Teaser
The Pride of Chanur is a merchant vessel, not a warship. Yet when its crew take aboard a fugitive, they find themselves caught in a game of galactic intrigue. Humans, it turns out, are more trouble than they’re worth . . .
Review
After being underwhelmed by Downbelow Station, I was initially planning to give it a while before revisiting C. J. Cherryh’s works. But then I decided to read my TBR from oldest to newest, and ended up reading my second foray into Cherryh’s Alliance-Union saga only a month after my first. This actually struck me as a good idea. After all, Downbelow Station did all the heavy lifting of putting a universe together. Now I could finally get a solid story set in that universe. Right?
Wrong. My hopes alas, were in vain. For while The Pride of Chanur does take place in the same universe as Downbelow Station, it takes place in a totally different part of that universe. We meet Tully, a human on the run, but every other character in this book is an alien. Mostly aliens of the furry variety, it must be said. On the plus side, this means we get a cover by Michael Whelan doing what he does best: cute, furry aliens that are similar to but legally distinct from Ewoks. On the downside, this cuteness does extend to the rest of the book. Tully’s rescuers speak in a broken English that starts off adorable but soon becomes grating. And even when the aliens converse among themselves, their speech patters remain the same. Obviously, aliens would likely have different speech patterns to humans, but if we’re going to write their words into English for the sake of a readable book, can’t we go the whole hog and have their dialogue be less jarring to read?
This sort of thing does irk me, but a lot can be forgiven if the plot is worth writing home about. Here again, Cherryh falls flat for me. It’s only been a week since I finished the book, and already I’ve forgotten pretty much everything about it. Granted, I’ve had a very busy week (woo, FantasyCon! – More on that soon, I promise) but it’s still not a good look for a book to be so forgettable. the more I explore science fiction, the more I start to wonder if the nineteen-eighties were so heavily influenced by Star Wars that storytelling gave way to spectacle, even in literature. There are countless space opera books from the period that I only remember because they’re on a shelf next to me as I type this. For all it’s alien-stuffed premise, there’s not much to separate The Pride of Chanur from the rest of the space opera stew.
This is all the more baffling because it came out only a year after Downbelow Station. Why go through the effort of creating such an intricate universe if the next book in that setting uses none of that as a basis? What we end up with is something quite bland and tasteless. Cherryh’s prose is on the same level in both books, but while Downbelow Station felt like it was building towards something, The Pride of Chanur shows no sign of those foundations. Maybe later books connect the two. Is suspect they do, but at this point I have little interest in finding out the answer.
C. J. Cherryh has an incredible career, and has to be on of the most award-nominated space opera authors in the field. But for the life of me, I just can’t convince myself to go any further into the Alliance-Union universe. Not if the two books I’ve read so far are to held up as fine examples of it.
Book Stats
- Chanur Series #1
- First Published 1982
- 224 Pages
