Foreigner by CJ Cherryh

Foreigner lagged a little in the middle of the book for me. Cherry lays out this complex society, complex worldbuilding, complex understanding of atevi cultural norms, in stages that track with Bren becoming a different person than at the start—braver, more understanding of those around him, and more realistic about risks and rewards. More atevi, less human. Naturally, Bren needs to be left alone some, in order to allow these changes to proceed realistically, to be processed in his mind. Rather than skipping this step, Cherryh writes it out. All of it. Using Bren’s changes to further illuminate aspects of the world, to recontextualize earlier situations, to drive home human and atevi relations and differences. She does this through repetition, rephrasing, and showing. The Bren of the start would not have been saddened by the death of one of his torturers. The Bren of the end is saddened by it. And this difference is key to the story's arc.

Trust was a word you couldn't translate. But the atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.

This structure—action followed by internal change—stops and starts the pace of the novel. First, a ship launches into FTL and doesn’t come out where they aimed, cue panic and sacrifice—and a lack of reflection here disorients the reader. Then, 100 years later, the ship’s descendants essentially crash-land on a planet that is already occupied by atevi, and one human gets kidnapped—and a lack of reflection here disorients the reader. But rather than this being a compilation of short stories, the next start is the last start, when, 200 years later, a man named Bren shoots at somebody invading his bedroom, followed by quite a few pages of reflection on that and fallout from it. Bren goes to Malurgi, followed by same pages of reflection. Bren drinks poisoned tea, followed by same. And then happenings start to stack again, start to occur simultaneously and speed the pace back up: the power goes out and Bren finally gets Jago to open up, followed by some reflection. Then Ilsidi’s wild ride, tourists coming to the castle, and another assassination attempt all happen in the same scene. And that’s when Bren really loses control. Too much is happening too fast for him to track with, leaving the reader to fill in some blanks—in a great way. And then we’re already at the breakneck paced end of the book, with the flight, the fights, and the arrival of the excession ship, which recontextualizes the whole novel up to that point, but still leaves mystery to the atevi reactions.

The sounds that reached his ears were rich enough, the wind and the creak of leather and jingle of harness and bridle rings, the scuff of gravel, the sighing of the grass along the hill—but he’d never been anywhere, even Taiben, where he couldn’t see power lines, or hear, however faintly, the sound of aircraft, or a passing train, or just the generalized hum of machinery working—and he’d never known it existed, until he heard its absence.

The middle is bookended by consistent action, is more introspective to Bren beginning to finally understand the alien atevi culture than anything else. This contrast made it feel like it lagged a little for me. I know Cherryh is using this space to really put flesh on her world—and it worked brilliantly. Somewhere about the torture scene I realized in my head, I believed and understood, just how alien atevi culture is to humans. A piece, a clue clicked into place, and I understood Bren's struggle as a result. And that is an important realization for the readers. Cherryh’s tactic did what it should have. But, and this is merely a niggling point as I did love this novel, the middle lagged a little in interest. Don’t read this book if you’re looking for pulp fiction, it’s a lot of worldbuilding.

He’d fired a gun, he’d learned he would shoot to kill, for fear, for—he was discovering—for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him—an anger he hadn’t known he had, didn’t know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.

Cherryh focuses here on one character. With her distinctive voice, it takes time to extrapolate a whole world from that one character. Yet she builds Bren into such a strong character that I understand his optimism, care, goodness, before they're explicitly stated. She shows and tells, perhaps telling just a bit too much, and Bren’s path through the world allows her to engage other interesting characters. Ilisidi, Cenedi, Jogi, Banichi. I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a rare book that grips me and fills my mind like this one did. But the point of these notes is to find why it did grip me.

Maybe it was paralysis of will. Maybe it was instinct saying Be still—don’t defy the only friend humanity has on this planet.

