Foreigner

CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series is one of my favorites, and I feel like it's wildly underappreciated. I'll keep my future reviews shorter I promise, but let me pitch these thirty year old books to you.

Here's what brings me back to these books:

(1) Interesting alien psychology. The alien Atevi do not have a concept of "love" or "trust". They are instinctually and biologically hierarchical, with upward loyalty in their associations. This creates all sorts of translation friction across cultural boundaries. They are also incredibly numerically-minded, with the numerical equivalent of astrology, finding particular numbers innately more felicitous than others. They do truly act in interesting and non-intuitive ways, and it's so fun to read.

(2) Humans aren't particularly privileged. This isn't an uplift story. Although the humans show up with more technology initially, the Atevi have their own inventions, and have very mixed feelings about how they are being pushed by the injection of another culture's ideas. Both Atevi and human politics are complicated and messy, and the series delves into intricate political worldbuilding about various internal factions on both sides.

(3) A blend of action and politics. There's a lot (a lot) of diplomacy and talking about and (thinking about) politics in these books; but also Atevi also believe that assassination is a respectable and legal means of solving disputes. The combination mean these books read like grippy fantasy political thrillers.

He had no idea what its native customs or expectations must be. It could have very little idea about his. But it was possible to be civilized, all the same, and he found it possible to be gracious with such a creature, odd as it was

(4) The tea drinking. I feel like a through-line of this whole series is about trying to be civilized and gracious even and especially when you don't understand the beings on the other side of the table. It's no surprise to me that the Ancillary books took the tea-drinking detail from this series.

On the flipside, I think CJ Cherryh does not do "alien gender" or "alien bodies" very interestingly here. (One could argue that it's not the point, or the similarity is part of what creates the trap of thinking the characters and the reader can understand them through a human lens.) Maybe I'm picky about this particular detail, but even as I love the alien psychology, it is wild to me to write aliens that are so human-like in other ways. What does stand out to me is that Atevi have two binary genders, which are somehow legible to humans from the first moment they meet. If my memory serves me, these books are also incredibly straight. It just feels like a missed opportunity.

One other thing that makes these books hard to recommend: their length. The series is written as arcs of three novels. Currently, there's seven (7?!) full arcs and one additional novel, for a total of 22 books as I write this. On the positive side, the novels are on the shorter side (no giant fantasy tomes here), and each novel (as well as each trilogy) ends with a great sense of closure. The pacing is quite good (and maybe almost too regular). Personally, I think the first two trilogies cover the most ground and so you could stop there as a reader and still come away with most of the scope.

Ok, let me talk about Foreigner, this first book, specifically.

What I love the most is that Foreigner is a first contact story that is not about the moment of first contact. I've read too many books about the very first moments of meeting aliens; this book brushes past that two hundred years into the future to talk about the politics and power dynamics between stranded humans on an alien world who have a tentative understanding with said aliens. (Incredibly tangentially, but this is the same premise I love about Mira Grant's Feed, a zombie book that zooms twenty years past any initial zombie uprising to talk about the politics of trying to get on living in such a world.)

This first book (and most books) follow the point of view of Bren Cameron, the treaty-established human paidhi. His job is to translate and mediate and be the single point of contact between the Atevi and human governments.

I want to warn a little up front, but the pacing of this first book is a bit wild. Let me try to break it down. There's a few chapters about how humanity ended up on this planet and then time jumps forward. There's some initial action as Bren is attacked in the night. Soon after for his own safety(?), he is carted off to the countryside manor of the Atevi leader Tabini's grandmother, Illisidi. At this point, Bren is out of contact with his government, unsure about who to trust; his security keeps disappearing and won't answer any of his questions; he can't get his mail or a power charger; he gets poisoned (intentionally?); there continue to be attacks (but from whom?); he starts getting paranoid of Atevi that he's previously trusted. I would almost describe this part of the book as worldbuilding through Bren's anxiety, where the things he is worried about help to explain Atevi psychology to the reader. Things get to a breaking point and the book ends with some really good sequences and action, where Bren's will and motives are truly tested multiple times.

What's dangerous about this to me is that for a large portion of the book, Bren (and the reader) have no idea what's going on. There are events and politics happening off page that nobody will tell Bren about no matter how he asks. He is, essentially, a prisoner in Illisidi's country manor. I think this exercise in uncertainty and mistrust is something you could largely only do in a first book in a series, as the reader will know (better) in future books which recurring characters are "on side" or not, as much as you could ever say that with Atevi. This whole section works for me because I think it functions quite well as worldbuilding, but also truly gets into Bren's psychological state as the single human inside the larger Atevi world, trying to cope with his human emotional needs not being met by Atevi who do not understand them and cannot meet them.

At any rate, I love this book. It's such a good introduction to the world and the politics and the characters. This series surely isn't for everybody, but I keep coming back to the interesting aliens, cross-cultural misunderstandings, and intricate fantasy politics.

They have no word for trust, and fourteen for betrayal. The 'foreigner' is Bren Cameron, who was used to being quite large on his home planet (Earth) but now among eight-foot-tall [2.5 m] humanoids is beginning to feel a little small. It's not just that: the atevi, who have allowed humans an island enclave in their world and one 'interpreter' or ambassador, called the 'paidhi' - that's Bren - are a feudal people, given to poisoning and double-dealing. They have no nations as overriding loyalties and fealties are the basis of their world. Cameron can't make head or tail of them even though he does his best, for their worldview is not his and maybe he never tries to appreciate that. If humans expect honesty, the atevi expect treachery. When Bren is fed tea by the dowager grandmother of a feudal lord (I almost say 'shogun', I do, but maybe it would be putting too obvious a spin on the story), he ends up in hospital; but was it attempted poisoning, or just something that nobody told the dowager humans couldn't handle?

