Black Gate

The Pride of Chanur (DAW Books, January 1982). Cover by Michael Whelan

C.J. Cherryh has just lately announced the end of her writing career: For medical reasons, she can no longer manage a writing project. Sad news! This seems like a time to look back at what I consider one of her most memorable novels: The Pride of Chanur.

One of the common themes of science fiction is alien races; and a particularly interesting version of this theme is stories about first contact with aliens. By far the majority of such stories have human viewpoint characters, and show the nonhumans as alien and hard to figure out. This has been the case from H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon to memorable recent novels such as Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, or films such as Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life”). But some stories turn this around, giving the reader a nonhuman viewpoint character. And that’s what The Pride of Chanur does, and does ingeniously.

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Tam Lin (Tor Books paperback reprint edition, April 1992). Cover by Thomas Canty

There’s been a lot of genre fiction set at schools. Hogwarts is an obvious example, but such settings were around long before Harry Potter; Heinlein’s Space Cadet, The Uncanny X-Men, and Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea were all there first. Tam Lin is another early example, published six years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made scholastic fantasy a best-selling subgenre.

But it has an important difference: Its setting, the fictional Blackstock College, doesn’t teach magic, or superheroic combat, or spaceflight, or anything else fantastic. It’s a fairly typical small liberal arts college (based on the real college where Pamela Dean did her undergraduate work) where the supernatural elements are hidden beneath the surface.

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Science fiction fans naturally know H.G. Wells best for his scientific romances. But after 1905, he wrote relatively little in that genre. Instead, he turned his efforts variously to the Fabian Society, Britain’s indigenous socialist movement; to surveys of human knowledge for general audiences, in the style later followed by Isaac Asimov (I read my grandmother’s copy of The Outline of History, and I still have the four volumes of The Science of Life); and to realistic novels, starting with Love and Mr. Lewisham in 1900.

Joan and Peter is a curious amalgam of these interests — a realistic novel about changing class relations and cultural attitudes in England, much of whose storyline focuses on the problems of the English educational system as experienced by its title characters. This gives Wells a chance to explain things to his readers, though he’s often fairly good at enlivening the presentation beyond big lumps of exposition.

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Stand on Zanzibar (Del Rey/Ballantine, June 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

Watching their sets in a kind of trance
Were people in Mexico, people in France.
They don’t chase Jones but their dreams are the same—
Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that’s the right name!
Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

Stand on Zanzibar is perhaps John Brunner’s most significant novel. Up until then, he had written competent science fiction on familiar themes such as psionics (Telepathist) and time travel (The Productions of Time). With Stand on Zanzibar he began writing larger books that were no longer purely ways of playing with such standard ideas, but examinations of our own world in a fantastic mirror. At the same time, they used a more sophisticated literary method — not the surrealism that inspired much of the New Wave, but a naturalism similar to nineteenth-century fiction.

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The Weigher (Baen Books, November 1992). Cover by C. W. Kelly

First contact stories are one of science fiction’s major subgenres, an important branch of stories about aliens, going back at least to H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. The usual point of view is a human one; after all, humans are familiar and nonhumans are not, and that way the reader can share the protagonist’s discovery of a new species and culture. But every so often, a writer tells the story from the nonhuman point of view. The Weigher, published first in Analog in 1984 and then expanded into a novel in 1992, is one of these ventures.

What adds interest to this is that the culture of the aliens is worked out in some detail, and is different from our own culture in major ways, and probably from a lot of human cultures. Some of these differences reflect different biology and psychology; others probably don’t, such as the version of money in use.

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