No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company — a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown — and he was a prisoner of his discoverer/captors the sadistic, treacherous kif, until his escape onto the hani ship The Pride of Chanur.
Little did he know when he threw himself upon the mercy of The Pride and her crew that he put the entire hani species in jeopardy and imperiled the peace of the Compact itself. For the information this fugitive held could be the ruin or glory of any of the species at Meetpoint Station.

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? 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.