C.J. Cherryh was recommended to me by a friend who said she loved the books because of the cat-like Hani race. Ms. Cherryl is the the author of numerous suspenseful science fiction and fantasy novels. They are not light reading.

Caroline J. Cherryh started her science fiction writing career in 1976 and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 1977, with Hugo and Nebula nominations two years later. Of her first four novels, three are groundbreaking classics .Today, over twenty years later, she continues to produce some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking soft science fiction, enriched with speculative ethnology, invented linguistics, and thoroughly imagined civilizations.

C.J. was born Carolyn Janice Cherry in St.Louis, Missouri. She spent her preschool years growing up in Joplin, Missouri. World War II was in full swing. Times were tough in a way most Americans today never even dream about. Food, gasoline, heating fuels, money-everything was in short supply. Entertainment was talking to your friends, reading a book, or listening to the radio, if you were lucky enough to have one. Television, at that point, was years away, at least for the common man.

Perhaps the best introduction to her work is the Chanur series, which starts with The Pride of Chanur. Pyanfar Chanur is the captain of a trading ship, The Pride of Chanur, which travels between the worlds of the Compact, a loose confederation of spacefaring races. Pyanfar is a Hani, a vaguely feline race. Only female Hani are allowed into space; male Hani tend to be simple-minded and short-tempered. During an otherwise normal stay at a space station, Pyanfar acquires a stowaway--a human named Tully, from outside of the Compact. He is the sole survivor of the first Terran ship to reach Compact space. Pyanfar, her crew, and eventually the whole compact are plunged into turmoil as the Kif try to get Tully back.

The series continues in Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back and concludes in Chanur's Homecoming. A related book, Chanur's Legacy, concerns Hilfy Chanur, one of Pyanfar's crewmembers in the earlier books.

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