Quote:
Originally Posted by Joebill
In C. J. Cherryh's stories there are hydrogen beings who use a matrix of words in a pattern matrix. I think it was hydrogen, could have been methane. It has been a long while since i read them.
The Pride of Chanur stories are mostly told from the perspective of a cat-people.
Humanity shows up later on, a few here and there, strugling to deal with the sudden locating of several star faring civilizations.
I think she is one of the few authors who handle well truly alien to us species.
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She is, and I read the Chanur series with pleasure. The problems of inter-species communications are something of a constant in her work, as is the question "How much can you really know about an alien culture?", where such knowledge may be crucial to your own survival.
I liked the late James White's Sector General stories, set in an interstellar hospital station, where the patients took myriad forms and came from many different evolutionary trees. White bowed respectfully at Dr. Jack Cohen, a lecturer in comparative animal taxonomy in the UK. Whenever White thought he'd developed a
truly weird alien species, he mentioned it to Cohen, who immediately mentioned at least two Earth species twice as weird as what White had postulated. (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle make similar comments about Dr. Cohen.)
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Dennis