There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
Done well, the Chanur series indeed could be excellent on film. Right now, I’m really looking forward to Game of Thrones coming up Sunday night on HBO. I truly love the books, so I’m hoping they do it right!
And if “they” ever do film Chanur, I’m still pulling for Matthew McConaghy (sp?) for Tully!
hehe, except for Woody Harrelson, I can’t think of anyone I’d dislike playing Tully more than Matthew McConaghy. 🙂 Funny how peoples taste in actors run! But I’d love to see The Pride of Chanur as a movie. You’d just have to be so careful with the appearance of the Hani so the story remains the focus and it doesn’t just turn out some farcical joke of kitties in space. I could see Peter Jackson doing it.
They could do hani using human actors, then FX’ing African lion’s faces and manes on them as in the Michael Whelan covers. LOTR used that sort of process for Gollum. That’s what we’re expecting, right? The thing is natural looking hair is just slitghtly ahead of the “state of the art”, and ridiculously processor intensive for the best they can do now, but it’s getting there.
Filming?
as others have said, Heavy Time, maybe RimRunners. Downbelow for a series.
How’s this for a minority report though: Cuckoo’s Egg?
Re : Running into aliens on the far side of earth… ” they got their fingers burned…”
…. always thought that referred to “Hestia”….. the “Adam Jones” takes 7 years to get there, so I’d imagined it as almost the last of the non FTL ships… poor Sam, he got several flavours of raw deal on that gig…. mind you, does any of CJ’s male protagonists get off any lighter?
… sorry to spam… or maybe “Cuckoo’s Egg” ( or both – yep, that’d sting…)
mind you, does any of CJ’s male protagonists get off any lighter?
Nuin? Cajeiri? Hallan? It helps to be an alien, I suspect. Although Damon had a lousy time overall but lucked (if that’s the right word) into keeping a beloved wife who would almost certainly have left him if not for her ship being blown up in the war. And Bren hasn’t done too badly for himself, despite occasional bouts of suffering.
Bren does take a beating. It’s interesting to go back and look at how “concentrated” (‘intense’ might be a better term) his bouts of suffering are. With the exception of the space travel sequences, each book seems to cover a matter of days at most. No wonder he he enjoys pondering additions to the garden!
I always thought “they got their fingers burned” referred to Compact Space.
Goldtooth got off pretty light.
His course of action was thoroughly discredited when Pyanfar and Jik “won”. Theoretically he would have lost all influence. But then Pyanfar asks right at the end “what’s going to happen to him” as if she has some ulterior motive.
I always hoped there’d be another great book in the ‘Nighthorse’ series. And, sorry if this was asked and answered elsewhere, but is there a sequel to Regenesis? And I’m still not at all reconciled to not having a summary novel to ‘Fortress’ as I have many unasked questions like: Is Mauryl alive in any recoverable form? What is Emuin’s ultimate fate? And don’t Cefwyn’s boys and Tristen need to travel North and/or settle with the not-quite-dead Aswiths once and for all? Are there more Sihhe somewhere?
(How’s that for a whiny and impudent list of demands?)
I always thought that ‘fingers burnt’ referred to Compact space as well. In the third book the description of Human civilisation from what I remember seemed to very closely match Earth from the Alliance universe. It seemed to fit so well – a beleaguered (or at least excluded) Earth reaches out thinking it’s found new markets to exploit only to be rebuffed.
Oh and yes, another Nighthorse novel would be very welcome 🙂
Andruec, I felt the very same way – when I read that, I immediately expected that the Phoenix was an Earth Co ship that got lost.
Fringe is good but the most reason season finale was broadcast in the UK last week and it dissapointed me. It felt rushed and confused – almost as if they aren’t expecting a renewal. Then again this is the team that came up with Lost and there was a series finale that failed big time (at least for me).
I also like Castle but I’ve almost gone off Bones it’s always been a bit silly (like the way they mix up metric and imperial measurements in the same breath). For that kind of genre I prefer the BBC’s Silent Witness or Waking the Dead (the latter now sadly a cold case itself).
British S/F on TV hasn’t really been a huge success for me. As a child I loved the BBC’s Blakes Seven and ITV’s Space 1999but watching them now is quite painful. Most of the acting is poor and sets are very ropey. The less about about S1999 the better. Ironically the acting and sets are better but the entire premise violates good scientific principals right from the off and doesn’t get any better 🙁
Looking for Tripoint:
http://www.space.com/11699-rogue-alien-planets-milky-common.html
Tracking those fellows is going to be real important to future navigation.
