A review of "The Pride of Chanur" — 3 years ago
There were editing problems with this novel, but it was fairly short and a good intro to the series. The editing problems spanned from simple typos to some dialect issues. See, I don’t mind dialect in my fantasy fiction. I can even deal with “poor/simplified language due to the limitations of machine translation” kind of thing, and “shorthand lingo because we’re in space.” In both cases, the author has chosen to express this dialect as a lack of articles (the, a, etc) and a looseness of structural similarity to the human language of English (so we have “I no go” instead of “I won’t go”).
What I cannot deal with are:
- characters who speak in the same shorthand between two members of the same species who are standing next to each other.
- expository paragraphs using the same shorthand/translator-speak
- a matrix of communication that is supposed to represent the thoughts/sentences of an alien species and which is a crucial piece of information and which the protag immediately knows what it’s supposed to mean, even though it’s really unclear whether “help help help help help help help” is a command, a statement of intent, or a request.
Otherwise, it was an entertaining book, and I just kind of skimmed over the parts that got to be too non-English, and the rest I read them as if I were reading a piece written by a non-native-speaking Freshman.
