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. ( )

I rather liked this, especially the hani race and how they deal with others. I thought the flow was hampered a bit by some of the space maneuvering and fighting, though. I would have liked more interaction between the different characters. ( )

I really don't know how or why I didn't read this when it came out, but I'm certain I would have loved it then. The strengths of "The Pride of Chanur" remain very appealing to me: the non-human perspective, the 'human-as-alien' factor, that guile and machinations are given primacy over shoot-'em-ups, and we are presented with a number of non-human species who truly differ in nature from each other. The story itself is intriguing, the Chanur vessel with its human refugee running for shelter while the storm breaks around them; setting a large-scale space opera in motion and focusing on a few characters awash on the tide can make a brilliant narrative ("A Memory Called Empire," for instance).

This is an earlier Cherryh work and one of several she published in a very short time in the early 1980s, however, and those clearly signify. The writing is rushed and unclear; too many scenes make a reader ask "Huh?" in simple confusion. The attempted trade-pidgin was a nice idea but really, really comes across as bad Asian caricatures from regrettable movies of years past: "me good speaky-speaky, you see!" Worst of all, though, is what seems to me the biggest narrative hole: very little of this book actually involves attempted communication with the human when that is THE single most crucial factor at play. Missed opportunity.

I'm entertained enough to read further in the Chanur novels, but this book left a lot of opportunities on the floor, bits that would have made a superior novel out of the fair-to-partly-cloudy book I just read. ( )

This story didn't do it for me. Don't know whether it was because I was sick, or the author manages to take what could be a very exciting story and make it dull. Both? The main character had no charisma, nor did any of the others. I couldn't bring myself to care much what happened to them. I read and read and got nowhere. Finally, half way through, I found myself reading anything else to avoid picking it up. I skipped and read the end. Enough.

All that being said, I know many others who adore this story, so you will have to read it for yourself and find out. ( )

The best ever human as alien book. Ms. Cherryh is the master of making me believe a human is the alien. Love the series but this one is comfort food for me and I reread it all the time. I also recommend it to readers at the bookstore where I work as the best introduction to Ms. Cherryh's work. ( )