She tells the alien atevi and the alien human so well. This is a characteristic strength of Cherryh’s: alien cultures. Her work here starts with both seeming familiar and safe, but as questions and unexpected twists and turns begin stacking up in Bren’s mind, the alien nature of human to atevi grows clearer. Bren embodies Polybius’ task—Bren is the Mospheira human sent to the atevi to work closely with their ruler, explaining humans to atevi, and atevi to humans. So this discussion of the differences between the two cultures constitutes his profession, and a main focus of the novel.

As if the mind could leap, that quickly, back to ski catalogs. His damned well couldn’t. It didn’t like informational voids; it didn’t like silent guards lurking in his reception room, or the chance there was a reason to need them, possibly slipping up the stairs outside.

Yet Cherryh doesn’t focus on the differences so much on Bren trying to understand them, and overcome them. Some of my favorite moments were Bren steeling himself for taking up the gauntlet the old woman had thrown down—drinking her tea after she had already poisoned him with tea, being frank where she challenges him to, riding the hunting beasts over the mountains, and finally bravely saving her life without any need, an act that earns her and her bodyguards’ respect. He realizes this tough old woman, who has a fondness for surrounding herself with young men, tests everybody around her, is sharper and more perceptive than everyone around her, and has standards that she rigidly holds. Yet instead of treating all of this like some alien inexplicable trait, Cherryh treats Ilisidi as a character. A normal character. She’s not human, and she doesn’t come off human, but she is just another character with all of her preferences and dislikes.

He made an effort to fold up the computer. Jago shut the case for him, and disconnected the cord. After that—the necessity of getting up. He made it that far. Ended up with Banichi’s arm around him, Banichi standing on one leg. The dowager-aiji said something rude about young men falling at her feet, and go sit down, she was in command of the plane.

And Cherryh builds the atevi culture out of these character studies. Bren at the start only understands Tabini and two other atevi. Then he realizes that he doesn’t understand Tabini and starts to pay attention to those around him. By the end of the book, both he and I understand atevi culture only as far as the people Bren knows: Cenedi’s professionalism, Ilisidi’s desires, Tabini’s desperation, Banichi’s lack of understanding, Jago’s discomfort with human ideas, Djinana’s devotion to cultural history. Through these characters, a range and diversity of atevi culture is shown and told. Instead of dumping some wikipedia-esque explanation on the reader, Cherryh takes Bren into the culture, with the reader riding inside his head, and lets the culture explain itself. This is some of her strongest storytelling in this way. And the theme should be readily apparent by now: overcoming differences in priority respectfully, relying on empathy. In other words, who is the real alien here? By the end I understand less about human culture on Mospheira, because Bren and the whole book have been in atevi lands.

Not damned fair. The only thing in his life he enjoyed with complete abandon. And it was a damned death wish.

The repetition Cherryh typically engages in often strengthens the reader’s understanding. But here it goes a little overboard. It’s a little heavy handed through Bren’s struggles, how his brain keeps trodding over the same ground again and again and again. I understand that in reality, as my brain does the same when faced with problems like this—unintended offences, a lack of understanding other people, cultural differences, mistakes at work. But it’s not the most enjoyable to read through the whole book.

He’d become, he decided, thoroughly paranoid. Afraid. And he didn’t think a crew from the national news network was going to produce explosive devices. It was stupid.

That all said, this book read very well. These two small critiques of Cherryh’s work still allow this book to be better than most science fiction I have read. It’s not her best work, but it’s also not the forgettable, necessary intro that many reviewers have dismissed it as. Yes, I want more complexity and less repetition in Bren’s development. Yes, the middle grows a little stale because of that over repetition. But find me another writer capable of injecting such a deep understanding of alienness, and I’d be really surprised. Well worth reading, and I love it.

He wished he’d done better than he’d done. Didn’t know how he could have. He was alive and they hadn’t found him. Better than some of the professionals had scored. Better luck than poor Giri, who’d been a decent man.

