it is really weird to see "all sff authors in the 80s were bigots" while reading a hugo award winning novel by a lesbian in the 80s who wrote about alien lion women doing politics
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Cherryh is an amazing author. I've just finished Alliance Unbound and managed to get my hands on second copies of all the Chanur books a few weeks ago so they are next up in the reading list!
I literally wrote a book on the far-right strain within sci-fi and there have pretty much always been writers, often loudly, declaring "hey that's bigoted bullshit" and creating works actively opposed to it.
I was just thinking, when I was in a used bookstore a few weeks ago, that I should re-read the Chanur books, as it's been several years. (That store didn't have any of them, alas.)
we live in a regressive patriarchal conservative culture and this take feels weird to trot out while a lot of your so called fav progressive writers were silent on or worse actively cheering an ongoing genocide
a lot of writers have sucked across the generations! but also! there are good writers there too! stop justifying your incuriosity with faux progressivism!
imagine thinking you're too good and smart and moral to read Ursula K. Le Guin. we used to turn people into spiders for that sort of hubris but now we let them write particularly unimpressive essays about how they'd save the Omelas kid
Past Generations: [spend effort suppressing, silencing, and concealing the existence of persecuted people]
Future Generations: "Those people didn't exist back then."
It's because there are no "good guys" so they end up sticking to "these things to me indicate bad guys so I'll use them to justify every shitty thing I do."
Most of the time I feel like any genuinely good people are shoved under the tide of performative patriarchal bullshit because people learned that all you have to do is yell the right script as loud as you possibly can and people will make a moral value judgment based solely on that.
just returning here to say ty for this rec I am reading Downbelow Station and loving it (tho ngl the political tension is at times a bit much for me rn)
What? I didn’t know she was a lesbian. Wait! How many women were writing award-winning novels about alien lion women doing politics in the 80s? I know it was the Cold War, but still
as an aside it's funny how circumspect the books are about lesbian hani existing while at the same time it's like well duh, of course they do, spend five seconds thinking about this culture
not to mention that she's still writing and when some of these people talk about writers from the 80s it's as if they think they're all dead or if not dead that their creative juices have dried up and blown away from decrepitude.
but in the meantime more books will be published. It is both staggeringly incredible that there are so many books and also dammit I'm never going to get to all of them
I want more Chanur - a sequel, perhaps, but I really want a novel of first contact. Cherryh hints at it, but I think it would be neat to see the Hani go suddenly from ocean ships to spaceships.
i am so happy to spread the word of badass middleaged lion women in space. cj cherryh is a fabulous writer. think like the politics of ursula leguin but in a pulp adventure format with lots of dense politics. these books are RAD.
I think it might have been on the back cover of one of the books? If it's not Michael Whelan's art it references his illustrations. I understand this doesn't really answer the question.
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Future Generations: "Those people didn't exist back then."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1nUi3DaWzGI&si=Je381Wi3wCSLB1ws
I too am a huge fan of the chanur series