Naturally Bren gets into more trouble than he should, and like any Cherryh hero undergoes a phase as punchbag, even if it isn't really his fault. As anyone who had read "The Left Hand of Darkness" could have told him, these big inscrutable aliens have their own feuds and Bren's going to be a pawn in some of them. The trouble he gets into is so little his fault - he does so little to bring it about, so much to try to understand even if he can't - that our bewilderment is his. The story is intricate (even if she never points out that the furniture would be huge by his standards) and the decay of Bren Cameron's world a descent into brutality and strangeness, like being caught by bandits in foreign mountains, who might just kill you because as far as they're concerned, you don't matter. Maybe the most alien are those who we think are closest. 

On a distant planet, and at great cost, a small group of human settlers come to call the island of Mospheira home. Lost in space with few options, they made landfall knowing the planet was already home to its own, isolated native species, the atevi; a humanoid, physically-imposing, black-skinned and yellow-eyed alien people with their own civilization, politics, and culture. After six generations, humans and atevi have learned to communicate but still struggle to actually understand each other, while human technology has had an important, pervasive effect on the atevi world. At a pivotal moment in their history, Mospheira’s official human interpreter, Bren Cameron, has to make quick sense of the nuanced, subtle, and dangerous relationships between atevi, whose lattices of loyalties are complex, who do not have a word for “trust,” and whose emotions run deep but remain conceptually elusive to humans. Most importantly, he must determine where he, and the rest of his tiny island of humanity, fits into those relationships as others test him, through violence and intrigue, to determine whether they fit at all.

Foreigner is the first installation in a series of novels about human-alien intrigue, politics, and sociological what-ifs with a specific emphasis as to what extent, exactly, can two very alien species understand each other. Told mostly from Bren Cameron’s point of view, the book explores both this world and these concepts in great detail, and as Bren finds himself in stranger environs and company, he reflects more, along with the readers, on the possible implications of the events around him. I joked to myself an alternate title for this book could be Bren Cameron Explains It All, in parody of the Nickelodeon show about a girl who tells us all about her life.

He also operates at high anxiety, with increasing paranoia, for basically the entire book. While understandable, he can often come across as petulant, but at least he’s self-aware about it.

Despite this minor complaint, the book is a cerebral exploration of a rich world of which readers only get to scratch the surface. It also explores questions of linguistics and epistemology. For example, is this planet Earth because they live there now, or is Earth a specific planet? Is an eight-legged bug an arachnid, or should an entirely new scientific taxonomy be developed to differentiate unique evolutionary branches and divergences of the two planets? Bren likes Bannichi and Jago, the atevi security agents assigned to him, but isn’t sure how to wrap his head around how they might feel about him.

The atevi have their own conceptual struggles. Human motivations do not align very well with any atevi words, and their penchant for displaying a constant deluge of emotions can be disturbing. Combined with how comparatively small, weak and fragile humans are in comparison, it’s easy for atevi to think of them like ignorant, or perhaps miscreant, children. The atevi also have a deep psychological inclination towards numbers, and various schools of numerology compete to define harmony and discord at the highest levels of power and the lowest gatherings of poor farmers. The implications of human computers, which convert everything to numbers with no regard for numerical harmony, is profound and potentially heresy.

Finally, the humans themselves are not exactly a united front. When the original colony ship stumbled its way into the solar system, there were disagreements about the course of action with long reaching consequences.

The book is a well-considered dive into a first-contact, space-colonization scenario, full of texture in a rich setting, which clearly sets the stage for the next couple books in this opening trilogy of the series: Invader, and Inheritor.

1) "The foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream-bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the o' o' o' click of a small creature somewhere in the brush."

2) "'So what more, paidhi? Rockets to the moons? Travel amongst the stars?'
A far more dangerous topic. 'I'd like, yes, to see atevi at least reach that threshold in my lifetime. Nai-ji, so much is possible from there. So much you could do then. But we aren't sure of the changes that would make, and I want to understand what would result. I want to give good advice. That's my job, nai-ji.' He had never himself seen it so clearly, until now. 'We're at the edge of space. And so much changes once you can look down on the world.'
'What changes?'
One more dangerous question, this one cultural and philosophical. He looked outward, at the lake, the whole world seeming to lie below the path they rode.
'Height changes your perspective, nai-ji. We see three provinces from here. But my eye can't see the treaty-boundaries.'
'Mine can. That mountain ridge. The river. They're quite evident.'
'But were this mountain as high as the great moon, nai-ji, and if you were born on this very high mountain, would you see the lines? Or, if you saw them, would they mean to you what they mean to people born on the plain, these distant, invisible lines?'"

3) "He'd believed the game in the cellar, when they'd put the gun to his head---they'd made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he'd have thought he'd think of Barb, he'd have thought he'd think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn't. They'd made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn't discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he'd been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine---just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family's clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they'd pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity---"

According to my records, I read this in 1996, a week after reading Cyteen. Just re-read it for the first time since, and wow, what an excellent book. I was particularly struck by the two introductory chapters, each essentially framing short stories for the novel, and how rich a backstory and society Cherryh paints with them, accomplishing more than many average SF books do. And then there's the main story, which I think I appreciated and followed much more this time around.

Back in 1996, I didn't like the aliens, especially as shown on the cover,
and it was all confusing. (It still is, but in a good way.) I had expected to sort of slog through this reread, on my way to the 10 (?!) sequels that have been written since. Instead, wow, I have nearly as much Cherryh as I've read before ahead of me.

(This wasn't as much a shock as rereading 40,000 and having it go from 2 to 4 stars, but I clearly missed a lot of Cherryh's depth the first time around.)