Books SFF Bestiary Space Lions With Cattitude: C.J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur A classic work of science fiction, told from the viewpoint of spacefaring hunters and explorers — who just happen to be lions. By Judith Tarr | Published on January 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share C.J. Cherryh has been one of my favorite authors for a long time. She writes beautifully, her characters are always memorable, and she is a master of intricate plots that grab you and pull you along to the very end. She’s particularly fond of writing from alien viewpoints, and she loves to throw a lone human in among the aliens. Often the aliens are female or female-ruled, and the human is male and very much out of his comfort zone—literally and figuratively. The Pride of Chanur is a classic example. The title is the name of the spaceship captained and crewed by felinoid aliens called hani, but it also points to their terrestrial model: a pride of lions. As with lions, hani females (she calls them women, and so going forward will I) are hunters and explorers. They’re the starfarers, while the males stay at home on their native planet. Captain and protagonist Pyanfar Chanur is the captain of the ship. She’s a woman of a certain age and a considerable degree of confidence. Her crew of six includes her adolescent niece, Hilfy, who happens to be her brother’s favorite child. Hilfy has to grow up hard and fast as the story progresses, and Pyanfar has her own escalating series of obstacles to overcome and personal and professional crises to deal with. It’s all very relatable to this human female of a certain age—even more so now than in 1982 when I first read the book. The universe they live in is an interstellar version of our hypercapitalist present. Multiple species claim different sectors of space; the Compact unites them, to a certain degree, and regulates them, also to a degree. From Pyanfar’s viewpoint, the Compact adds up to a set of trade agreements. She’s a successful trader; she runs cargo around various stations. She’s comfortable with her place in the universe—until a being of an unknown species tries to stow away on her ship and throws her into a set of conflicts that could break the Compact wide open. The hani are not a highly technological species. They were discovered by the large, dark-furred mahendo’sat and introduced to space travel. The only species in fact that propelled itself into space, as far as we know in this first volume of the series, is the kif: tall, grey-skinned, long-snouted, black-robed persons with a distinctly villainous vibe and a tradition of intractable blood feud. Everyone else seems to have taken the same trajectory as the hani. That’s as much as we, through Pyanfar, can know. Pyanfar’s assumptions drive her actions through the novel, and they’re not always correct. One thing she persistently does is focus on the oxygen breathers and treat the methane-breathing species, particularly the many-legged, incomprehensibly singing/screaming knnn, as an ongoing nuisance. Knnn ships are always around whenever things get complicated, getting in everybody’s way and singing incessantly on the com channels. Nobody can control them. They don’t follow traffic laws. Everybody else keeps an eye out for them and tries to stay out of their way. They’re like a form of sentient space debris: you can’t do anything about them, and you have to hope you don’t crash into them, or they don’t crash into you. Pyanfar is not interested in understanding them. She doesn’t care what they may be doing or saying, until she has no choice but to try. I had figured long before she did that there was more going on with them than Pyanfar takes time to notice. Part of the fun of the latter part of the book is waiting for her to figure it out, and then find out what it all means. Pyanfar’s priority throughout the book is the protection of her pride—both the crew of her ship and her family back home on Anuurn. Everything she does revolves around that. She is herself a matriarch, the leader of her family, in conjunction with her brother who, like all hani males up to this point, has never traveled offworld. Male hani are considerably larger than their sisters and daughters and wives. They’re regarded as far too emotionally volatile to trust outside of a very narrow sphere. Their function is to prove themselves in single combat (which can be to the death), and once they’ve done that, to make babies. They’re heavily protected and much indulged. One of Pyanfar’s late realizations is that her cultural conditioning might be wrong about male incapacity; that it might be nurture more than nature. It’s part of her ongoing development as a character, though it doesn’t feature prominently in this first volume of the series. There’s too much else to worry about before she gets to that. As for what hani look like, Michael Whelan’s beautiful cover (along with the covers of the sequels) gives us a good idea. They’re bipedal, humanoid-shaped, browny-bronze, short-furred except for their manes and beards, with strongly leonine facial features and mobile, expressive ears. Both hands and feet have retractable claws, though they also seem to have opposable thumbs: they easily manipulate various tools, weapons, and tech, including the charmingly Eighties-vintage pagers that they carry at their belts. They have color vision—they love to dress in bright colors, with plenty of jewelry, notably earrings that signal a hani woman’s achievements and status. It’s not clear in this volume if they’re mammalian, though their resemblance to lions and their affinity with the mammalian mahendo’sat (and for that matter the humans) indicates they probably are. They seem to produce single offspring or maybe twins rather than multiples, though again, that’s not addressed in this particular story. We know Pyanfar has a son, and Hilfy is one of her brother’s (apparently multiple) daughters; some of her crew are sisters, but whether they’re twins or born separately, we aren’t told. Part of the fun of the book is that because we’re living in Pyanfar’s head, we’re getting information as she would perceive it. She doesn’t give us chunks of exposition. She assumes we know because she does—and the same for what she doesn’t know. When she meets the all but hairless biped with the weird pale coloring, who doesn’t speak any language she or anyone on the crew knows, we pick up from context what he is, but we learn the why and how along with her. We never get the human viewpoint. That’s clearly a deliberate choice, and it works for me. Pyanfar makes sense as a person, and also as a cat. Her concerns are very human in some ways and catlike in others. It’s especially evident in her interactions with the men in her life. She cares deeply for her husband and her brother, but she’s much less emotionally involved with her son who challenges the latter for supremacy. She is prepared for one or both of them to be defeated in combat and probably killed. It may cause her grief, but it’s the reality of life in a hani family. She’s tough with her crew, too, and with her niece. Hilfy is a future matriarch, but she has a long way to go, and a lot of growing up to do. Part of that education involves being literally smacked upside the head. It’s cat discipline, with claws out if and as needed. We don’t even need to visit a safari park to see it: it happens right here at home, with our own small feline housemates.[end-mark] The post Space Lions With Cattitude: C.J. Cherryh’s <i>The Pride of Chanur</i> appeared first on Reactor.