The Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh

The Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh (1982)
Review by Ian Sales

Cherryh is no longer as popular as she once was. Her books have not been published in the UK for over a decade, and she does not even have a title in the SF Masterworks series – though  Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both Hugo Award winners, are possible contenders. Reading The Pride of Chanur, which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in 1983, and which is the first book in a five-book series, a possible reason for Cherryh’s fade from favour suggested itself.

The title of the book is the name of a spaceship, a trader operated by the Chanur family and captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She is hani, as are all the crew. The hani are leonine aliens, one of the four oxygen-breathing and three methane-breathing races which form the Compact. While docked at Meetpoint Station, a strange alien creature sneaks aboard The Pride of Chanur, and though its return is demanded by another alien race, the kif, Pyanfar refuses. The creature is not property but sapient. It also has plainly run away from mistreatment – perhaps even torture – by the kif.

The alien creature is, of course, a human. And it is the potential market suggested by the appearance of humans in Compact space which causes near-war between the hani and the kif. And in the middle of which stands Pyanfar Chanur. So it’s just as well that she manages to resolve it. In her favour, of course.

Like all Cherryh novels, the prose in The Pride of Chanur is brusque and effective. She makes no concessions towards her readers, and her novels are typically light on exposition. But everything the reader needs to know is in there and skillfully revealed. Pyanfar is a strong lead character, well-drawn and engaging. As are her crew. The hani are all female – the males stay at home, indolent and nominally in charge, while the females do all the work and actually run things. The world-building, however, is uncharacteristically sparse. Technologically, the races of the Compact appear to have FTL – some form of jump drive – but no artificial gravity, and communications and sensors are limited by the speed of light. Most of the action in the novel takes place in space stations, which very much resemble the one described in Downbelow Station. It is only in the final third of the story that it moves to the surface of Anuurn, the hani homeworld. And even then, Cherryh does her usual trick of filing the serial numbers off a human culture.

In fact, reading The Pride of Chanur it becomes apparent that everything in the book hovers on the edge of familiarity. The hani are lions, the kif are jackals, the mahendo’sat (another alien race) are apes, the shto… Well, the shto only make a handful of appearances in this first novel in the series so it’s a little difficult to make out their inspiration. Throughout the story, the oxygen-breathing aliens operate more like human cultures than they do real aliens. The mahendo’sat, for example, talk in a sort of pidgin English that would not be acceptable in a twenty-first century novel.

The methane-breathers, on the other hand, are more mysterious than they are alien. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of real communication or relationship between the two groups. Cherryh tells us they trade, and the knnn do prove useful in the final scenes of the book… But then The Pride of Chanur is the first in a series, so it’s possible the methane-breathers will become better integrated into the setting in later books.

All this is not to say that The Pride of Chanur is not a fun read. It’s pacey, has more than its share of thrills, and possesses a likable and sympathetic cast of protagonists. But it is a little hard to understand why it made the Hugo shortlist in 1983 – though, to be fair, the rest of the list that year was mostly poor (for example, Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge actually won the award). Cherryh’s novels are very much products of their time, and while they’re certainly well-crafted, their time has passed. Fans of her work – and I count myself one – will continue to treasure them, but their appeal is six parts nostalgia to four parts admiration.

I never did get around to reading the rest of the Chanur Saga. Having now reread The Pride of Chanur (decades after I last read it), I think I will make an effort to track down copies of the sequels – Chanur’s Venture (1984), The Kif Strike Back (1985), Chanur’s Homecoming (1986) and Chanur’s Legacy (1992). All five novels were also published in two omnibus volumes in 2000 and 2007.

Angel with the Sword, CJ Cherryh

Angel with the Sword, CJ Cherryh (1985)
Review by Ian Sales

In a career so far spanning five decades, Carolyn Janice Cherry has managed to maintain both an enviable productivity with little or no loss of quality, and a future history comprising to date twenty-seven novels, seven anthologies, and a number of short stories. Angel with the Sword, however, is actually peripheral to the main history of Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe.

Altair Jones is a “canaler” in the city of Merovingen on the world of Merovin. She is seventeen, an orphan, and very much the mistress of her own fate. Like all the canalers, she is dirt-poor, living a hand-to-mouth existence as she picks up work ferrying cargo around the canals of the city. When she witnesses a man being thrown from a bridge, she rescues him before he drowns and finds herself embroiled in a political struggle among the religions, political parties and plutocrats of Merovin.

