Heavy Time by CJ Cherry is a Heavy Read

15 Nov, 2025

Having loved Gate of Ivrel, I eagerly snatched up several more CJ Cherryh books from eBay. One of them was Heavy Time, part of her Company Wars sub-series in the greater Alliance-Union Universe. The third book in this sub-series, Downbelow Station won Cherryh her first Hugo, so I was excited for this.

That excitement didn’t last long. 220 pages into this 350 page science fiction-flavored Xanax, even sunk cost fallacy couldn’t carry me through to the end.

The first problem is my own. Chronologically, Heavy Time is the first Company Wars book, but it wasn’t the first written; Downbelow Station came ten years before this. Wikipedia lists this book first in the sub-series, and I foolishly didn’t look at the release years. I’m not sure how much that matters since it takes place before Downbelow, but I felt like I was missing context to the wider world.

This book’s problems go far beyond my chrono-confusion. Heavy Time suffers the same dilemma, taking its title as an instruction. The story isn’t slow-paced, deliberate in its movement, and establishing an enthralling world and engaging characters. It’s rather the opposite. I hate to say “nothing happens,” but I’d be hard-pressed to explain what this book is about. By page 220, I knew very little about the three protagonists beyond their one-note personalities, much less the other characters. Confined to a spaceship and a space station—which itself is limited to a bar, bedroom, and hospital room—the world is small and lifeless.

As for those characters, there’s Bird. He’s an old spaceship pilot who works as a junker. The book loves telling us he’s old and experienced, without ever showing us that age or knowledge. His partner, Ben, is completely unlikable; a miserable man who only thinks about himself and getting ahead. As with Bird, the book thinks we all suffer memory loss and must remind us at every turn that he’s an orphan and that we should feel sorry for him. Then he opens his mouth and some variation of “no, you shouldn’t” tumbles out.

Then there’s Dekker. Bird and Ben find him out in space, unconscious in his ship. The ship is badly damaged, and when Dekker wakes up he screams about his partner, Cory. She’s nowhere to be found. The duo pull Dekker out and take him to their ship, and then take him back to a nearby station. Dekker has lost his mind, freaking out, flailing as he calls out for Cory and keeps asking about the time. Cherryh does a great job establishing his mental state. We piece together why he’s so concerned about the time and his watch, and we see his brain ticking away, trying to figure out what day it is, but it’s so jumbled in there he can’t get a clear picture. He can’t remember exactly what happened or where Cory is, but he’s sad that she’s dead, and equally convinced she’s still alive. It’s an impressive display of how trauma can wreak havoc on anyone.

The problem is that the book never advances from that point. This moment forges a status quo in a steel so tough that even the heat of a thousand suns couldn’t melt it.

The generous reading is that this is a work of literary fiction, that the “action” takes place in Dekker’s head. The plot is him working through his trauma and confronting it. This argument doesn’t carry water because nothing of the sort happens. Every time we cut to Dekker’s point-of-view, we’re subjected to the same thought process ad nauseam. “What time is it?” “What day is it?” “What happened?” “There was another ship!” “Where’s Cory?” In trying to put us in the mind of someone who is struggling with faulty memory and trauma, Cherryh jettisons both plot and character by subjecting the reader to the same scenes repeatedly. Dekker, in his hospital bed, asks himself what happened and never gets beyond an explosion and seeing Cory’s body floating in space. This doesn’t induce a sense of claustrophobia, fear, or anxiety, but boredom. Every time Dekker pops up, the story grinds to a halt so we can hear him once again ask “Where’s Cory?” and not get an answer.

While Dekker’s perspective has the cover of a person dealing with memory loss and trauma, there’s no excuse for Bird and Ben’s storyline. Theirs is just as repetitive and glacially slow-paced. The strong start of the two butting-heads as they debate what to do with Dekker and his ship, rescuing him and wrestling with him as he tries to kill the two out of blind fear may as well be the books own hallucination of what could have been.

The repetition kicks in early, thirty pages in. Bird and Ben argue about what to do with Dekker and his ship all the way back to the station. Ben wants to kill Dekker because he thinks he’s going to kill them, and then take his ship and sell it for scrap or try to rebuild it. Bird tells Ben to calm down and is gentle with Dekker, who in between screaming about the time is passing out. This sequence goes on for dozens of pages. Dekker screams about the time. Bird tells him to calm down. Ben wants to kill him. Ben says no. Dekker passes out. Ben says they should take the ship. Rinse and repeat.