Just as you always said it would be cj…
An odd question just occurred to me about shipboard bathrooms, generally, human and Compact species.
We never see bathtubs, that I can recall, aboard ship.
No swimming pools. No fountains. No fish ponds. (Although perhaps for hydroponics, seafood and algae, and reclamation, those might be sealed environments.)
Presumably, that’s to avoid vector changes or zero-g and sudden risk of drowning, breathing water, flood damage. Sensible. Also scary.
Yet everyone takes showers or perhaps sponge baths, hani particularly. There are sinks and some form of toilets. There are cooking pots. There are mugs of gfi and tea and coffee and such. There are (surely sealed) washing machines and dishwashers. But someone has to rinse dishes first, surely.
Practically, they have to deal with it, large quantities of water going awry and vacuumed up in a hurry.
I suppose this mainly applies to showers, or to tubs, or kitchen galleys, in which there are large amounts of water that could rapidly go where they could endanger people and equipment. How would they manage providing those yet keeping safe?
Related is, since a ship might need to change vector suddenly, or might lose apparent g, surely the bathrooms (and all compartments and corridors) have handholds…for safety but possibly recessed, or they’re hazards for blunt trauma.
It occurs to me that a bathtub would have about the same amount of water used as a shower running constantly while bathing. So perhaps a tub is possible, other than space-saving and water-saving?
What gives?
It occurs to me, you don’t want to be the crewwoman or crewman(!) assigned to clean the drains aboard a hani ship. Hair clogs couldn’t possibly be nice, but must be frequent! Heheheh. Do not want to get janitor duty, no ma’am. Heh.
Assuming the water in your shower can “find” the drain (and be pulled down it somehow), I think all you’d have to worry about are the water droplets that are in flight: not too much water at any time. That or pot of drink or a sink full of washwater will make a mess, but not a flood.
A large volume of water could be a problem. A large, half-full container could be, even if sealed. It could slosh around, behaving in ways that solids just don’t.
In Downbelow Station (which I reread a few days ago) they pipe liquid from tank to tank within the station to try to restore balance.
Regarding handholds, I do believe one or more of the books mention them. I don’t remember which. Presumably one of the ones that takes place on board a decent sized ship; which is a lot of them. Bathrooms are probably not the most troublesome places, since they’re small. (And my guess is, a lot smaller on a ship.) Nowhere to fall. Though I might want the fixtures to be made out of a softer material than porcelain.
The design of a bathtub would have to be different than here on Earth. An open ended container, relying on gravity in a particular direction to keep the water in… you get the picture. It’d be more like an enclosed shower stall, with the door sealed and the drain plugged. Seems a bit claustrophobic.
That would be “Finity’s End”, which I just reread. 😉
One doesn’t shower in zero-G, doesn’t need to in the Compact/Union-Aliance universe because the habitat rings rotate for artificial gravity. But if that were necessary an air-flow could move droplets downward.
Showers wouldn’t be that huge of a challenge, as you could make the floor a grid or perforated somehow so there could be a continuous flow of air to keep the water moving “down” even in minimal or non-existent gravity. A ‘dry’ cycle of warm air for a few minutes would be all you need to keep water from floating out as one exited. And I’m sure there are other ways to get dishes or clothing clean than our current technology of slopping water around until the dirt is gone. Totally different technology could be developed using heat or sound waves. As for the large volumes of liquid in tanks, slosh baffles are the way its handled currently even here on earth, basically breaking the tank up into a lot of smaller tanks.
A boat galley can give you a good starting point on ideas for a starship galley. Cabinets and even refrigerator doors latch shut, pots are extra deep to account for slop, the stove has bars that can be adjusted to lock pots in place so dinner doesn’t decorate the bulkhead, and the counters and tables have a lip to keep stuff from sliding off. Even the coffee pot has its own little cradle to sit in to keep it from sliding off the heat. Obviously without gravity, you’d need some changes, such as pouches or containers with some sort of a plunger-lid to keep the liquid where you want it.
Hello! Greetings and all that.
I just wanted to thank you for the wonderful Chanur series.
