write up on Cherryh ‘s chanur series

Introduction

The late 1970’s were busy years for Michael Whelan. He painted covers for classic science fiction authors like Poul Anderson and Clifford Simak and newcomers like C.J. Cherryh, all the while establishing a stellar reputation with both the publishers and fans alike. He painted aliens and spaceships, horror, sword and sorcery, dragons and far away planets – like Kelly Freas before him, here was an artist who actually read and loved the genre!

Michael has said that this is one of his all-time favorite cover paintings. He enjoyed the book and the experience of bringing to life the characters and themes of the beloved Chanur series by C.J. Cherryh.

Literature Review

Chanur Series by CJ Cherryh

The Chanur series consists of five books: We will discuss three

The Pride of Chanur
Chanur’s Venture
The Kif Strike Back (OK, OK, terrible title, I know)

The universe of the Chanur series is one in which six spacefaring species, three oxygen-breathing and three methane-breathing, control adjacent sectors of space. Within the framework of an increasingly uneasy “Compact”, they meet, trade, and sometimes fight. But then a new spacefaring species: largely hairless, bipedal, sadly lacking in claw or fang – enters the picture. With the arrival of these “humans”, as they call themselves, the fragile balance of the Compact is further disturbed, and war looms.

The Chanur are a spacefaring clan of the hani species, whose biology and social structure is modelled most closely on lions: the smaller females do the planning, organised hunting and (in this case) trading, while the larger males are valued mainly for their abilities at breeding and single combat. As the series opens, only hani females venture into space, with the males (and many females) remaining behind on the homeworld, Anuurn. The Pride of Chanur is a Chanur trading vessel captained by the unusually far-sighted hani captain Pyanfar Chanur.

The Chanur series falls within that sub-genre of science fiction known as space opera.

“The Pride of Chanur” by C. J. Cherryh is a science fiction space opera novel about the crew of The Pride, a spaceship of the hani – a species of alien that look a bit like humanoid lions. While The Pride is stationed at Meetpoint Station, a human called Tully escapes capture by another alien race called the kif and seeks refuge from the hani. Captain Pyanfur takes him in, resulting in an interstellar chase to the hani homeworld while Tully struggles to integrate with his new, all-female crewmates.

This is a complex story that speculates about how alien species from different environments and atmospheres may interact including through trade, dispute and war. A significant part of the book is concerned about hani and human finding a way to learn each other’s languages and cultures, and how understanding promotes loyalty. The hani are an interesting species because their spaceships are crewed entirely by females of their species while males stay on their own planet to protect clans and engage in domestic bids for power. One of the unique things about this story is that it is told from the perspective of Pyanfur.

The Pride of Chanur | Tinted Edges

What Cherryh does in The Pride of Chanur is to write this backwards. She tells it from the alien point of view, and she does it brilliantly. There’s a Compact of different aliens—the pacifist stsho; the inquisitive mahendo’sat; the leonine hani; the piratical kif; and then the methane breathers who are really weird: the t’ca, whose messages are six part and can be read in any direction; the mysterious chi; and the knnn, who wail into their communications units and whose actions are quite incomprehensible. Pyandar Chanur is a hani captain, a trader, and she isn’t expecting an alien escaping the kif to run into her ship, bringing chaos in his wake to disrupt the whole Compact. I’d have liked this book from the human point of view, but from Pyanfar’s point of view, alien and comprehensible viewing human and other aliens, comprehensible and incomprehensible, it’s unbeatable.

The best aliens ever: C.J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur – Reactor

Pyanfar Chanur is the captain of the space freighter “The Pride of Chanur” trading among the planets of the Compact. At Meetpoint station you can do good business but for her, her crew and generally for the hani it’s always necessary to look away from the kif and the trouble that always accompany them.

When an alien belonging to an unknown species secretely sneaks into her starship, Pyanfar Chanur must make a difficult choice that can have serious consequences. Opening new trade routes would mean a big deal for the hani and considerable prestige for the Chanur clan but the kif want the alien back at all costs.

The Chanur series belongs to the fictional universe created by C.J. Cherryh called the Universe of the Alliance-Union universe in which many stories written by the author are set. It’s set in an area of space far from the planets protagonists of other stories so it can be read completely autonomously.

The protagonists of “The Pride of Chanur” are hani, a species with a look of anthropomorphic lions. They make up the crew of a space merchant ship that makes interstellar travel within the area of the Compact, a set of trade agreements among various species. The Compact provides some stability in that area of space for economic reasons even though there are no political agreements but the relationships among the species are not necessarily friendly.

