Chanur Series by CJ Cherryh

This series has five novels that tell three interconnected stories: the first book, the middle three (published as three books, but they're really just one), and the last one. This Space Opera series tells an adventure tale of inter-station traders travelling faster-than-light to try and make a buck or two, becoming increasingly engaged in politics, and eventually coming to grips with their political reality as well as their personal reality. The stories focus on the characters and use action to change them or confirm their natures. Unlike other Cherryh novels, the focus of these is almost exclusively on single characters per book, though Chur, Hallan, and Tiar also get some alone-time on-screen, mostly due to their unique abilities. The story starts with, and focuses on, characters from a feline race of intelligent creatures: Pyanfar for the first four books, and Hilfy for the last. And Cherryh doesn't leave it there: the secondary Hani characters who play the antagonist role in the first novel come back in the second story arc and become, if not heroes, then at least sympathetic. Three things about Cherryh’s writing that really come to the fore in these five novels.

First, the laws of physics and tendencies of economics help build the world and tell the story. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article calls these novels, "Unusually realistic examples of space opera", and that's a great way to put it. Technology and the laws of physics deeply influence the possibilities of the economic and political realities within this universe. For instance, time dilation exists in this universe⁠—unlike other Space Opera tales that ignore hundred year old physics. The speed of light has importance here: as a Chanur ship approaches a station, the light from their dropping out of FTL hasn't reached the station yet, and they have an opportunity to monitor the traffic and communications within system, light hours old information, before anybody else knows they've arrived. This fills in the context of this new situation they have dropped into. Then, the delay between sending and receiving a message⁠—due to the speed of light⁠—plays an important role both in perception of situations, and in decision making. Also, the political organization that guides these alien species trading together is just that, a loose political affiliation that tries to regulate trade for everybody, rather than a political force. (Or, at least it starts out that way...) Cherryh rationalizes the economic and political intrigue in ways that, if you like Cherryh’s other writing, you will love here. It absolutely feels "unusally realistic".

Second, the sparseness of her voice. I don’t know how to explain this adequately. So, her narrative follows her characters who don’t describe things they already know, don’t explain as much as dwell on and recontextualize pieces to puzzles they’re given. Let me try an analogy: sometimes, when I read a Greek Myth, I think, “Huh. I don’t think I get that one? Why? And why was that seen as entertaining?” Then later something happens in my life that recontextualizes it, and I go back and re-read it, and it’s newly emotionally effective, or logically understandable as a story. Cherryh has a tendency towards that type of writing. And these books more than a lot of her other books. That’s not a bad thing. I like books that require some effort from the reader, some contemplation from them.

Third, and I know I’ve said it before: she writes aliens well. Really well. Throughout the series, alien species tend towards more and more screentime, and understanding of them grows⁠—but never in leaps and bounds, never in a way that contradicts earlier knowledge, or doesn’t coalesce into a whole. The Compact (Yes, this absolutely is Space Opera, the central organization of trade is called The Compact) is made up of a methane side and a oxygen side⁠—each space station split down the middle. And from the start, when Pyanfar knows nothing, the T’ca and Knnn are entirely obtuse. They’re scary. But, by the end of the fourth novel, by the end of the second of three stories, some understanding is present. They’ve been seen on screen enough times now that Pyanfar becomes more comfortable around them, and hence the reader is allowed the same cautious thawing.

How does she write her aliens well? This question drove me to look up her writer’s advice and compare it to her work here. In her, “Creating a World and Culture”, she states, “First, your environment. That becomes a biological given. It produces the beings you're writing about. Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better.” She then goes on to talk about how the alien species do things that humans either focus on or spend time doing⁠—finding differences between us and them, and using those as jumping-off points to further creation: eating, dying, questioning, modifying spaces for shelter, communicating with others, and believing about the afterlife. Out of these basic questions, and a knowledge of biology, her aliens come.

So, this seems to be a case of designing in a notebook, and then cherry picking the important or interesting data for the novel itself⁠—rather than a massive intro-info-dump, or an info-dump halfway through. By the end of the fifth novel, fundamental things about Stsho gender phasing biology remain unknown; the Kif tendency to push and prod and judge solely on their own morals with little cultural relativity has hinted at, but not explained, a homeworld culture never seen in the books; Hallan Meras’ encounter with the loading cart reveals more about the T’ca and dockside regulations, but nowhere near enough for Pyanfar's cautious thawing to take place for him or Hilfy.

