Reception
Translator and poet Burton Raffel wrote in an essay "C.J. Cherryh's Fiction" that he was impressed that Hunter of Worlds "explores not only multiple-levels of species relationships, but species differences of an extraordinary nature". The story is told from an alien viewpoint and vocabulary, and The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction notes the emphasis in the book on language. The iduve language makes "no clear distinction between the concepts of noun and verb, between solid and action". The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages describes three of the languages present in Hunter of Worlds, namely the kalliran, amaut and iduve languages, but felt that the "dense use of alien terminology" does tend to make the prose difficult to follow at times, despite the "Glossary of Foreign Terms" and the back of the book.
Some of the alien vocabulary represents concepts that are not easily represented as single words in English:
- vaikka – revenge, but not in the usual English sense;
- takkhenes – a kind of shared consciousness;
- arastiethe – the area you are responsible for or in control of.
Read more about this topic: Hunter Of Worlds
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)