History Creator / CJCherryh

* BondCreatures: The night horses in the ''Rider'' series are a horse-shaped carnivorous telepathic alien species. The horses bond with humans since they enjoy the complexity of the human mind, and ham, and humans bond with the horses so they'll help protect the humans from the world's other telepathic carnivores, which like to pull {{Jedi Mind Trick}}s in order to eat the humans.

* CultColony: The planet in the ''Rider'' series was colonized by a group of fundamentalist Christians.
* HorseOfADifferentColor: The Finisterre series has creatures called nighthorses that could be easily mistaken for horses, except that they are telepathic foul-tempered carnivores whose group behavior is based on being pack hunters. In contrast to herbivorous horses' tendency to form groups for protection, nighthorses formed groups for attacks. The implications of this are shown in the stories in such a way that it becomes quite plain that nighthorses are not just differently colored horses.

* LastOfTheirKind: Arafel, in The Tree of Swords and Jewels.
* OurDragonsAreDifferent: in the Tree of Swords and Jewels the plot is driven, although for a long time it's not clear, by Nathair Stheach, imprisoned under the roots of the titular tree, who Arafel stayed to guard against. He's been driving the conflict, manipulating the Drow, and breathing distrust and poison in everyone's ears, to set him free.
* OurElvesAreDifferent:
** Her novelette "Pots" was published in Janet Morris's anthology "Afterwar"...and was submitted after Morris complained that she was getting a lot of (unwanted) post-apoc stories about elves. Morris took the story anyway - probably because these elves had spaceships, AI moonrovers, and rayguns.
** "Scapegoat" (a Hugo nominee) uses 'elves' in-universe as slang for the aliens.
* RuleOfThree - Invoked often in the Dreaming Tree, where to know a name and call it three times is to call or bind the one it belongs to. Arafel gives the children the name of a water horse, who aides them during the final battle.

->''"Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if [[Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs Burroughs]] initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then [[Creator/AndreNorton Norton]] has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?"''

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor - In the ''Rusalka'' fantasy trilogy, a wizard's wishes will come true -- all of them. Somehow. Not always in a way that's good for the wizard. Wishing a stone to fly won't make it levitate -- it'll cause ''something'' to come along and fling that stone through the air. "Wish a stone to fly -- and then beware the whirlwind."

* HumanitysWake: In the short story "Pots", a race of aliens comes across a space probe with the Pioneer plaque on board, after mankind is long gone from the Earth. They attempt to find the remaining descendants of humanity, while spreading a romantic legend about the first space travelers across the galaxy. They remake their whole social structure, with hibernation and CloningBlues for top leaders and scientists, for this purpose. When a group of archeologists finally finds something on the third planet of a small, yellow star [[spoiler:it turns out humankind destroyed itself shortly after setting foot on the Moon]].

* TheWomanWearingTheQueenlyMask: ''Legions of Hell'' has a passage portraying Hatshepsut as a case of this. She sent out explorers, listened to their reports when they returned, and all the while she wanted to '''be''' an explorer, not just hear what they had to say.
-->''And if she were not Hatshepsut the pharaoh, she might blurt out, simply, with tears: ''I want to go'', the way she had ached when her explorers had come back to her and told of great waterfalls and strange tribes and unknown coasts and vast seas. ''I want to go'', because she had ruled two thirds of the known world and had no freedom ever to see those things, she could only send others...''

* HorseOfADifferentColor: The Finisterra series has creatures called nighthorses that could be easily mistaken for horses, except that they are telepathic foul-tempered carnivores whose group behavior is based on being pack hunters. In contrast to herbivorous horses' tendency to form groups for protection, nighthorses formed groups for attacks. The implications of this are shown in the stories in such a way that it becomes quite plain that nighthorses are not just differently colored horses.

* ''Literature/{{Foreigner}}'' 'verse

Carolyn Janice Cherry (born September 1, 1942), better known by her pen name C.J. Cherryh, is a fairly prolific American SpeculativeFiction author. She was a Classics teacher before working full-time as a writer, with a degree in Latin and a Masters in Classics. Unsurprisingly given the humanities background, her works tend more towards examining the social implications of things. She has written a fair amount of fantasy, but she's best known for her science fiction, having won two [[UsefulNotes/HugoAward Hugos]] for novels and one for a short story. Most of the science fiction elements in her stories tend to be of the "[[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness hard]]" variety, with FasterThanLightTravel generally being the only major deviation from currently understood physics, but, her works fall more in line with social science fiction.