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language: English
country: USA
year: 1986
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: the Chanur novels, #4
dates read: 21.8.25-23.8.25
C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur’s Homecoming is the fourth Chanur novel and the conclusion of the middle trilogy (following Chanur’s Venture and The Kif Strike Back) and I was regularly screaming to myself while reading it because it’s so fucking good.
in tense negotiations with the kif warlord she has found herself unwillingly backing, the hani captain Pyanfur Chanur must find a way to save herself, her crew and friends, and, indeed, her entire species, as the hani homeworld is threatened with a destruction it cannot comprehend. first a hallucinatory race through hyperspace towards home, then desperate politicking, trying to unite disparate factions of hani, mahendo’sat, and kif into one force capable of averting both the destruction of the hani and the uncertain threat of humanity.
where The Pride of Chanur had only just begun to untangle the assumptions, prejudices, and traditions exerpeinced as biological reality that are the foundations of hani society, here everything comes crashing dramatically not-quite-down. gender is a social construct — and a social construct that literally threatens the survival of the entire species, as only a handful of male hani are allowed off-world. species is not a social construct, but through its deconstruction of what it means to “be hani” the novel does at last raise questions of the inevitability of each species’s social formations. if the hani can — must — change, change must be possible for the kif, as well.
(this is, I will say, the one weakness of the trilogy — that it continues to posit a biological basis for the cultural differences between species — but it does finally begin to seriously interrogate its deterministic attitude toward kif culture, even if that interrogation remains suspended and unfinished at the end of the novel.)
this is a book about the existential dangers (and, indeed, violence) of stagnation — of clinging to past social and political formations when the material conditions that created them no longer obtain — and the existential necessity of change. it is a book about Pyanfar slowly but inexorably coming to the conclusion that so many of the things she thought “hani” meant is, in fact, putting her species at risk of imminent destruction.
it is also a book about friendship and whether and how it is possible to cultivate and sustain friendships across seemingly-insurmountable barriers of language and culture — and of gender and other prejudices. (its conclusion: yes, provided all parties are willing to work to surmount those barriers. too many are not.) it’s also an interesting counterpoint to “found family” space travel narratives: the crew of The Pride of Chanur are not “found” family but biological family — aunt, niece, husband, cousins, more distant cousins. I would like to see more exploration in the future (hopefully in Chanur’s Legacy) of this dynamic and the family as a site of exploitation, something that seemed like maybe the book was moving towards an awareness of (first and foremost re gender as Pyanfar begins to realize how thoroughly fucked-up hani society’s treatment of men is.)
it’s a book about a fundamentally ordinary person giving more than everything she has to navigate situations far beyond her experience as four main and several secondary political systems violently collide and finding not only herself but the metaphorical ground under her feet transformed in the process. it’s a book about someone who’s okay at chess suddenly being forced at gunpoint to play five-dimensional go and finding ways to reconfigure her conceptions of rules and goals.
the thread of tension Cherryh sustains through the novel is exquisitely done — if it were a movie I was watching in a theater I would have been at the edge of my seat for basically the entire book. interspersed through the narrative, particularly during the genuinely harrowing hyperspace sequence, are Pyanfar’s musings on age, her past, and what future she can imagine for herself and her people, and I loved these, too. the book does an excellent job balancing plot and character without sacrificing either narrative tension or the character moments that allow the reader to breathe (albeit sometimes to breathe stressedly).
please read these books.
moods: adventurous, emotional, grimy, hopeful, inspiring, tense