The Pride of Chanur, by C. J. Cherryh
More good space-lions SF
(Review posted 13 Aug 2006 02:35:21)

In my notes on Chanur's Legacy, I said I ought to get the earlier volumes in the series and see how I liked them. Apparently I did at some point, because I have a stack of them here, and when I started reading "The Pride of Chanur" (the first volume in the series), it seemed very familiar, and I decided that I must have read it sometime back (between reading Legacy and now).

Like Legacy, The Pride of Chanur is about a proud race of lion-like aliens where the males are too emotional and headstrong to be trusted out in space, so the females run the starships and the space stations. Also like that other book, this one centers on a particular captain of a particular ship, and how she deals with the complex relationships within and among both the various alien species out there and her own crew and conspecifics. Humans have a slightly more significant part here than in Legacy, but it's still very much about the Hani.

Relationships are the heart of both of these books: who owes what to whom, what subjects are sensitive, who suspects what and who intends what, whose pride will be hurt, who are friends and who are foes. This isn't technological or cosmological SF; it's more psychological. So much so that I sometimes lost the thread and got confused. As in the last book, the final rapid-fire resolution of all the difficulties got away from me, and I didn't entirely understand just how the various bad guys got defeated and good guys saved and/or vindicated.

But still it was a good book, well-written and with interesting characters, places, situations. So I'll take the next one off of the stack here, and see if it turns out that I've already read that one also...