Foreigner Review – Cherryh on Top
CJ Cherryh is a sink or swim writer. Gate of Ivrel was fantastic, seamlessly blending science fiction and fantasy with fascinating characters in an interesting world, despite its brisk length. Heavy Time was one of the worst books I have ever read, plagued by repetitive passages, dull characters, and dialog that can charitably be described as atrocious.
Having dozens of books to her name, I didn’t know where to go with Cherryh next. So shout out to a Mastodon user for suggesting Foreigner, the first in a now 22-book long series, and The Pride of Chanur. I went with Foreigner, because I already had that one after buying a job lot of Cherryh’s books on eBay, and braced myself.
What I found was a book that might be even better than Gate of Ivrel.
Foreigner starts with a brief history of Earth, but not our Earth. Humanity left our Earth looking for resources, and the rich are the first to travel on a new ship designed to take them light-years away to a promising star. Something went wrong, something always goes wrong, and the ship sent them much further away. The people aboard the ship have no idea where they’ve ended up, are out of fuel, and have no way of communication with those left on Earth, much less going back. With no option, they head for the nearest planet and cross their fingers.
Fast-forward a couple of years and the humans have split into two factions. Essentially, one group wants to stay on the ship in orbit, and another group wants to travel to the surface. Those that leave for the new planet are forsaken by the crew on the ship, and eventually the two break contact with each other. The group that went planet-side set up a small town and soon make contact with an alien race called atevi.
That all could easily be the basis for a book on its own, or even a whole series, but here that history is covered in the first 43 pages. Maybe Heavy Time biased me, where it took that long for a character to tie their shoes, but I love how snappy this introduction is. There’s always some action in Cherryh’s books, but she’s much more interested in characters, in how society communicates with itself and with others. Any writer can make an interplanetary war story interesting, but its a story that’s been told countless times. Foreigner is instead about what comes after that war. If both sides survive, how would the two alien species, totally incompatible and with drastically different views and cultures, coexist?
So after that quick setup, we advance two centuries. Humans are confined to a small island called Mospheira (which I read as Mospheria for the entire book, only now realizing my mistake) after losing a war to the atevi. A fragile peace was forged between the humans and a faction of the atevi who sided with the humans in the war. The deal is that humans can live on the island in peace, separate from atevi, in exchange for giving them human technology. The atevi were no cavemen before humans arrived, they at least had steam-powered trains, for example, but human technology advanced their civilization rapidly in the following two hundred years.
Bren Cameron is a “paidhi,” a human who serves as an ambassador to the atevi, living in the capital city of Shejidan. He’s a close adviser to the aiji of Ragi, Tabini. The Western Association (of which Ragi is a part of) is the group of atevi allied to the humans, and Tabini is the leader, though not in the sense that he’s a king that we would think of.
Cherryh displays her greatest strengths right away. Foreigner is dotted with terminology and concepts that are foreign (hey!) to us. So many books feature fictional alien languages and cultures, but often they feel fake, made up creations of a human. Aliens in these books often feel human because they act and think the same way as we do, and their words and culture are 1:1 translations. Cherryh’s aliens feel alien because they are so unlike humans. She doesn’t simply take an English word, smash her keyboard, and call the resulting letter-salad the alien equivalent of that word.
Here, many words have no direct human translation, many concepts cannot truly be comprehended or understand by us humans. Likewise, there are many human ideas that atevi do not understand. The biggest ones are the ideas of “love,” “friendship,” of liking someone, and trusting them. That’s a major theme of this book, as Bren desperately tries to share these feelings to those atevi he considers friends. But they cannot understand. They follow something called “man’chi”, which is a sort of oath of loyalty to a person.
As such, the atevi do not have our notion of “friends." Marriages are purely about procreation, many married couples don’t even live together. Likewise, they don’t have our understanding of “countries,” there are arbitrary lines on a map (more so than in our world, anyway) brought to them by humans. Real loyalties lie in these man’chi. Tabini is the ruler of Ragi on paper, but his power only comes from those he has a man’chi with. A man’chi is unbreakable, something that is rock solid, there is no “betrayal” to the atevi, it’s a completely unknown concept.
Which is why the assassination attempt on Bren is such a big deal. He’s supposed to be under the protection of the human and atevi treaty, and the personal protection of Tabini’s man’chi. Assassination is legal here, assassins have to be licensed and cannot take contracts that aren’t officially sanctioned. Nobody sanctioned the assassination of Cameron, which has thrown the entire Western Association into chaos, puts the fragile peace between humans and atevi in jeopardy, and has atevi questioning the very foundation of their society.
