Adapted from a few separate posts I made to Tumblr on The Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh, aka a surprisingly contemporary-feeling early-1980s SF novel in which a human dude is abducted by aliens (more or less) and ends up on a ship with a bunch of lion women who have never seen a human before. No spoilers for future books, though spoilers might occur in the comments. (FYI, I'm currently reading the fourth book. I know there are a couple people on Tumblr who are reading the books for the first time, but I'm not sure if any of the interested parties on DW are new readers. To be on the safe side, include spoiler warnings in your comments if you discuss future books.)

Rereading this book after not having read it in 15 years or so, I think what struck me the most is how much of this book is about people helping other people, and being generally kind and decent, even in the face of a universe that’s very much not. It’s an almost relentlessly optimistic book, and I really liked that.

And it’s not just Pyanfar and her crew protecting and sheltering Tully (although the lengths to which they’re willing to go to keep him safe are really something). It’s also that they take pains to make sure he’s as comfortable as possible – reassuring him nonverbally in situations where he doesn’t understand what’s going on, trying to find clothes for him since he gets colder than hani do, making sure he has drugs to go through jump. (I think I was particularly impressed by the inherent decency in that last one, because the hani don’t need it, and it would’ve been very easy for them to assume – especially given how macho hani women are – that he can tough it out too if he’s just willing to try. But they don’t; except in situations where they have literally no choice, they try to make sure that they don’t force him to go through it without being sedated.)

And it’s not even just the crew and Tully. It’s also the mehendo'sat freighter dumping their cargo and risking everything to rescue hani survivors from the kif-damaged ship. It’s also Kohan sheltering Khym, and Pyanfar being willing to look past her culture’s stereotypes about men and give Khym a chance rather than leaving him to die. And Goldtooth and his crew helping the hani against the kif. And Tully keeping his hair and beard long, even after he’s back with his own people, as a gesture of respect to his rescuers.

Generally, I feel like one of the main themes of this book is that even though space is big and cold and dark, and even though there are some awful people out there (and some truly incomprehensible aliens), most people are actually pretty decent and will help each other out, no matter what they look like or how much fur they have. It’s not just a few decent individuals (the crew of the Pride); it’s that most people are fairly decent, or at least try to be, and I really liked that.

Moving on to the gender stuff ... I don’t think I appreciated (or really thought about it at all), when I first read this book as a teenager, how extraordinary it is for a book published in 1982 to have a cast that’s almost entirely female, and a bunch of macho and (judiciously) violent women at that. The hani women of the Pride may be honest merchant traders, but there is something very piratical about them anyway, with their gold earrings and scars and willingness to use teeth, claws, and weapons to get what they want. And the main viewpoint character is middle-aged, with a husband and grown children back home!

I liked, however, that the gender roles in hani society are not merely human gender roles inverted. Their society is loosely built on lions as inspiration, so males are technically in charge, but are believed to be too violent and unstable to interact with outsiders, so women handle all foreign trade and diplomacy, as well as most of the fighting. Hani women enjoy freedom and power quite enviable to human women … but their position is also precarious, deeply dependent upon male hani politics back home, while male hani live a life of strictures and boundaries if they “win” (they’re protected and cosseted, living a life of luxury for as long as they can defeat challengers) but most can look forward only to a short, violent, lonely life in the wilderness.

The hani very easily could’ve ended up as some sort of Noble Savage stereotype, as a species very new to space travel, still very much embroiled in violently gladiatorial politics, effectively “primitives” who’ve been given spaceships by their mehendo’sat discoverers … except they are very much not that; they are not even considered “primitive” by galactic standards, simply different in a galaxy full of very different groups of sentients, even though you can see how much their society is being influenced and changed by very recent contact with spacefaring species. They may be new to space travel, but Pyanfar & co. are canny, cynical, smart, cosmopolitan, and technologically sophisticated, even though their society has not yet adapted to dealing with galactic outsiders on a regular basis.

The book does suffer somewhat from the “one planet, one culture” problem, and also “one species, one cultural trait” with the more exotic aliens and the kif, though future books develop them more. And there’s an appendix to one of the books that explains the hani are effectively monocultural because the group of hani who first made contact with the mehendo’sat were able to expand their influence all over the planet due to controlling space travel. It … sort of works. I wish we saw more variety within the hani, though it’s also plausible that they don’t have as much cultural variation as humans do because, as a species, they aren’t particularly innovative. The most humanlike aliens in the books, the curious and exploration-oriented mehendo’sat, do seem to have a lot more ethnic and linguistic variety (which is seen a little bit in this book, and more in future books).

But I love that what made Tully decide to seek refuge on the Pride (hurt and on the run, surrounded by aliens he knew nothing about) is that he saw them laughing, and decided that a group of people with that kind of camaraderie were probably his best chance at getting help instead of more pain. That’s such a lovely detail.

And his willingness to trust them is really extraordinary given what he’s been through. His entire experience with aliens up to this point has been with the kif, who tortured him and killed his friends. But he’s still willing to look past their differences and see the hani as people, and able to come up with an impromptu way to show them that he’s a sentient being rather than an animal (while bleeding all over their deck!).

There is a fascinating “reading between the lines” thing going on with Tully’s interaction with the crew, because we don’t really see a whole lot of it since the entire book is through Pyanfar’s eyes, and she’s the captain (and also the kind of person she is, generally), so she’s somewhat aloof from the crew, and also (by necessity, as the main responsible party) more suspicious of Tully than the rest of them. So we see Tully’s growing closeness with the crew secondhand, for the most part, through Pyanfar’s glimpses of them … even though it eventually becomes quite obvious that everyone on the ship is SUPER protective of their breakable, accidentally acquired human.

(I also love that he keeps hugging people whether they want him to or not, and Pyanfar’s general impression of humans as a very physically “touchy” species compared to her own!)

And Pyanfar is a great narrator. :D I love how tough and practical she is – a grown, middle-aged woman, neither young nor sentimental, with a husband and grown-up kids. We already discussed in the comments to a previous entry the clever gender inversion going on with Pyanfar and Khym (her husband), with Khym in the role normally filled by older women who find themselves past their reproductive prime, in a society that now says they’re old and unattractive and useless. After losing his position at the head of his house, Khym is considered to have outlived his usefulness; there’s no place in their society for old men. He’s supposed to just get out of the way and die to make room for younger males. Meanwhile Pyanfar, who is about the same age, is at the top of her career, tough and savvy and swashbuckling, and neither she nor her society considers her old at all.

Most of the other female characters don’t really emerge with a lot of clarity as individuals in this book, aside from Hilfy, the young woman on the crew who is understandably charmed by rescuing a half-naked alien damsel in distress with a silky blond mane. :D (Tully: space princess.)

Have you read the book? Do you have thoughts? Come talk to me about it!