The Pride of Chanur

I read 'The Pride Of Chanur' in 1988. By then, C. J. Cherrhy had already won three Hugo Awards, including one for 'The Pride Of Chanur' yet I had to place a special order at my local Waterstone's to get a copy and even then the bookseller handing it to me clearly thought it was an odd book for a man in his thirties to be buying. Times have changed. Science Fiction is respectable in the UK now. Even so, you won't find C. J. Cherrhy on the shelves at Waterstones. They have short memories.

A few years ago, I gave away all my C. J. Cherrhy books because the print was too small for my ageing eyes.

I hesitated to replace them. What if, thirty-five years later, I no longer enjoyed the books that pleased me so much way back in the last century? show more I'm no longer the same man and Science Fiction has moved on, hasn't it?

When I saw an audiobook version of 'The Pride Of Chanur' performed by Dina Pearlman, a favourite narrator of mine, I decided to take a chance.

Reader, it was wonderful.

The book felt fresh and exciting and matched anything being written today. And, wow, what a difference an audiobook makes. Dina Pearlman fed so much life and energy into the text and she knew how to pronounce species named Knnn and Tc'a.

The thing I'd forgotten about C. J. Cherryh is that she doesn't do world-building. Her world, her universe actually, already exists rich and entire in her imagination and she drops you into the middle of it with no warning and no explanation and immediately creates a crisis for the main characters to react to. To add an extra twist, the main character here isn't human and has never even heard of humans. Her name is Pyanfar Chanur. She's hani, a catlike spacefaring trading race. She's the captain of 'The Pride Of Chanur' and her ship has just been boarded by a stowaway creature from an unknown species that has escaped from the reviled kif, natural enemies to the hani.

What follows is a vivid, tense and remarkably realistic space opera, rich with cultural details, inter-species intrigues, emnities and alliances and domestic threats back on the hani homeworld. Much of the book has 'The Pride' running for safety, pursued by the armed kif ships.

I loved the way all the technology made sense but it was so taken for granted by everyone concerned that it never took centre-stage.

This is a tense adventure that is made even more intense by its focus on the psychological and linguistic challenges of trade and warfare between alien species and by the richly imagined details of hani culture.

I'll be back for the rest of the Chanur books and probably for 'Downbelow Station' as well. show less

I remember seeing this offered in the science-fiction book club that I was subscribed to in the 80s. For some reason— probably financial as high school me didn't have much money—I never picked it up. So when a local used bookstore went out of business and was selling off their inventory, I snatched it (along with several other books). I wish I hadn't waited so long.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Pyanfur, and I think it's a great idea. Humans are the alien here. When Tully shows up on her ship, she initially mistakes him for an intruder and thus her claws are out. She has no idea if he's a wild animal or not. When he starts writing something in his own blood, it dawns on her and her crew that this naked creature is a show more sentient being, alone and afraid. Some protective instinct is triggered inside of her, and she orders that he be treated for his wounds. It's a decision that she constantly wrestles with, for it puts her and her crew in danger. The Kif consider Tully to be their property and demand that she return "it" to them. She's no bleeding heart, but it strikes Pyanfur as wrong, and she strives to prove that Tully is sentient and deserves the rights that all sentients of the Compact—a trade agreement among several civilizations—enjoy.

Pyanfar knows that she needs allies. The way home is a long one, and the Kif have faster ships than hers. She's also outnumbered; the Hani are a feudal society and thus not all clans are willing to set aside rivalries when the threat is from another species. Pyanfar has to negotiate with other species, convince some of them not only of Tully's sentience but value as a potential trading partner once proper contact with his homeworld is established.

Communication is as much an obstacle as the Kif gauntlet. Even though Tully is an avid pupil—he realizes that he can't plead his case if no one understands him—it takes some time before he can communicate with the Hani. And even then, there's difficulty. But even among the established species of the Compact, communication is difficult. Different larynx shapes make speaking awkward. Short sentences dominate conversations. There's a lot of repetition. While there are machines to help with the process, Star Trek's universal translator does not exist. Still, when there's money to be made, people try to find a way to communicate.

I really enjoyed this story. I would've liked more world-building, but the way the story unfolds, there's really no time to dwell on that. It's very much a novel where everyone is living in the moment, trying to survive. While I appreciate shining a spotlight on the difficulty of interspecies communication, sometimes it was a bit cumbersome to read, not to mention repetitive when Pyanfar needed to get a point across. But those are just quibbles. It's definitely a classic sci-fi novel worth checking out. show less

10/10
A different twist on “first contact”.