Not only do I love the depth of the characters, I also love the richness of the worlds and languages created. I’ve lived in Japan for close to two decades and one of the reasons that I feel I’ve been a successful stranger in a strange land is that I approach every cross-cultural mystery with the same sense of wonder I felt as I tried along with Pyanfar and crew to interpret the actions of those crazy methane-breathers. The best thing I learned was, that you just can’t understand everything – as open-minded or intelligent as you may think you are. Even among oxygen-breathers. Some things will always be a mystery and that’s okay. I think people who try to understand other cultures from only a single cultural point of view will just end up being frustrated. But even so, if they are trying and they find even the smallest frame of reference, they can build from there like Tully and the crew did with the translator. Making a lot of really embarrassing mistakes helps as well.
Okay, this thank you ended up being a bit long so… thanks so very much.
PS, was the Wiki that was mentioned in some comments ever created?
I’ve begun a re-read of the series, and I have a few questions about Heavy Time and Hellburner. (BTW, the Brooklyn Public Library has the December 2000 1st printing of these combined as Devil to the Belt, and there are a lot of distracting typos. ☹) I’ve also posted these to scifi.stackexchange.com:
• What is the “beam”? This seems to be some sort of propulsion controlled by Belt Management, but I’m having a hard time picturing what was intended.
• What is the fate of the Hellburner crew? Was it ever made known which of the Maziani ships Decker et al. ended up attached to?
• Are the lyrics to Sam Jones available somewhere? Asking Google for [sam jones cherryh lyrics] turns up my own effort at transcribing this YouTube video (which transcription I will immediately take down if you so request), but there are words I’m not sure of and the punctuation is completely my own guess.
The beam, I believe is a high powered laser that pushes against the sail of the ships and allows R1 or R2 to push a ship out outback to the stations. From what I remember, there are relays all throughout the belt to gt the miners out to their prospecting area and back to the station.
As for their fate, we don’t see any of them in the future, except for Almarshad who ends up aboard Norway with, presumably his crew. Something tells me that they died in the war, or at the world that the Mazianni found.
In personal correspondence CJ told me that Dekker’s crew is also aboard Norway. ISTR she said that Norway’s riders are the only ones left with the original crews.
oh, that is heart-warming, Jcrow9. 😀
Minor correction to what I wrote: IIRC (more of an issue than it used to be! :-/ ) CJ said that Norway’s riders are the only ones left with all-original crews.
That’s good to know, and what I was hoping was the case.
OK, here’s a really minor question that just came to mind after re-reading “Rimrunners” for the umpteenth time: What does “mof” stand for?
My guess (as an Army veteran) was “motherf##king officer”
That was my first thought as well, and for the same reason. It doesn’t fit well though – that would be “mofo”.
Other ideas? A definitive answer?
Mike
Taking the first two letters of each word for pronounceability, that would make mo-of, which would naturally contract to mof. That was my guess.
On the other hand, the word mof is used in Dutch as a pejorative for a German (especially around football matches and such), and is linked to the caricature of the strict by-the-rules ‘Prussian’-style military people/officers. This helps to distinguish between the nasty occupation military in my grandparents’ war/occupation stories who are always referred to as ‘moffen’, and the pleasant neighbouring country’s people where we go on holiday, who are ‘Duitsers’. This made the word quite appropriate even if it was an invention.
Maybe a faint spark from CJ’s distant Dutch heritage, if she’d ever encountered the word in her genealogical resources, helped create it? Mof is a very old word, used since the 16th century as a not-complimentary term for a German immigrant; it’s acquired its link with the strict rule-bound German style of military from the WW2 war stories, though by now it’s mostly back to the old meaning, being used without the military connotation in aggressively partisan utterings around football matches and parking trouble at crowded summer beaches.
More likely it’s just a coincidence.
going to read rimrunners after listening to the audio of downbelow station … 😀
On MOF, it grew out of military slang, as for instance NG Ramey, whose nickname was the NDG printed on waste containers, for Nonrecyclable Disposable Goods. Which spacers say just means, “No Damn Good.” Unfortunately I had the origin of the acronym in mind, and then forgot it. The O stood for Officer, I remember that, and M-F is, yes, exactly what you think it is.
What we should do is hold a no-prize contest for who can come up with the best acronym, on the analogy of NDG’s origin, since the author has had a couple of decades intervene and cannot effin’ remember. 😆