1. Well, the door repair guys did not come today, but they rescheduled for next Tuesday, which is at least not that far away. And I still took my day off, since I'd already said I was going to, so that was nice.
2. This morning I broke a glass bottle in the sink and got a couple small cuts on my hand and one bigger one on my finger, but thankfully it's not "going to the hospital" level. Rather than being a slice, it seems to have cut a little chunk out, so it was bleeding a lot and awkward to bandage. It's my right hand, but my second to last finger, so not a finger I use a whole lot.
3. Since the guys cancelled on us we were able to go to Disneyland earlier, which meant less traffic and less heat (though it was still warm and sunny). We had a really lovely lunch at a restaurant we haven't eaten at in ages.
Darkseid's loomed behind the run so far - his death started it and his passing's the reason its new threat, the Nyctari, are active now.
There's a child of prophecy tied to those god-purgers, one Metron's interested in.
He's made a pawn of Maxwell Lord - brought him out of his post-Rebirth-Wonder-Woman coma and turned his resources to acquiring the child.
In issue #7, some of New Genesis'd arrived on Earth fleeing the Nyctari.
Those of Apokolips who'd fled the enemy's coming there first had also made it to Earth. Max'd met them - and Metron'd smoothed enough the way to their combining forces.
We ended up going down to the park earlier than planned since the door repair guys had to cancel on us. Bummed about them having to reschedule but I was very glad to get an earlier start.
Bruce and Alfred have noticed that Robin has been unfocussed and a bit moody of late, and are stumped as to why, though Alfred has an idea and offers to have a word.
My check-in: Minor editing + researching details to fill in placeholders + meta info (title, tags, summary) for pod_together. My partner and I are doing a collection of stories instead of just the one, so there's going to be a lot of meta-info to write…
When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!
I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.
Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.
Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.
Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Starting in the mid-70s, she has has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.
Notes towards an overview
It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won two Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)
Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.
Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.
Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)
I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.
Series and other groupings I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:
The Union-Alliance universe Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.
In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.
The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)
Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)
The atevi series In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.
The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.
The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.
This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.
The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)
Fantasies Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).
Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.
Shared-world work The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.
For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh resurrected her college major and Master's degree in Classics to focus on Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories, some of them also incorporated into two novel collaborations with Morris and a solo novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.
Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.
Full disclosure This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.
I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.
Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.
I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.) Other Cherryh reading projects
The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward
Endnotes 1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]
2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]
The link to the information page for the book, Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, now returns “Page not found,” and the text is no longer listed under the book series on computer systems and networks.
Springer Nature confirmed the removal is part of the retraction process: “The book is being retypeset, including with the addition of a retraction note, to reflect its retracted status. Once that has been completed, it will be back on the website (clearly marked as retracted),” Tim Kersjes, Head of Research Integrity, Resolutions, at the company, told Retraction Watch.
As we previously reported, many of the citations at the end of chapters contained significant errors, referencing works or chapters of books that do not exist. We confirmed a few of these errors with four people cited in the references.
As of June 26, the book, which sold for $169, had been accessed 3,782 times, according to its information page.
Following our coverage, Yung En Chee, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Melbourne, contacted her university library, which had the book in its catalog. According to her post on Bluesky and emails we have seen, on July 2, Chee asked the library to “pause access, or ask Springer Nature for an explanation or refund.” The library sent her an update saying the publisher told them they were aware of the problem and were currently investigating what happened. The book was removed from the library’s catalog by July 14.
Kersjes told us Springer Nature is “committed to publishing content that is accurate, trustworthy, and aligned with the highest editorial standards,” and is “reviewing this case carefully so we can understand what went wrong and ensure it does not happen again.”
The author of the book, Govindakumar Madhavan, did not respond to our request for comment. According to his author bio, Madhavan is the founder and CEO of SeaportAI.
1. I had two meetings today but both went quicker than I thought they would.
2. The guys are coming to fix the back door tomorrow (they got the part in that they needed to order), so I decided to take the day off and then we can go to Disneyland afterwards for lunch or dinner.
A prominent cancer research lab is up to three retractions and six corrections for “highly similar” images in papers published between 2018 and 2022.
