter. I guess it didn't know any better or Shadow has never known anything else, but the neuter aspect doesn't really come up that much, which surprised me a little bit. Maybe this is because it was written a few years ago.

Reading this book makes me wonder why some of the books I read are 300, 400, 500 pages, but are not as compelling as this 160 page book? I have a few others, like WASP, by Eric Frank Russell, which is about 140 apges, and is also very powerful, more powerful than much longer books being published today. I don't know the answer to this. It seems like a lot of older science fiction is very dense, and I mean dense in a good way, a lot really packed into a short book - everything that happens, everything on the page moves the book foward.

This book was published 15 years ago, and I may have been lucky in getting this British edition - it may never have come out in an american edition - but if you can find this book, I strongly recommend it: the tight, moving, twisty plot, the unusual setting, and the strange but great narrator, the Shadow, make this book a compelling, pleasurable read.

CLOUDROCK, by Garry Kilworth.