I finished Syndey J. Van Scyoc's Darkchild prior to reading Cloudcry. If you're interested in this author feel free to peruse that entry. I bought two of her books during my last trip to the States, and for all intents and purposes this will be the last entry relating to this author. She remains a relatively obscure (if very overlooked) writer, and I doubt I'll happen upon her other books anytime soon.
In Cloudcry two humans and a bird-like humanoid are quarantined on a distant planet after contracting a contagious disease. Upon arriving on this planet they discover the existence of several other races of humanoids, each having made its mark on their shared planet long before the humans' arrival.
Unlike Darkchild, Cloudcry is kind of a mess. At best it represents an uneasy marriage of the older, more traditional form of science fiction embraced in the late 50s and early 60s with the newer, more "psychedelic" kind of science fiction emerging in the late 60s and early 70s. Most of the "adventures" undertaken by the two human characters resemble nothing so much as an episode of the original Star Trek TV series, while the trippier aspects of this book feel like something imported from a more recent, more polished, and more heartfelt book that the author hadn't gotten around to finishing.
There was potential in Aleida, one of the nonhuman characters. She's an impulsive, elemental sort of person not unlike the princess character in Darkchild, but her reasons for doing what she does are often obscured by the humans' disjointed attempts at reasoning out what they experience in her presence. Making her the focal point of this novel would have improved it considerably, especially since the two humans she contends with are little more than cardboard cut-outs.
The ending of this book is also disappointing. It's obvious that the author couldn't manage to get where she was trying to go, and the last few chapters of this novel feel both random and extremely forced. There were some interesting aspects to the lost race of explorers, the ill-defined disease from which the humans suffer, and the race of "gods" encountered through hallucinatory experiences, but none of these aspects of the story are really brought together in the end, and the reader is left to wonder what kind of story the author was trying to tell.
Darkchild was a lot better. Cloudcry is a less accomplished effort, and there were far superior science fiction novels widely available in 1977. Were I to assign Cloudcry a score out of 10, I'm thinking it's a solid 6. It's not derivative, but it's also very flawed.
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