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language: English
country: USA
year: 1992
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: the Chanur novels, #5
dates read: 28.8.25-29.8.25
C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur’s Legacy, published six years after Chanur’s Homecoming, serves as both a postscript and a capstone to the Chanur novels. if its stakes feel a bit lower than the first four novels, it is nonetheless both gripping and compellingly reflective. the novel’s central question, as I read is: what happens when you’ve changed the world but everyone in the world is standing stubbornly still, refusing to move with the times?
here we follow, first and foremost, Hilfy Chanur, unceremoniously shoved off of Pyanfar’s ship to be head of clan Chanur. she has made some poor choices in this capacity and resents having been put in a position to make them. Hilfy does not want to be dealing with politics; she wants to be in space, running a merchant ship and enjoying the peace that her aunt has ostensibly created. she accepts what seems to be a straightforward and lucrative contract from a stsho that ends up spiraling wildly out of control and threatening the basis of the new political order — a situation exacerbated by the fact that everyone assumes, incorrectly, that she is in regular and direct contact with Pyanfar and conducting her aunt’s business.
through Hilfy, the novel explores the complicated interplay between the political and the personal and tensions between duty / loyalty and desire. Hilfy’s arc is, in part, a processing of grief and anger — grief for the life she feels was unfairly denied her when Pyanfar became the leader of the Compact; anger because she feels she has been, essentially, thrown to the dogs, picking up her aunt’s mess. at the same time, Hilfy finds herself grappling with her growing realization that maybe her aunt was right about somethings — even if not about everything — and that Hilfy has, perhaps, not been as open-minded as she believed herself to be.
our secondary protagonist is a young male hani named Hallan Meras, who wants desperately to be a spacer but has been abandoned by the crew of the ship he signed onto and rather grudgingly taken on by Hilfy and her crew. through Hallan, the novel explores the shifting dynamics of hani society: while theoretically Pyanfar has made it possible for hani men to leave their homeworld and go to space, in practice Hallan meets distrust and fear from aliens and dismissal or even disgust from other hani — as well as the lingering specter of sexual coercion (it doesn’t seem like his first crew actually did take advantage of him sexually, but everyone reads it as a possibility, and accusations of sexual misconduct are eventually leveled against the Chanur crew for taking him on board).
I think Cherryh does a really interesting job here of both portraying a dynamic that is clearly analogous to contemporary patriarchy while also rendering it alien and accounting for the predominantly matriarchal basis of hani society, but without producing something that feels like “what if sexism but against men? Really Makes You Think”. part of this I think is the relationship dynamics between Hallan and the crew members and in particular his tentative romantic interest not in the young woman who’s around his age but rather in the older, experienced spacer who, though she starts off more conservative, is nonetheless willing to learn to take him seriously and acknowledge his merits as well as his flaws.
(I do still wish there was some indication of queerness among the hani, but the fact that I was — literally — cackling gleefully about a heterosexual marriage is a testament to the quality of this book.)
structurally this book had a lot in common with the middle trilogy: jumping between stations, dealing with station protocols, frustratingly enigmatic warnings from the mahendo’sat, kif being ominous. two things stand out. first, we are substantially developing the Nuance: perhaps the mahendo’sat in all their five-dimensional political machinations do not always have the best interests of the Compact in mind (as evidenced by the fact that they’re still doing five-dimensional political machinations at all); meanwhile, perhaps the kif are capable of understanding peace and interspecies cooperation and even cohabitation as a desirable situation that should be sustained.
second, and more importantly: we finally get to spend a significant amount of time with the stsho, the last of the oxygen-breathing Compact species. there’s been a lot of lip-service in the previous books to the fact that the stsho are finicky and always playing politics but too cowardly to commit themselves (and also categorically incapable of direct violence, apparently). here we get extensive interactions with the stsho in a way that makes them more than a caricature — though their obsession with aesthetics and propriety remains a bit overblown, I found myself coming to appreciate the way the stsho passenger speaks. there is, in stsho terms, a certain elegance to it. “Wai, go! […] Go, at all necessary speed, dear hani, and work necessary disarrangements upon our enemies!” — and it makes sense that, in a context where emotional distress can cause your personality and identity to fragment and reconstitute so that the old you is for all intents and purposes dead, yeah, disarrangement and execration are probably pretty effective!
we get tantalizing glimpses here of the tc’a, but that’s my one remaining frustration — I would have liked to get some understanding of any of the methane-breathing species.
I don’t think I’ve at all succeeded in conveying how good this book is — how good these books are — and how much joy I got from reading the series. if you like sci-fi, please do yourself a favor and give them a try.
moods: adventurous, funny, hopeful, horny, reflective, tense