[Edit 10-2-19: When first introduced to Bren, Cherryh tells the reader that he works as a diplomat and translator. Yet Cherryh’s plot and characters show him like a spy: his kidnapping, torture, ignorance, and actions do not match up with what Cherryh tells about Bren. By the end of the book, I realized that Bren learning about his ignorance was a point of the book. He slowly becomes more competent through the next two books, but clearly shows a rising understanding, and the personal conflicts of a changing role in life, changing personality. By the time of the fourth book, his competence is clearly shown and told. And Bren finally starts to really shine.]

[Edit 10-11-19: One thing just struck me about why this book doesn't work as well as later books in the series: Cherryh tells us again and again that Ilisidi is difficult to deal with, but she seems most pleasant on the surface. The poisoning comes off accidental, and she seems to be forced into the interrogation. Instead of showing us just how difficult she can be, Cherryh asks us to trust her, and that's a tall task to trust her through 90% of the novel when the evidence on the page implies the opposite.]

Tripoint by CJ Cherryh

1. My question here is this: does this book stand on its own? I don’t know. But this question will guide these notes.

2. What a wonderful novel. This book carries on the quality of Hellburner: a well paced story that doesn’t forget to stop and take a walk in the woods; engaging, damaged characters overcoming themselves as much as others; there is no such thing as a free lunch -esque interpersonal relationships and politics. But this novel definitely is its own thing: Cherryh engages that broad political scope that affects her macro focus on the characters in a more direct, more explanatory way. In Hellburner, she focuses clearly on trying to get the ship to work. In this twenty years revenge tale, the context is everything that has occurred over the last twenty or so years at Mariner, Viking, Pell, Tripoint, the Rim Stations, Sol, and on the two ships that are the focus of the novel: Sprite and Corinthian. The characters respond to the big political shifts, but being free merchanters, they know more and discuss more of the broader politics. This wide angle perspective and narrow character focus creates an intimidatingly intriguing novel and it reminds me of The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin in that way. But I’m not sure that somebody who hasn’t already gathered what Tripoint is from Cherryh’s other works, should read it. The intricate relationships and political maneuverings within the Alliance play a most important role here, but they are alluded to in other novels that I have read, allowing me a familiarity that may have helped me understand more than the novel gave. I’m not sure, but it’s a possibility that reading at least Downbelow Station first really helped make this novel superb for me.

3. The writing here is superb, some of the best I’ve read from Cherryh. She manages to communicate things the reader must imagine, but in a way that makes them still strange. For instance, a portion of Tom’s story involves the spacer-sin of staying awake during jump.

They say you don’t come back sane, you leave a part of yourself out there in the chaos of the parallel universe. Well, among the Mazianni, it’s a mark of a good navigator to grow used to that place, to learn to read the sights and sounds of it, to literally feel themselves passing by masses, to feel starships around them.

This military necessity creates a sort of mysticism in certain circles, and Tom runs into Capella, described perfectly as a “lend-lease navigator” from the Mazianni fleet—which has fractured into at least three parts: The Fleet, Mazianni, and Signy. Capella is from The Fleet and initiates Tom into this activity of staying awake when all else are tranked out—initially from pure lust and later for emergency purposes. Her guidance allows him to remain sane. But more profoundly, because Cherryh’s voice doesn’t allow a ton of description until a character sees something new or in a new way, it allows wonderful and beautiful descriptions:

He lay still—he thought he was lying down, Saby lying near him, but whether it was light or dark didn't seem relevant to his eyes. He saw, somehow, or something like. The brain kept shifting things around or the walls truly ran in streams of color. Things just were. Couldn't see Capella, then shivered at a strangeness as her hand met his body.