In “The Pride of Chanur” the kif seem particularly treacherous and ready to do anything to get what they want. The object of a dispute is an alien belonging to an unknown species who escapes the kif who had captured him and secretely sneaks into the starship “Pride of Chanur”. The consequence is that its captain, Pyanfar Chanur, is forced to handle a situation much bigger than she could imagine.

The Chanur series is usually included in the space opera subgenre because these stories are set among the stars, with a lot of interstellar travels. However, C.J. Cherryh goes far beyond what could be simple adventures creating with the Compact an intriguing community of species that have different psychological traits. From the beginning of the novel, one of the difficulties for Pyanfar Chanur is given by these differences and the language barriers.

All these difficulties are emphasized when Pyanfar Chanur must deal with Tully, the mysterious alien at the center of the contention with the kif. The reader sees him from the hani point of view of but for those familiar with a certain short story by Fredric Brown it’s not anything special.

Communicating with Tully is critical for Pyanfar Chanur because protecting him threatens not only the lives of her crew but also other hani as the kif leader who is looking for the alien is willing to take military action to recapture him. For this reason, the element of space opera of the novel is closely interconnected with the psychological one.

The characters are a crucial element of “The Pride of Chanur”, in particular Pyanfar Chanur and C.J. Cherryh explores in depth her doubts and uncertainties. She’s a veteran captain but the situation in which she finds herself is quite different from those she faced in the course of her life. Again, the element of space opera is mixed to a more personal one because Pyanfar Chanur must also handle a situation with her husband.

Chanur Venture 1984

the book starts reasonably well. It opens a few years after Pride ends, when Pyanfar Chanur and her entire clan are down on their luck. The promised wealth, resulting from trade with the newly discovered human species, has not materialized. Chanur has been shafted by the cagey mahendo’sat, who have gone behind hani backs to deal with the humans and leave the hani outside of the loop.

Chanur is struggling to make ends meet, and she has even fallen out of favor with her fellow hani for violating established tradition and allowing her disgraced husband to join her crew, making him the first male hani ever to leave the surface of the hani homeworld. Male hani are hopelessly unstable emotional powder kegs, you see, a little role-reversal of demeaning stereotypes traditionally applied to female characters.

Chanur — after years of persona non grata status — is suddenly allowed access once again to Meetpoint Station, where all her problems began. There she meets up with Goldtooth, the shifty mahendo’sat trader who may or may not be an ally, who promptly produces the human Tully. Goldtooth is the one who managed to arrange clearance for Chanur onto Meetpoint, and did so expressly for the purpose of dumping Tully into her lap for another new round of crises. And of course, crises develop, with the kif going berserk and one of their number, Sikkukkut, making dubious gestures of allegiance. Worst of all, it’s possible even the ineffable knnn are getting riled up.

After much chaos, Chanur gets Tully to explain what he’s doing there, and it’s the worst scene in the novel. Tully still has problems communicating, and I can understand from a logical standpoint why Cherryh would need to depict that consistently, just as I understand her method of representing Tully’s limited language skills with broken sentences. But it still leaves the novel with the crippling problem that its most pivotal scene — the one upon which the reader’s comprehension of the story’s entire chain of events hangs — is conveyed in dialogue that sounds like a Texan asking an Uzbekistani to explain vector calculus with only a pocket phrasebook between them. Remember, Tully has already served on Chanur’s crew once, so his speech shouldn’t be this incoherent: “Human. Kif. Mahe. Not good go so — kif. Three human ship. Gone. Not see. Not come home. Try go stsho. Mahe come-go.” Thanks. That clears everything up nicely.

In fact, much of this novel’s most important plot points are conveyed not in clear narrative, but in dialogue exchanges between myriad alien species yakking in broken pidgin English. In the end I found it was most helpful for me to skip ahead to the next book and check out its synopsis of Venture in order to clear up hazy plot points buried under Cherryh’s tortuous writing. Call me old fashioned, but I consider that a problem.

As in Pride, Venture picks up the pace towards the end and features a couple of propulsive action scenes to bring everything to a thrilling climax. But it’s just too little too late. And it’s frustrating as all git-out, because I can tell that there is, potentially, one hell of a cool story lurking within these pages. Yes, I’m willing to concede that my dislike of Cherryh’s writing might be simply a matter of taste, but I do think the problems I have with it go deeper than style. Cherryh, like many of her aliens, just doesn’t communicate clearly to her audience. Or maybe I just need a better translator.

