The Pride of Chanur – C. J. Cherryh (reread)

Cover of The Pride of Chanur


The Pride of Chanur
C. J. Cherryh
224 pages
published in 1981

I’ve read and reviewed The Pride of Chanur before, way back in 2001. That’s only three sentences long though, so high time for a reread and a proper review, especially as I’m trying to read more women sf writers this year, having discovered how unbalanced my reading was. Rereading old favourites like this one seemed a good way to start. Even if it did make me dream of kissing a Kif at Kefh.

The Pride of Chanur is a trade ship run by Hani –a race of bipedal intelligent lions– of the Chanur house/clan, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She’s doing the rounds of her ship, currently docked at Meetpoint, the big interspecies trading station run by the stsho, when something speeds past her into the ship. At first thinking it some kind of animal escaped from another ship, it turns out to be sapient, but “naked-hided, blunth-toothed and blunt-fingered” unlike any species she knows, something that after careful questioning calls itself human and turns out to have escaped Kif custody, the Kif being a particularly nasty race of black robed, grey skinned, long snouted pirates and thiefs. She refuses to hand it –him– over to them and the result is she and her ship have to flee Meetpoint, one step ahead of the murderous Kif, who in the process blow up and murder another Hani ship…

Now read on at the bookblog

Shards of Honor – Lois Mc Master Bujold (reread)

Cover of Shards of Honor


Shards of Honor
Lois McMaster Bujold
313 pages
published in 1986

I’ve reviewed Shards of Honor before, way back in 2001. Chronologically it’s the earliest story in the Vorkosigan series, with the exception of Falling Free. It is also the earliest published novel in the series and was based on an idea Bujold had for a Star Trek story. In the original story, the roles of Aral and Cordelia would’ve been played by a Klingon warrior and a Vulcan scientist; you can still sort of see the traces of this in the published book.

Cordelia Naismith is the captain of a Betan Planetary Survey Mission investigating a newly discovered planet, when her expedition is attacked by a Barrayaran force. She’s stunned and when she comes to she’s alone with the leader of that force, Aral Vorkosigan, left behind for death by his own internal enemies. They negotiate an uneasy truce to try and survive on a hostile planet to reach a survial cache left behind by the Barrayarans. After a long and ardeous terek they reach the cache, but something unexpected has happened in the meantime: they’ve fallen in love.

Read on

Is Bujold hard science fiction?

James asks for recommendations for hard science fiction written by women. I suggest Lois McMaster Bujold, but Ross TenEyck disagrees:

So a story that is undeniably science fiction, by virtue of being littered with SF props (e.g., ubiquitous space travel), and even one in which all the science is correct or at least plausible, does not necessarily — by my definition — count as hard SF… if all the science details are simply background to whatever the story is. And, although I’ve only read a couple of short stories in the Vorkosigan series, my impression is that it may fall into this boat. Science fiction, yes, science correct-or-plausible, sure, but the stories (so far as I’ve gathered from discussion about them) aren’t really about the science, so to me it isn’t hard SF.

I actually can go along with this, at least in part. Hard science fiction needs to be about the science, if only to distinguish it from all other science fiction. But his unfamiliarity with the Vorkosigan series is showing here. At first glance it does look like a standard mil-sf series, but the genius of Bujold is that she writes stories that revolve around science, technology and the sociological and cultural impact of these, without you realising she is doing this.

Much hard science fiction suffers from technofetishism, where the characters go around lovingly describing each type of ship taking part in a space battle or go into the finer details of the ammunition they’re using in the midst of a firefight. Even when the focus is less militaristic, it can sometimes seem the future is entirely populated by geeks. This is not the case with Bujold: her characters are people comfortable with using futuretech, without particularly noticing it or how it influences their society, but this influence is still there. As a reader it means you yourself have to work harder to notice things too, as they’re not pointed out to you.

The best example is the uterine replicator, first introduced in Shards of Honor. Here’s a technology that means women no longer have to suffer the dangers and side effects of pregnancy anymore, it’s going to have a massive impact on any society introduced to it. Barrayar never had this technology until recently and during the Vorkosigan series you see the effects of its introduction and the accompanying gender selection methods reverb through its society, until in Komarr the fact that Ekaterin had had a natural pregnancy was seen not just as unusual, but as almost perverse. She herself said she did it out of foolish romanticism, but it’s clear she was pressured into it by her husband and it counts heavily against him that he did so. Meanwhile the entire plot of the love story between Ekaterin and Miles himself is shaped by the effects gender selection had on Barrayar’s supply of potential wives, as every familiy went for sons over daughters and males started to outnumber females heavily…

And of course, uterine replicators are at the heart of Barrayar.

Komarr – Lois McMaster Bujold

Cover of Komarr


Komarr
Lois McMaster Bujold
311 pages
published in 1998

Komarr was the first Miles Vorkosigan book I’d ever read, back in 1998. At the time it was the latest in the series to have been published and deliberately written as a jump on point for new readers like me. I didn’t jump in completely ignorant however, as the Vorkosigan series was one of the favourite series of rec.arts.sf.written, which each new novel thoroughly dissected and discussed. It was these discussions that prompted me to finally pick up one of the series and luckily, it was the perfect starting point.

What I missed about Komarr the first time around was how feminist it is in its own right. It’s not an overtly political book, but the heart of the story is how one woman manages to escape from a bad marriage and the gender assumptions, traditions and expectations she grew up with. It’s her story that makes Komarr special, in what otherwise would’ve been a fun but unremarkable adventure science fiction story. As I’ve realised since, Lois Bujold has always been good at infusing even her slightest science fiction with subtle sociological backgrounds, imagining what effects the usual genre props might actually have on a society. So for example, the coming of Galactic gender assignment technologies to backward Barrayar has lead to a glut of males, as tradition values male heirs more than costly daughters and every family scrambled to make sure they got their quota of males. It’s something that has happened in the real world as well, not that outrageous a prediction to be sure, but Bujold pulls that sort of thing all the time, hidden in plain view in the background to Miles’ adventures.

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Living in the Future

map of all current Solar System space missions

Emily Lakdawalla has her monthly post on the state of space exploration up once again and as always it’s an useful reminder that despite appearances, we are living in the future. One clue being sentences like ” I’m enjoying following the relatively active Twitter feed of Voyager 2, which also mentions the position of Voyager 1 once a day”. Who would’ve guessed in the dying days of the twentieth century that a decade later we would get status updates from a robot space explorer at the edge of our Solar System, through a medium usually portrayed as only being good for shallow gossip or self promotion?

It makes silly little arguments that the future died in 1998 because that’s when Disneyland embraced steampunk seem even more facile than they already were.