Bren considers Tabini a friend, and thought he explained the concept well enough that aiji considered him a friend in turn. But Tabini doesn’t tell Bren anything about the investigation, nor do his bodyguards, Banichi and Jago, whom Bren also considered friends. It’s not long before Tabini “recommends” Bren go to a remote mansion in the mountains to hide, where the aiji-dowager lives. The dowager, twice passed over for aiji in favor of her son and then grandson, is seen as a radical. Anti-human, a conservative, someone who wants to go back to “the old ways” before all this newfangled technology.
The majority of the novel is Bren isolated in this mansion, dealing with more attempts on his life, and getting increasingly angry that nobody is telling him what’s going on. All the while, the aiji-dowager seems to take pleasure in making his life miserable, demanding he go on mechieti adventures (they’re like horses, but bigger and with sharp tusks) with her and asking lots of difficult questions about humanity and of him personally. We see him start to question everything he knows, or thought he knew, about both atevi culture and his own. He questions what he himself believes and understands.
So much of the way Bren presents himself is manufactured, polished to a mirror sheen by years of training to be paidhi, of following specific procedures and pre-approved responses. When he’s thrown into this situation, everything changes and he’s forced to think for himself, truly think, about what he wants and what is right. He’s a great protagonist, and watching him grow and change is a great journey.
This is a smart book. It does a fantastic job at explaining the differences between human and atevi, and doesn’t talk down to the reader. Atevi look relatively human; they have pointy ears and are about eight to ten feet tall and glowing golden color eyes, but they have two arms and two legs and physiologically are very similar to humans. But they don’t act like humans, and they don’t think like them. They feel like aliens, aliens that you can kind of understand, and you might even be able to fool yourself into thinking you do understand them, but at the end of the day there’s a divide there that will never truly be erased. It can be bridged, but it takes both groups reaching across that divide, and that’s what Foreigner conveys so well. In keeping the perspective entirely on Bren, we’re forced to look at the world through his perspective, and come to understand just how wide that divide between the two species are.
That’s not to say its perfectly written. Some of the problems I had with Heavy Time are present, namely how repetitive it can be at times. Foreigner feels like it was written with a formula in mind, and that formulaic writing becomes brutally obvious about halfway through. Anytime anything happens, you can bet Bren is going to go to his room and think about it for about three or four pages.
Granted, there isn’t a lot you can do with a single protagonist hiding in the mountains, not allowed to go anywhere or talk to more than five or six people. But the sheer amount of times, and the length of time, that Bren spends sitting around thinking about something that just happened gets old, fast. It's like a TV show that starts with a recap of what happened in the previous episode, but if that recap was instead every five or ten minutes.
It’s realistic that somebody would think about what happened to them during a quest moment, think about what they could have done or said differently to get a better outcome. And it is interesting, at times, to see inside the mind of Bren, him trying to work out what he said or did wrong or right. But again, the sheer number of times Bren does this, and for how long each time, drags the pacing to a halt. There will be an engaging and revealing conversation or a thrilling action sequence, only to be immediately followed by Bren going to his room and replaying that same event all over again.
That's my only gripe with Foreigner. Otherwise, I quite enjoyed how the book is structured. In a world favoring character-driven stories these days, Foreigner feels like an outlier, more plot-driven with its characters reacting to it. Cherryh wisely frames the story around the assassination attempt on Bren, teaching us the history of this world and its cultures through the eyes of this human who understands it better than most, but still has a lot to learn. That makes it easy to teach the reader about this world, while still giving Cameron room to grow without making him a complete idiot.
As such, the plot feels relatively low stakes, at first. We spend time with Bren and two or three others trying to figure out what’s going on, thinking this was a major incident, yes, but not something with long-lasting consequences. But as you learn more about atevi culture, about the tense peace between humans and atevi, and more attempts are made on Bren’s life, it spirals into something much bigger. Cherryh manages to make Bren a important person who could change the fate of humans and atevi, without making him feel like this big, bombastic, leader-type or hero chosen by destiny. It’s simply the nature of the job and he’s the one who happens to hold that job. Likewise, the reveal about who was trying to kill him and why I did not see coming. It was a clever twist that I think I could have worked out if I was paying a bit more attention, and makes quite a lot of sense.
There’s a lot to love about Foreigner. From its story, the world and the characters that inhabit it, how smartly both the culture of the atevi is developed and presented, and how the plot progresses to a satisfying ending that makes you want more. It can at times be repetitive with how often Cameron reflects on events that just happened, and by nature of the fact that he spends most of the book isolated in small rooms. That is a small complaint compared to the rich narrative and world that's so well-realized and presented. Cherryh ably demonstrates why she is one of the foundational writers of science fiction, and Foreigner is her at her absolute best.
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