[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 1984
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: the Chanur novels, #2
dates read: 24.7.25-25.7.25
obviously I knew that C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur’s Venture was connected to The Pride of Chanur, but I also knew that it was the first book in a trilogy, so I expected there to be a little more distance between it and The Pride of Chanur. as a result, the beginning was a little bewildering, because it’s been more than two years, so I had to dredge up my memories of what happened, who the characters are, and how the setting works. fortunately, perhaps foreseeing this very problem, Cherryh included a brief gazetteer of the setting and the various alien species active in the region of space she’s portraying at the end of the book, so I was able to use that to orient myself.
even with that orientation, however, this remained a disorienting book, and it ruled.
Pyanfar Chanur, a hani (= cat alien) freighter captain, finds herself and her crew — now including her husband, either the first or one of the first male hani to leave their homeworld — once again caught up in an interstellar pursuit with potentially enormous implications for the political organization of the loose trade interspecies network known as the Compact.
my main complaint about The Pride of Chanur was that the aliens felt too human, and while to some extent that was still true here, Cherryh compensated for it by ramping up the multispecies interactions (already a highlight of the first book). not only are humans back — once again forced to communicate through an awkward and incomplete translation program — but also a lot of the book is just…Pyanfar talking to representatives of other species. the first third-ish of the book is dedicated to her attempts to convince the local authorities on Meetpoint Station to let her ship leave, in a dizzying array of legal arguments and arrangements, always mediated through a translator and complicated when the station administrator, a stsho, changes personalities mid-negotiation, as stsho sometimes do when under stress.
meanwhile, she’s been dealing — in a clunky but workable pidgin — with the mahendo’sat (notionally friends) and the kif (notionally enemies), as well as disagreements with other hani, who disapprove of her bringing her husband into space instead of, essentially, leaving him to be honorably murdered now that he’s been deposed from his position as a lord on their homeworld.
a lot of the political wrangling here I honestly did not entirely follow, but I think that’s a strength of the novel rather than a weakness: this is a book about what happens when six different legal regimes — one of which nobody from the other five understands — intersect, along with six (plus) radically different cultural frameworks. I say “plus” because at this point Pyanfar is slowly but definitively coming to the conclusion that gender is a social construct, something that puts her at odds not only with other, more conservative hani but also with her husband, who is struggling to adapt to life in space and the fact that he’s not dead yet. one wonders how different the spacebound mahendo’sat and stsho she meets might be from their planet-dwelling fellows.
the kif as evil pirate species remain the sticking point, but at least here we get a much stronger sense of internal divisions among the kif, and I hope we’ll get to see more of this in subsequent books.
this is a book about navigating a situation where you don’t understand all the variables, there are major communication barriers between you and everyone else involved (including your husband), and also you have to make a decision now — and now that you’ve decided all you can do is wait and hope. I loved it.
moods: adventurous, tense