Foreigner Review – Cherryh on Top
edited May 18, 2026
CJ Cherryh is a sink or swim writer. Gate of Ivrel is fantastic, seamlessly blending science fiction and fantasy with fascinating characters in an interesting world, despite its brisk length. Heavy Time is 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 a copy after buying a job lot of Cherryh’s books on eBay, and waded into the unknown depths of a writer capable of anything.
I found a book that is even better than Gate of Ivrel.
Foreigner starts with a brief history of Earth, or a version of 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 communicating with those left on Earth, much less going back. With no other 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. One group wants to stay on their ship in orbit, and the other 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 now planet-bound group set up a small town and soon make contact with an alien race called atevi. Soon a war breaks out between the human and atevi, a war always breaks out. Meanwhile, those that stayed in the ship somehow found an alternative fuel source and continued traveling the universe.
That all could easily be the basis for its own book, or even a whole series. Here that history is covered in the first 43 pages. Coming from Heavy Time where it took that long for a character to tie their shoes, this is a breath of fresh air. There’s always some action in Cherryh’s books, though 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, its a story that’s been told countless times. Foreigner instead asks comes after that war. If both sides survive, how would these totally incompatible species, with drastically different views and cultures, coexist?
After that quick setup, we advance two centuries. The war is long over, and humans have lost. They’re confined to a small island called Mospheira (which I read as Mospheria for the entire book, only now realizing my mistake) after losing the war. 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. Human technology advanced their civilization rapidly in the following two hundred years, and that leads to consequences.
Bren Cameron is on protagonist duties, a human serving as an ambassador to the atevi as “paidhi.” He is the only human allowed to live outside Mospheira, residing in the capital city of the Western Association called Shejidan. He’s a close adviser to the aiji of Ragi, Tabini, the leader of the Western Association. He’s also the only one on the planet who fluently speaks both English and atevi, and more crucially, the only person who understands both human and atevi cultures.
Cherryh flexes her writing muscles right away. Foreigner is dotted with terminology and concepts that are so foreign (hey!) to us. Many sci-fi books feature fictional alien languages and cultures, but often they feel fake, made up creations of a human. These fabricated aliens act and think the same way we do, their words and culture 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. Instead, they follow something called “man’chi”, which is a sort of oath of loyalty to a person. Marriages between atevi are about procreation, many married couples don’t even live together. Bren views Tabini, and his bodyguards Jago and Banichi, as friends, and he tries repeatedly to express this feeling to them, but they do not understand. There’s a running joke where Banichi, thanks to this lack of understanding a mistranslation, says Bren views him as a “delicious salad.”
Likewise, the atevi 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, though 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 an 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.
Much of the novel sees Bren isolated in a mansion after the assassination attempt, 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 (Tabini’s grandmother) seeminly takes pleasure in making his life miserable, demanding he go on mechieti adventures (they’re like big horses 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. Atevi 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. A divide exists that can never truly be erased, only bridged, and that takes both sides reaching across for one another. That is 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 how wide that divide between the two species are.
At the same time, once you do start to understand the atevi, their perspective makes so much sense. They are afraid of humans, even know, two hundred years after their arrival and after beating them in a war. They brought world-changing technology that, funny enough, changed their world. We humans brought all our good and our ills, and the atevi are left to figure out how to square that circle with their own beliefs and culture.
That’s not to say its perfectly written. Some of the problems I had with Heavy Time are present, namely how repetitive the writing can be. Foreigner feels like it was written with a formula in mind, and that formulaic writing becomes more apparent about halfway through.
There are countless instances of engaging and revealing conversations, or a thrilling action sequence, followed immediately by Bren going to his room and replaying that same event over in his head over and over for several pages. It’s realistic that somebody would think about what happened to them during a quiet moment, think about what they could have done or said differently to get a better outcome. And it is interesting, at times, to see how Bren’s mind works. He’s socially awkward, not great for an ambassador, doing the best he can. He can’t help running through everything he said and work out whether it was right or wrong. But the sheer number of times Bren does this, and for how long each time, drags the pacing to a halt.
Otherwise, I enjoyed how the book’s structure. In a world favoring character-driven stories, Foreigner feels like an outlier, more plot-driven with its characters reacting to that plot. Cherryh wisely frames the story around the assassination attempt on Bren, using this event to teach us the history of this world and its cultures through the eyes of a human who understands it better than most, but still has a lot to learn. That makes it easy to inform the reader about this world while still giving Cameron room to grow.
As such, the plot feels relatively low stakes, at first. Other than Bren, we don’t spend a great amount of time with any one character. Like Bren, you don’t realize how big a deal this all is, and how it’s spiraled into a major crisis, until much later. 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.
Perhaps the other major flaw is Cherryh’s use of language, the very thing the book is about. All humans only speak English, and all atevi only speak atevi. You could hand-wave the human’s English-exclusivity by arguing that the ship that carried them was made of wealthy white people from America. No one would put that past the current administration to only allow English-speaking Americans on a humanity-saving ship. But an entire planet of millions of people, with multiple nations divided into multiple clans, all speaking one language? That’s much harder to reckon with. I’m interested to see how (or if) future books address this.
This feels like a nitpick compared to how much Foreigner does so well. 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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