SFF180 : Chanur’s Venture / C. J. Cherryh ★★

After her banning due to her actions in the first book of the Chanur Saga, Pyanfar Chanur and her ship The Pride of Chanur are once again at Meetpoint Station. As she steps off the ship an old acquaintance, the mahendo’sat, Goldtooth, offers her a present. This turns out to be Tully, the human Pyanfar rescued from the kif in the earlier book and he carries with him a valuable contract for trade with humans, a contract the kif would have for themselves thus necessitating a quick exit from the station. Before this can happen, though, Pyanfar’s crew has to extricate her husband, Khym, from a bar fight which turns out to have been set up by kif. That Hani males like Khym are widely known to be unstable off-planet provided the perfect excuse for the brawl.

Internal factions among the Hani force Pyanfar to allow Tully and his escort, Pyanfar’s niece Hilfy, to be taken to a supposedly safe holding space at the station’s administrative centre but on the way they are abducted by kif.

The ship also needs repair and new drive vanes of mahendo’sat design and manufacture are fitted as part of the deal with Goldtooth.

Chanur’s Venture by C J Cherryh – A Son of the Rock — Jack Deighton

Worries for Pyanfar Chanur come especially from her husband Khym after he started traveling on the merchant ship “The Pride of Chanur”. No hani male had ever traveled in space together with females and for Khym anything new could be a possible cause of emotional instability.

When Pyanfar Chanur goes back to Meetpoint station for what looks like a normal commercial tour, everything changes when he meets the human Tully again while he’s on a secret mission to start trade relations with other species of the Compact. It’s a huge opportunity for all hani but the kif are still there and there’s a internal power struggle between two hakkikt that makes the situation even more complex and above all dangerous.

This is the third of Cherryh’s novels featuring Pyanfar Chanur, a hani from the planet Anuurn, itself a member of the interstellar trading system known as the

Pyanfar’s first task in this book is to gain the release of both her niece Hilfy and the human Tully from their captivity by the kif, Sikkukkut. For this she has travelled to the station of Mkks, which is under Sikkukkut’s control. The exchange involves her agreeing to an arrangement with Sikkukut to aid him in his contest with another kif, Akhtimakt, for supremacy among their kind. Part of this is a gift to her of Skukkuk, a kif whose presence on Payanfar’s ship The Pride of Chanur causes grave misgivings among her crew. An alliance such as this is also thought by other hani undesirable, even treasonous, and may have repercussions for Payanfar’s family back on Anuurn.

The agreement requires Pyanfar to journey deep inside kif territory to Kefk station, where most of the action takes place. The nature of kif beliefs and behaviour is emphasised by the entrance to Sikkukkut’s headquarters being flanked by his enemy’s heads on poles. So far, so mediæval. Pyanfar manages to bargain for the release of another hani ship’s crew from Sikkukkut’s custody but on the way back to the Pride they get caught up in the struggle between kif factions which provides the book’s only ‘battle’ scenes.

I note here that the kif language is heavy with (often doubled) percussive consonants and seems to lack the vowels a and e. Apart from Pyanfar’s hani, the only other language represented on the page in this volume is that of the tc’a, who communicate in cryptic seven by three matrices.

Though bearing in mind that hani are essentially lion-like (certainly in appearance, apart from what I assume – there being no indication to the contrary – is their bipedalism) Cherryh may have been making a comment on human affairs when in the context of hani social arrangements she tells us “Hilfy had known all her life that men were precious things; and their sanity precarious; and their tempers vast as their vanity.”

While all the action and intrigue Pyanfar witnesses and takes part in is going on a lot of stuff has been occurring in the background. Pyanfar’s mohendo’sat friend Goldtooth has, without Pyanfar’s knowledge, been manœuvring to leverage the impact of human accession to the Compact. Tully has less of a central role in this book than he had previously but he does let slip that human culture is more factional and complicated than the species of the Compact had perhaps assumed.

I suppose these books are technically space opera but their emphasis is less on spaceships battling each other than on political matters in the Compact, inside kifdom and amongst the hani. There is, too, frequent reference to domestic life on board the Pride. In this regard the procedures on board make the hani seem more human than leonine.

Pyanfar, Hilfy and even Sikkukkut have become more rounded the more the story develops and we also learn more of the other members of the crew than before.

The Kif Strike Back by C J Cherryh – A Son of the Rock — Jack Deighton

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