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The Morgaine Books Long before the movie Stargate or its television sequels, author C.J. Cherryh imagined gate travel in a very different way in these novels. The gates span an “empire of both Space and Time” as it explains in the prologue of the first book, Gate of Ivrel, 1976. These gates are a technology “discovered in the ruins of a dead world” by the qhal, a self-serving and often cruel race who use the gates to open their way to the stars, and then to time. It is the latter, when once someone goes back, rather than forward in time, that causes a cataclysm, twisting worlds out of true all down the line.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Morgaine is the last of a small group dedicated to destroying all the gates, one after another, world after world, to prevent another cataclysm. Each of the four books is another gate, another world with its own set of post-cataclysm problems and seemingly insurmountable odds against Morgaine and her companion, Vanye. Each world is also another set of individuals with whom they become entangled, though Morgaine is always set on her course and willing to use anyone and everything in her path to achieve it.

Morgaine carries a sword called Changeling; made from the same technology as the gates, it creates a gate to nowhere at its tip. With her sword, armor, and war horse, Siptah, and the largely feudal civilizations, keeps, and ruins she and Vanye travel amidst, the novels are deep in the trappings and action adventure pace of dark high fantasy; but the underpinnings are of science fiction and there’s no magic in the books, only a technology so arcane it looks like magic. The character arcs, action, dire circumstance and gravitas of Morgaine and Vanye’s adventures make these novels some of the very best of their kind.

Gate of Ivrel introduces Vanye and Morgaine. Vanye is a young human lord reduced to ilin--outcast--status, and wandering, because he killed his half-brother in self defense; Morgaine is a world-traveling warrior lost in time for a hundred years within a frozen gate. She is released what seems like moments later to her when a deer injured by one of Vanye’s arrows stumbles into the gate. Morgaine, seeing in Vanye the only help at hand to aid her in finishing her quest to destroy this world’s gate, takes him as a servant--a fate any ilin is subject to--for a year, duty-bound. For Vanye, Morgaine is an evil legend, who led thousands of men to their deaths and decimated his civilization. Vanye is an honorable man, however, and he takes his oath to serve her, reluctantly as it’s given, seriously. Old loyalties, enemies, and treacheries tangle with new around them as they seek to complete Morgaine’s hundred year old quest. There are still those who take their power from the gates, among them an ancient qhal who has been hiding for centuries in human bodies taken over by use of gate power. Morgaine and Vanye meet with much resistance.

In Well of Shiuan (1978), Morgaine and Vanye come directly from closing the gate on Vanye’s world behind them to a drowning world in which the dire consequences of the gates and their use become more apparent to Vanye. As he begins to see more clearly the great misery wrought by the gates’ use, a commitment to Morgaine’s purpose beyond that demanded by his oath is seeded in him, along with a growing attachment to Morgaine herself. Vanye’s cousin Roh, now inhabited by an ancient and evil qhal, has gone through the gate before them and has desperate plans and desires of his own. As always, Morgaine’s only goal is to close this world’s gate; but the people of this world, drowning and wretched--the humans, abused by the qhal, and the qhal, with no future--clamor to Roh’s promise of a new land on the other side of the gate.

From Shiuan and its tragedies, Morgaine and Vanye come to a kinder world. Fires of Azeroth (1979) takes place in a forest world, where the powers of the gate have been harnessed by wiser, gentler folk. Here qhal and humans coexist in peace. But their way of life is threatened by the desperate human and qhal horde that Roh and his allies lead through the gate on Morgaine and Vanye’s heels. The guardians of the great forest, the Shathan, use innocuous-seeming gate jewels to protect their land and way of life from more violent neighbors. Morgaine and Vanye find themselves pitted against these good folk, too, when it becomes clear she has come to destroy their power and leave them unprotected. By the end, Vanye and Morgaine have come to a new balance in their relationship, exchanging an intimacy never between them before, though they have been close companions in arms.

Almost a decade later, Cherryh returned to Morgaine and Vanye’s quest in Exile’s Gate (1988). From the green world of the Shathan, they ride through the gate into the middle of a long war, human against qhal, where distrust of those who look human but may be qhal is strong, and deadly. Morgaine and Vanye save a young human, staked out with others of his defeated war party to die. Coming into the middle of this war they must contend with humans, qhal, and one very ancient, powerful qhal who knows Morgaine, and knew her father. By the end of this chapter, Vanye graduates, his pattern, like Morgaine’s, imprinted into the gates so that he can continue on with her, nearly immortal, moving into the legends of a thousand worlds.