There’s not much in Angel with the Sword itself which makes the story science fiction. Merovingen, a city which has been flooded so often and to such an extent that it has now become like Venice could just as easily be, well, Venice. And the politico-religious factions which drive the plot of the novel, while unique to it and connected to the Alliance and Union of Cherryh’s future history, aren’t actually necessary in that form for the story to work. But Cherryh chose to write Angel with the Sword as sf, and it’s proven a popular book in her oeuvre – perhaps as much for its setting as for its protagonist. I’ll freely admit it’s my favourite of her novels, and rereading it for review only reminded me how much charm it possesses.

There’s enough in the plot of Angel with the Sword to make sense of it, but Cherryh adds thirty-four pages of appendices and maps. These place the events in Merovingen in a planetary context, and the world of Merovin itself in a galactic context, as well as detailing flora, fauna, customs, dress, etc. Some six hundred years prior to the events of the story, Merovin was settled illegally by colonists from Union. All went well for a couple of decades, then the world’s former inhabitants, the sharrh, turned up and demanded the removal of the human colonists. Most left, but some ran to the hills – for reasons which probably owe more to a romanticised US pioneer spirit than any convincing in-universe rationale. The sharrh destroyed every human city on the planet and then left. The stay-behinds resettled the ruins, gradually rediscovered civilisation, and now operate the sort of low-tech libertarian paradise beloved by certain US sf authors, in which a fabulously wealthy upper class control everything and live the life of Riley on the backs of a much larger powerless and poor populace.

The man who falls from the bridge, Mondragon, is a member of the upper class from another city, and he used to be a member of a powerful politico-religious organisation. But he left them. And now he knows too many secrets. Factions in Merovingen, as well as his home city of Nev Hettek, are after him. Jones falls in love with him, and goes against all her instincts in helping him. When he is then kidnapped by one faction, she leads the canalers on a rescue mission.

There are problems with Angel with the Sword. There’s the society on Merovin, for a start. Six hundred years after the survivalists came down from the hills, you’d expect something a little more civilised than pure unregulated capitalism. It’s not as if the world suffers any kind of scarcity – the only thing that appears to be in short supply among the canalers is, well, money. In Merovingen, the strata of society are as much physical as they are social – the canalers live among the pilings of the buildings, down on the water. The rich live on the upper stories – and when Jones visits one such, a member of one of the city’s most powerful families, she is astonished at the luxury on display. The story also makes the repeated point that the various public institutions are corrupt and controlled by the richest and most powerful families.

And then there’s Altair Jones herself. She’s seventeen, tough, independent, resourceful… and a virgin when the story opens. It’s not stated how old Mondragon is, but he’s no teenager. Within a day of the rescue, they’ve had sex – and yet neither of their motives for doing so are really plausible. It’s almost as if it’s an expected consequence of the rescue. There’s also a disturbing lack of gender equality in the novel, despite it being supposedly set in the thirty-third century. According to one of the appendices, clothing on Merovin has “no particular gender distinction”, and it’s true that Jones wears trousers and sweater throughout the book… but it’s still very much a male-controlled society, and Jones is the only female character in the story with agency.

And yet, despite this romanticised Wild-West-in-Venice setting, Angel with the Sword continues to appeal. Jones is an engaging heroine, despite being exceptional within the world of the story. Merovingen is a fascinating place, despite being horribly unegalitarian and far from civilised. Angel with the Sword is a fun sf read, despite only being science fiction because Cherryh says in an appendix that it’s set in the thirty-third century. There’s much to dislike about the world Cherryh has created in this twenty-seven-year-old novel – though that doesn’t mean such worlds are not created in twenty-first century sf novels (and some of them even get shortlisted for major genre awards). In some respects, Angel with the Sword feels like a product of a decade earlier than its 1985 publication year, but it remains readable because of the quality of Cherryh’s prose, because it is tautly and relentlessly plotted and because it embodies the remorseless appeal of a romance novel.

And those anthologies mentioned at the beginning of this review? Angel with the Sword inspired a seven-book series, Merovingen Nights, containing stories by Cherryh herself, Lynn Abbey, Mercedes Lackey, Janet Morris, Robert Lynn Asprin, and others, all set in the titular city.