But these are framed stunningly—Cherryh just drops them on the reader from nowhere: a lengthy, semi-erotic dream sequence describing jump to a tranked out human is strange, then gets stranger when he wakes up and the reader just doesn’t know until later what happened:

Pale, then. Capella's blonde, brazen flash and try-me attitude, Capella standing there with her bare arms resting through bars he recalled he wasn't dreaming, with the bracelet of stars evident on her wrist. It wasn't the freedom of the docks he was in, he was in a box he couldn't get out of, and an exposure that let the whole ship come and stare at him if they liked.

Capella gave him an I-don't-give-a-damn rake of the eyes, leaned there, enigma like the fatal holocards. Her hands were death and life together, the serpent and the equation that cracked the light barrier, the bracelet no honest spacer wore…

Colors washed to right and left of him, red and blue and into infrareds and ultraviolets, a tunnel at the black peripheries of his vision. He daren't come any further. Christian wasn't his friend. This woman wasn't. This dream was destructive. He could make it go away.

It’s fractured and seeming nonsensical. But by the end of the book, the reader has a pretty good idea what being in jump would be like—unfathomable as a whole, but bits of it parsable.

He felt the loneliness, and the cold. Then… just felt/ smelled/saw the colors a while. And vast, terrifying silence. He tried to move, then. He couldn't feel things. Couldn't tell up from down. He leaned into space, flinched back toward solid limits, and thought he was falling.

Arms were there. Caught him. Hands showed him where level was.

It’s these sentences—short, declarative—that jump around and don’t seem to fit together, but sometimes they do in a rambling, rolling way: the sound of it reminds him of music from another time, but he can’t remember time. But then Cherryh also allows phrases to shift out of place: something looks green but tastes purple and orange, and smells blue. These experimental steps are phenomenal, and her description is astounding. She spends a lot of pages to do what she does with jump, and I loved every second of it.
—However, without the context of the other Merchanter novels setting up that aversion to not tranking for jump, I’m not sure this exposition of what that experience is like would actually fly. It’s maybe a third into the novel when Tom wakes up in a jump, and I feel like I wouldn’t have bought how insane some people go when that happens if I hadn’t read the others. It’s as if Cherryh is saying it’ll drive you crazy while showing a character or three who ends up coming through it alright. A bit of a contradiction.

4. There are a few main characters: Tom, Marie, Austin, Christian, and Capella. And each of them gets portions of chapters devoted to them in a way that tells the story from multiple points of view. It is Tom’s story, but it’s told from the perspective of others as well as his own, and it grows out of others’ stories—kind of like how our lives do. This challenges the reader to make up their own mind about the story and characters within, instead of spoon-feading the reader opinions to hold about characters. I like this tactic when George RR Martin does it, and I like it here.

5. On one hand this is a revenge story and the theme is Marie’s revenge for rape. But the real theme is Tom's coming of age, his realization of reality. The book takes place twenty years after the rape and Tom’s still trying to find a place, a group of people he can belong to. And he finds it in the unlikeliest place: on the ship of the rapist, his father. But it’s not because Austin is his dad, but because Saby and Tink befriend him, accept him, support him in a way his mother and her ship never did. Yes, he hates his father. But he wants a new start and it's really the only place, the only choice he has. This theme is all tied up with ignorance and codes of conduct in a way that really strikes home for me. And Marie's rape echoes where each echo adds some to the reader's understanding and keeps drawing one deeper. This theme is applicable and understandable to somebody who never has read any other Cherryh.

6. I love this book, a lot. On the one hand the theme allows the book to stand on its own while the political context is probably a neutral influence—it may or may not help to have read her other novels. Taking the jump awake almost certainly relies upon the other novels to set the stage, but could potentially be grasped by a new reader—which I think is unlikely. So, on the whole, the book probably doesn’t require one to have read her other work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And for that, despite this being a real treat of a novel, it doesn’t quite stand on its own. But that’s the nature of a long series like this—seven novels in this Merchanter or Company Wars branch of Cherryh’s broader Alliance-Union universe. So I love this novel, a lot, but can’t quite recommend it as easily as Downbelow Station.