I’ve been on a steady diet of Cherryh’s books over the past year (about 1 book of hers per month), but this was my first time diving into Compact space and meeting the kif, hani, knnn, and others who live and trade here. Like a few of Cherryh’s books in the Company-Alliance-Union part of the universe, this was both tightly focused on the small crew of Pride of Chanur, especially Pyanfar and Hilfy, and their human refugee, and more widely inclusive of the social/political/economic issues at stake in the systems of the Compact. Cherryh creates believable main characters who, faced with adversity and challenge, find ways to respond and adapt rather than simply react. The reader is never show more bogged down with too much detail, yet the various species are distinct, the settings are fully realized, and the plot is action-packed and well-paced.

I will be eagerly continuing this series over the next few months, interspersed with other books. show less

The four Chanur universe books are my favorite books in the entire universe. Bar none. Cherryh slyly takes on sex, gender, culture, first contact, money, and power, among other issues, all in a rollicking good adventure story.

The Chanur series is one of my faves and is one of the most intelligent, exciting, and intriguing books out there. I had to rebuy this one after a loaned-out copy didn't come back. This is the first book I read by C.J. Cherryh and I bought it because of the awesome Killer Kitties on the cover painted purrfectly by my favorite cover artist, Michael Whelan. I always did have a soft spot for feline alien races ever since I saw the cat woman on the Star Trek animated series (and the Na'vi from Avatar are just amazing), but Pyanfar Chanur and the crew of the Pride of Chanur are so much more than whiskers and fur. Captain Pyanfur is gutsy, tough, wise and has more political savvy in her furry pinky than the whole of the U.S. Congress. And boy show more does she need it since the first human to be discovered is on the run from the slimy Kif (who would love to find out where the human is from so they can be the first to take full advantage of that knowledge) and has taken refuge on the Pride. I enjoyed the intrigue, the political plays, the double-talk and double-dealing and such, but mostly I enjoyed the development of the relationship between the humans and the feline Hani and getting a good idea of what it's like to deal with a completely alien society (like the methane breathers). Warning: you WILL find yourself wishing you were part of Pyanfar's crew, you WILL find yourself tearing through this book and jumping into the sequels (there are five books total), and you WILL find yourself wanting even more. Come on, C.J.! More Chanur! show less

I really don't know how or why I didn't read this when it came out, but I'm certain I would have loved it then. The strengths of "The Pride of Chanur" remain very appealing to me: the non-human perspective, the 'human-as-alien' factor, that guile and machinations are given primacy over shoot-'em-ups, and we are presented with a number of non-human species who truly differ in nature from each other. The story itself is intriguing, the Chanur vessel with its human refugee running for shelter while the storm breaks around them; setting a large-scale space opera in motion and focusing on a few characters awash on the tide can make a brilliant narrative ("A Memory Called Empire," for instance).

This is an earlier Cherryh work and one of show more several she published in a very short time in the early 1980s, however, and those clearly signify. The writing is rushed and unclear; too many scenes make a reader ask "Huh?" in simple confusion. The attempted trade-pidgin was a nice idea but really, really comes across as bad Asian caricatures from regrettable movies of years past: "me good speaky-speaky, you see!" Worst of all, though, is what seems to me the biggest narrative hole: very little of this book actually involves attempted communication with the human when that is THE single most crucial factor at play. Missed opportunity.

I'm entertained enough to read further in the Chanur novels, but this book left a lot of opportunities on the floor, bits that would have made a superior novel out of the fair-to-partly-cloudy book I just read. show less

A strange creature is skulking around the loading bays of Meetpoint station, a creature that none of the intelligent species making up the Compact had ever seen before ...

‘There had been something loose about the station dock all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell among the rampway accesses of the many ships at dock at Meetpoint. It was pale, naked, starved-looking in what fleeting glimpse anyone on The Pride of Chanur had had of it. Evidently nobody had reported it to station authorities, nor did The Pride’

The Hani, a leonine species who operate the spaceship The Pride of Chanur are inclined to ignore the creature until it finds a show more way aboard their ship, when a decision by the Hani captain, Pyanfar Chanur, has far reaching consequences for her people. For the creature has escaped from the Kif, who may be members of the Compact, but are always trouble, and they want him back...

This is a human alien encounter told very much from the point of view of the aliens, and more interesting for it. In fact there is a complex web of alien species in [The Pride of Chanur], which adds a level of complexity requiring the reader to concentrate. Not the first time in reading C.J.Cherryh novel, I realised halfway through that audio was probably not the best format! It would have been much easier to refer back to remind myself which species was which if I’d had a hard copy. That proviso aside, this was really enjoyable, and I’m certainly going to carry on with the series. I’m just going to buy the paperback copies first. show less