When my high school Novels class finished reading Fahrenheit 451, we had a “book-burning.” The teacher asked us each to bring in the book we would commit to memory as members of the resistance. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read Fahrenheit 451. Your library will have it. Just read it carefully, or Ray Bradbury will make you scared of the Internet.) Sitting in a circle around a construction-paper bonfire, we each introduced our book, read a passage to prove its contents were worth preserving, and then consigned it, pages and binding, to the imaginary flames.
The book I brought was Pride of Chanur, the first in a series of C. J. Cherryh novels set in a far-off corner of her Alliance-Union universe where humans are unknown and the usual sort of space merchantry is done by four oxygen-breathing species and three methane-breathing ones. The story of first contact with a kidnapped human is told by Pyanfar Chanur, captain and matriarch of a ship of space merchants from a lionlike species called hani.
The time I started reading the Chanur series was about the same time my dad decided I should spend my summers reading “real literature,” as distinct from “pulp.” That’s how I read Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein and Catcher in the Rye and Heart of Darkness, and found all of them (except Catcher in the Rye, which I read when I was sixteen and therefore empathized perfectly with Holden Caulfield’s teenage alienation) so boring that my dad probably still has a list of ten or so “classics” he wants me to read. This struck me, at the time, as hypocritical: why, if he thought fantasy and science fiction weren’t worth the time it took to read them, was he collecting Discworld novels?
The answer, of course, is more complicated than that. Boring as the novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are to a teenager of the twenty-first, they should not be forgotten, because they laid a foundation of tropes and genres that novels written in my lifetime are still building on and responding to. Not to mention that the field of classic literature is littered with rabbit holes of its own; Extra Sci-Fi, a Youtube series I enjoy about the history of science fiction, spends five episodes explaining all the literary references Mary Shelley makes in Frankenstein to establish exactly what literary conventions she established and which earlier ones she played with or broke with altogether.
Also, the line between literary and pulp is arbitrary, and seems to me to be more about age than anything else. I remember once, in middle school, I was asked what made a book a classic, and said "it's good and it's old." This didn't satisfy my teacher, but I don't have a better definition given the subjectivity of what is "good" writing. And what is "old" writing.
Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel, and I can't say Pride of Chanur doesn't follow in its footsteps. When I first read it, I fell in love with ideas I'd never really felt connected to before, like the story's perspective of looking in on humanity from the outside. The refugee Pyanfar picks up is too physically fragile to withstand a cautionary slap from hani claws; he never really learns the language; and he brings dire politics with him...that nobody really cares about, since everyone seems to want him as a pet, a meal, or a bargaining chip. Yet he stubbornly tries to find his footing in this strange environment, to the point of writing base-ten numbers on the floor in his own blood after the aforementioned clawing. (Having recently received an annoyed bite from an otherwise friendly cat, I can now attest to this man’s tenacity.) And it was that passage, where Pyanfar recognizes the writing as numbers and realizes that this alien she’s wounded is intelligent, that I read to my high school Novels class on book-burning day.
The other thing I loved about Pride of Chanur was how different the aliens’ social structures were from anything I’d ever seen or read about. The hani had a strict matriarchy that looked a lot like my understanding of real lions, in which males led families in name only, were mostly kept around to make babies, and usually died in single combat with an ambitious teenage son or nephew. The stsho had three sexes and five genders, and any individual could change between them at moments of emotional crisis, with a taboo against mentioning a person’s previous identities (this being well before my extremely cisgendered self knew anything about trans or nonbinary people or the real taboo against deadnaming). And—in what I understand now as a challenge to male-dominated science fiction as direct as either the hani or the stsho—the only species where men did all the business were the kif, lizardlike predators who refused to eat anything that was already dead.
Teenage me needed that. And grownup me is delighted to discover not only a new wave of feminist fantasy and science fiction, led by such award-winning luminaries as Seanan McGuire and Nnedi Okorafor, but also a tradition of female and otherwise marginalized voices going back probably all the way to Mary Shelley. And those may not be classics (though they could be someday, if "old and good" are what matters), but they’re worth preserving.
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