The lab is led by Kounosuke Watabe at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Watabe holds one of three Wake Forest professorships all funded by a $2.8 million donation for cancer research in 2016.
Each of the retractions and corrections came after sleuth Kevin Patrick raised concerns about the articles on PubPeer in May 2024. Patrick, who identified instances of images in Watabe lab papers being “more similar than expected,” told Retraction Watch he wasn’t confident whether the image duplication could be attributed to misconduct. “I am never sure which is worse, misconduct or a pattern of errors. Neither seem to inspire confidence in the published results,” he said.
Watabe did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mark Anderson, the assistant vice president of strategic communications at Wake Forest, also did not respond to our requests for comment via phone and email, nor did the general media contact listed online. Patrick told us he reached out to the university when he identified the image issues and never heard back.
The first retracted paper, on chronic nicotine exposure and metastatic lung cancer, was published in Oncogene in 2022. The authors retracted it in January for “highly similar ex vivo brain images,” which the authors said was a result of “mismanaged” data, according to the notice. The article has been cited 65 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Kounosuke Watabe
In a May 2024 PubPeer comment, Patrick, who uses the pseudonym “Actinopolyspora biskrensis,” had also questioned one of the paper’s citations. The work cited a paper that “was peer reviewed, accepted, and published in 5 days” from Journal of Cancer Science and Research, a journal “commonly believed” to be published by a predatory publisher. The journal appeared on Beall’s list, a controversial catalog of suspect publishers that went dark in 2017, and is not indexed in the Web of Science.
The same authors agreed to retract a 2021 paper in Nature Communications suggesting nicotine promotes the spread of breast cancer. That article has been cited 180 times. The May 2025 notice also cited mismanaged data and similar images in the work.
A spokesperson for Nature Communications confirmed the journal investigated the paper after being alerted to PubPeer comments. When we asked what the notice meant by “errors in data handling,” the spokesperson told us the question was “best answered by the authors.”
The group also lost a third paper in May, this one in Breast Cancer Research, for “highly similar images.” All the authors who responded to the journal disagreed with the retraction, although they admitted the images were “incorrect,” the notice states. The article, published in 2021, has been cited 29 times.
Patrick pointed out on PubPeer last year that one of the figures in that paper “seems to have been published” by the same authors in an earlier paper “where it is described differently.”
A representative from Springer Nature, which publishes the three journals, told us each of the retractions was initiated after journals became aware of concerns on PubPeer and that they didn’t plan to investigate any other papers by the same researchers.
The spokesperson also told us two of the Oncogene corrections were spurred by PubPeer, while the authors requested a correction on the third.
Five of the six corrections on papers coauthored by Watabe were also for image duplication. In the remaining article, a 2019 Oncogene paper, the authors “inadvertently omitted” dividing lines in blots and “incorrectly stated” the source of a cell line, according to the notice.
Hui-Wen Lo, the corresponding author of that paper and two others, responded to the concerns raised on PubPeer. In response to questions on a different Oncogene paper that received a correction for reusing an image from a previous publication, the corresponding author called the duplication an “an oversight on our part” and an “honest mistake.”
And Watabe responded on PubPeer to a post from Patrick pointing out a 2019 eBioMedicine paper contained images that “overlap, but are described as representing different treatment groups.” Watabe replied that the images were “inadvertently switched.” He said the authors requested a correction to the article. However, Patrick later commented the images had been completely replaced in the correction, and asked Watabe to clarify. Watabe did not respond.
In addition to the 2016 donation that established Watabe’s professorship, all of the studies were funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the research funding statements on the papers.
When we asked how the journal was alerted to issues with the papers and whether they would look into other papers by the Watabe lab, Christine Battle, vice president and publisher at the American Association for Cancer Research, which publishes the journal, said “We don’t comment on specific cases.”
What Is Write Every Day? A roving writing support community, with a bias toward encouraging a daily writing habit. It's a decentralized community, without moderators or a fixed home; hosting duties are passed around among members of the community. nafs is hosting the first half of July; I'm hosting the second half, starting on the sixteenth. (By my time-zone: tomorrow.) zwei_hexen will take over in August. If you want the history of who hosted when, zwei_hexenkeeps a list.
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