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language: English
country: USA
year: 1981
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: the Chanur novels, #1
dates read: 21.6.23-28.6.23
C.J. Cherryh’s space opera The Pride of Chanur caught my eye as an entry point into her work because the main characters are feline aliens. I do love cat people.
the plot follows Pyanfar Chanur, the hani captain of The Pride of Chanur, an interstellar freighter. the novel begins when a hairless and unfamiliar alien — a “human” — stows away on her ship. this gets Pyanfar and her crew pursued by the piratical kif and tangled up in political machinations that could upset the balance of power within the galactic political structure called the “Compact”; meanwhile, Pyanfar has to deal with some rather pettier political conflicts on the hani homeworld, whose social structure is clearly inspired by the social structure of lion prides.
this was a fun read! the characters are great and the writing is excellent, stylized at times but also direct. the rescue of Faha’s Starchaser was extremely harrowing, as it should have been. the politics were suitably grandiose and, while occasionally a little opaque, the stakes were mostly as clear as they needed to be.
I enjoyed the portrayal of multispecies interactions, in particular the focus on language (with the minor caveat that I’m still not clear what language was being used to communicate between species; presumably not hani, but there was never a clear indication) — the human stowaway has to communicate through an incomplete translation program that only works on The Pride of Chanur itself, and the novel also draws attention to the logistical difficulties of communicating with species whose social structures and biologies are radically different.
that being said, I was a little underwhelmed by the relative normality of the alien species. certainly they all have different cultures, but they still all felt like humans (just variations on humans) — if the goal was to fulfill John W. Campbell’s injunction to “show me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better, but not like a man”, I don’t think it succeeded. the fact that the kif are essentially “the untrustworthy pirate species” also felt particularly…hm. well, the problem with aliens is always that it risks reifying racial difference. that’s how you get D&D’s racial politics. all told, it was mostly good, but, as I felt about Tanya Huff’s Valor’s Choice, not as theoretically sophisticated or convincingly executed as some other things I’ve read (read: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, as usual).
HAVING SAID THAT: I kind of don’t want to read the books on the human side of the Alliance-Union setting now? I like the hani, and I’ll probably read the other Chanur novels before I consider any of the others. I do want more sci-fi with alien protagonists and espcially where humans are marginal to galactic society, and I feel like human politics will be boring. we’ll see.
also, almost forgot the other thing I was going to say, which is that it’s garbage that Pyanfar sees human women and immediately distinguishes them from her stowaway as having “radically different” bodies and goes “oh, those must be the women” (because of course all bipedal species must have binary genders unless proven otherwise). especially given that Pyanfar was just (but only just) starting to come to the realization that gender is socially constructed. bad vibe.
moods: adventurous, tense