What’s most frustrating is how this sequence ends. They arrive at the station, and Ben tells the authorities they want the ship, greases some palms, and that’s that. Bird shrugs and says “okay,” as they hand Dekker over the police and they walk away. Bird has the moral fortitude of Chuck Schumer, because once they’re in their private rooms, they continue to argue about whether they have the right to take the ship as if it isn’t already too late. This renewed version of the argument goes on for many, many more pages well after it’s a moot point.

With great trepidation, the plot eventually inches forward. At the station, we’re introduced to Meg and Sol, two freelance pilots who work as prostitutes in between jobs since they don’t own their ship. They’re also friends of Bird and Ben. The women stick around because… they want Dekker’s ship, I think? They’re not trying to steal it, and they offer the two their services (as pilots) and fair pay, but they can’t afford to buy it outright. Then they hang around in the background talking about how much they want the ship, as Bird and Ben continue arguing about whether they should take it.

Eventually, Dekker gets out of the hospital and wants his ship back, and despite Bird and Ben not yet agreeing to take them on, Meg and Sol act like the ship is theirs and try to make Dekker their indentured servant (their exact words), and at this point you can’t help but ask yourself “what the hell is going on?”

Speaking of Meg and Sol, let’s talk dialog. Everyone has this strange way of speaking. It’s very stilted, with a lot of repeated phrases, short responses, and expressions that don’t exist in our world. Word choice is strange, and some words are out of order or used in a nonsensical context. I think Cherryh is trying to show the evolution of English hundreds of years into the future. Maybe? But on top of that, Meg and Sol have different accents. Meg sometimes sprinkles French words into her dialog, making it sound even stranger, and Sol… I don’t know what her accent is supposed to be. I can’t understand much of what she says. Here’s an example of some word salad she serves:

“Ben got data off that they got when they were after that ship. He's been working with it and he doesn't give a damn what it is to anybody else, it's his charts and he's not going to see it dumped.”

The second sentence is a little legible, but what is that first sentence? Is that a grammatical error or typo that made it into print? I’m inclined to say no, since my book is a fourth-printing.

Later on, another character, Mitch, who I think is supposed to be their pimp says: “Don’t screw up, Meg. You’re on tolerance.” To which Meg responds: “Take it and screw with it. I'm not on your tolerance.”

Some of the dialog is utterly inane, there to take up space and pad out the word-count. Take this exchange between a woman working with the government and Ben, who’s trying to sweet talk her into expediting the transfer of Dekker’s ship to him and Bird:

“Mmmm. Not from this zone, Benjie. That’s a long procedures delay. Where the hell have you been?”
“Yeah, well, --but--” he turned on his nicest smile.
Maurice said: “Just so you know—” and turned on her terminal.
(That was the end of that exchange, she didn’t finish whatever she was going to say.)

Reading Heavy Time is an exercise in experiencing the dumbest version of yourself. I repeatedly had to go back and re-read sentences and even whole pages to figure out what people were talking about. Is this Cherryh’s way of putting me further into Dekker’s broken mind? Kudos if so, it worked.

I reached my breaking point starting around page 200. After Dekker got out of the hospital and joined our motley crew, they, surprisingly, spends several dozen pages talking about who owns the ship and what happened to Cory. We’re treated to something new: a bizarre shopping trip where Meg and Sol take Dekker to buy some clothes. It’s as pointless as some of the dialog, but a breath of fresh air at this point. But afterward, Ben randomly confronts Dekker again, saying he’s going to punch Dekker and take the ship, with Bird holding him back and Dekker screaming about Cory. I slammed the book shut and put it to my donation pile, never looking back.

Supposedly, Heavy Time is about a conspiracy involving a mining company. Cory’s mom pops up once or twice. She thinks Dekker killed her daughter and wants him dead. Her word matters because she’s the head of some powerful corporation, or something. But the Space Police let Dekker go anyway, and she never came up again. When interrogated, Dekker says there was another ship in the area where he and Cory crashed, but by page 220 (out of 350 pages, remember) everybody had dismissed it and it didn’t look like that was going to come up again. Cherryh isn’t a bad writer, she wouldn’t forget elements like the time, Cory’s mom, or this mysterious second ship, but being so near to the end with none of those threads going anywhere, I didn’t care enough to see how she’d pick these threads back up.

The word I would use to describe my experience with Heavy Time is ‘stunning.’ I am shocked at just how bad it is. I try to find something good in every book, movie, or game I review, but I can’t do that here. The characters are paper thin, the dialog is incomprehensible, the story doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s far too repetitive. If you told me this was a first draft of Cherryh’s first book and Gate of Ivrel was the one she wrote fifteen years later, I’d believe you.

This is one hell of an introduction to an author: the first book of theirs I read is one of the best books I’ve read this year, while the second is the worst I’ve read in recent memory. I can’t wait to see where this roller coaster takes me with the third book.