Invader by CJ Cherryh

This book showcases Bren coming to grips with four aspects of his world: the invasion of the Phoenix, his own power, the complexity of three societies, and his own motives. But really, the latter three aspects fall out of the first one—the arrival of an excession spaceship just before the book starts. That’s the first point I want to make: Cherryh uses that excession ship to spark the rest of the story by exploring it deeply. Nothing is wasted here, Cherryh uses most of the whale. The flipside, of course, being that each page isn’t jam-packed with action. (If you want that, go read the John Carter books. I didn’t hate them.)

Average people didn’t analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.

In the Pheonix’s arrival, Bren faces an immense amount of work. His job is to translate humans to atevi, and vise versa. Yet nobody has seen the ship or heard from its crew for around 200 years. That time includes a war between the atevi and the humans who stayed behind, a breakdown of the station, the landing of the rest of the station bound humans—there are significant cultural differences between Mospheira and Phoenix. (Example: America 200 years after independence from the UK) And after a week kidnapped in the woods, Bren finds himself better able to understand his atevi kidnappers instead of his fellow humans. The plot of the book traces Bren, Tabini, Deana, Ilisidi, and the human reactions to the ship’s return, culminating in a landing of two illiterate translators from the ship, formalizing the new three-way power structure.

The knowledge that if the future of humankind on Mospheira and in this end of the universe wasn’t in his power to direct—it was damned sure within his power to screw up.

One of the foremost problems is Deana. Because of his kidnapping, the human government flipped and sent his backup—a woman he has had a lifelong rivalry with. They come from different political camps—she is human-first, while he tries to foster cooperation and communication and equality between the atevi and humans. Their political backers differ. Their strengths, weaknesses, and experiences differ. She does things Bren wouldn’t, and he certainly does things she wouldn’t. Tabini, the head of the atevi, sides with Bren, putting Deana’s life in danger. After she attacks Bren, and after some significant empathy thought experiments, he tries to exercise some of his power to save her life and find a place for her before the human government decides what to do with their situation. This backfires on him when Deana gets kidnapped/runs away to Tabini’s enemies, and that devastates Bren. He went out on a limb for her, risking his political power to take her under his wing, and she throws it all to the wind to attempt to throw him under the bus. To Bren, she calls into question the future of peace and the entire world for her political beliefs that he doesn’t find justification for in his experience. Bren starts to learn about power here, personally, not from theory. As he uses his power sometimes it comes off great, twice people try to assassinate him, and he usually gets betrayed left and right.

“How do you define fool?”
“I don’t attempt it. I wait for demonstrations. They inevitably surpass my imagination.”

In learning about power, Bren finds the central struggle of his political position: the competing authorities of atevi and human are personally competing priorities to Bren. He must protect himself from Deana’s backers, which means he cannot communicate fully with any humans. Yet his conscience guides him to acts that some humans consider treason, potentially endangering his family. He justifies this with the idea that his actions serve a greater good—a better future for more people. He attempts dispassionate observation, but he also feels anxiety and internal conflict. I really resonated with this theme throughout the book, and I think it is the main theme here. He second guesses himself, and this leads to a deep character study by Cherryh: what could living a good life cost?

Death wasn’t an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away—that, he might do.

This theme of fighting against self-interest is poignant throughout the novel. Deana accuses Bren of self-interest and selling the humans out, but she’s coming from a place of wanting human dominance over the atevi. Her political backers align with their Human Heritage Society, which seems as racist as it sounds. But the atevi do not buck the trend of distrust: various atevi associations are as anti-human—more so as assassination remains a very real possibility in their culture. Through all this, the addition of the third wheel of Phoenix up there in space, creates a very complex background to Bren’s actions. And that’s what this book is: complex political, cultural, and personal conspiracies played out over three growingly complex societies.

Reality always put a texture on things, a chaotic topography of imperfections, that imagination had foreseen as smooth and featureless.

Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative voice allows this complexity to dawn on the reader slowly. As Bren comes to grips with the importance of FTL and number-counters, so does the reader. As he starts to guess at atevi and human connections and reasons, so does the reader. Instead of dumping everything on the reader at the outset, Cherryh slowly doles out information. Questions unravel into complexities over chapters, giving the reader time to ingest new context and reflect on its importance. Again, I’m a huge fan of Cherryh’s voice. But usually she uses more than one main character to let the reader in on some of the context. Here she focuses solely on Bren. I want another character, sure, but by focusing solely on Bren, she brilliantly paces the flow of information to the reader, building the context throughout the book, increasing the complexity throughout the book, helping the reader understand more as the book goes on.

For a human, he thought, he was doing remarkably well at figuring out the entanglements of man’chi after the fact; he’d yet to get ahead of atevi maneuvering—and he’d no assurance even now he was looking in the right direction.

One thing Cherryh consistently does is war. Though it may not always be total war, she usually builds the characters and their positions early in the book, before somebody makes a move and it all gets decided on a battlefield. This tendency echoes human history. It shows yet again that Cherryh consistently touches on what makes us human throughout her works—we try and try to avoid conflict, but sometimes conflict is all that will decide the issue. In our lives, that often means conflict other than physical. Yet when the stakes are as high as Cherryh’s narrative makes them, physical violence seems unavoidable. This means that her books usually end with a bang, as this one does.

Ludicrous, on one level. Grimly humorous. And not. Atevi historically didn’t engage in vast conflicts, when little ones would do. But important people and ordinary ones could end up quite effectively dead.

I realize in this second book that so far the series has been court drama, an understated comedy of manners. Also a first-contact tale where the aliens are humans and the residents are atevi. It’s starting to seem like Cherryh wants to explore first contact past the first few days of contact, and really delve into cultural differences, cultural relativity, and struggles inherent in trying to work together when so many groups are self-serving. I’m along for the ride so far, if she does. Another good book here.

He asked himself how he’d gotten into this position, except one good intention at a time.