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:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)