In short, she keeps the aliens alien by:
• Not explaining them, except in what the characters know and rely on in dealing with them;
• Letting her characters curiously question the alien natures and discover pieces that only lead to more questions;
• Discovering and expanding on the ways they fundamentally differ from humanity in the way a bear or mosquito does, including communication, eating, death, etc. She takes all these one-step further, at least. Ok, so the Kif are exclusively carnivores, so they're competitive like earthly carnivores. But where Cherryh distinguishes herself is taking that further: therefore, when the meet an unexpectedly strong outsider, they're going to respect and follow and learn from and feel threatened by and threaten;
• She designs them first, and then never reveals the whole design.
In looking at it this way, this technique apes the old adage, “don’t show the monster,” which I agree with if the story wants the monster to stay monstrous. But she applies this adage to things that are not monsters, aliens, and they read as alien. Again, in Greek Myth, some of the magic of Myth is that the gods, titans, and other immortals operate on a different biological, moral, and spiritual level, and that constant mystery and surprise helps Myth beguile. For instance, Cherryh never explains humans. Tully is a known quantity by the end of book four, but his people remain mysterious to Pyanfar and Hilfy throughout. Cherryh rides this almost fourth-wall breaking line, by relying on the human reader to input their knowledge of humans to contextualize the novel's humans' actions, knowledge her main characters clearly lack. Brilliant.

My one single critique arrises from the way the first and second books relate. At the end of book one, many things seem solved in an optimistic way. Humans have discovered The Compact and Pyanfar has an exclusive contract to trade with them, saving her clan and culture, and the whole Compact, really. But the second book ignores this optimism and opens on a pessimistic note with Pyanfar held hostage and released by possibly different unknown parties, with her trading license revoked and her stranded. Reading these back-to-back like I did, this jarring shift took a few pages for me to understand, and at the end of the series it still feels like a bit of a cheap writer’s trick, like Cherryh wrote herself into an overly solved position, and had to hit a reset button to get the story back off the ground. That’s not to say that the middle three novels, composing a story by themselves, didn’t absolutely engage and engross me, just that a part of the story makes little sense by the end of the novel, Cherryh doesn’t explore that aspect enough for me to feel emotionally invested in Pyanfar’s misfortune, though I am still curious about it. It's almost as if the first book didn't need to be in the series, or was a rough draft.

In short, these novels show a lot of the strengths of Cherryh’s writing, and some of the weaknesses. Though it’s a Space Opera Adventure that I adore, I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody. I can think of two or three people that I can’t wait to tell about these books, but in requiring so much from the reader, and in skipping a major plot point that, between books, shifts the whole tone from victorious to defeated, recommendations have to come with a caveat. However, wholeheartedly, I can recommend her techniques of creating alien species and populating a universe. I am floored by how well she writes aliens. Where some of her books take a few pages, or a third of the book, to start getting to a point where I can’t put it down, here each book’s pacing brilliantly starts off with a bang and continues from problem to solution to new problem consistently and I turned the pages happily, devouring these stories. Finally, the realistic feeling of the aliens is matched by the realism and rationality she puts into designing the universe and reacting to physical laws and economic tendencies that help inform the story and keep it based in our reality. Brilliant stuff.

[EDIT 2/1/2020:] The novel series does some gender role reversal. Hani women are allowed off the planet's surface, while each tribal pride's male is not. Excess men retire to reservations and must fight to the death, and win over and over again to even find a chance of getting off the reservation alive. Men who portray any divergent masculinity die immediately at the hands of traditionalists, or must be strenuously protected by their family. I find this gender reversal engaging and wonderful: instead of simply reversing the roles, Cherryh reasons out what a matriarchy might look like, and uses stereotypically masculine traits to identify reasons why men constitute the hani second sex. For instance, she calls men flighty and over-emotional⁠—phrases that some men continue to call women today. Yet, instead of just "switching the pronouns" like some unimaginative authors have done in their gender reversal tales, Cherryh reasons out what stereotypical traits of males would be construed by those two words, and the hani males are viewed as unreliable or lazy, and quick to anger or sulk, especially when denied food. Cherryh uses the same words that men have used against women for centuries, yet changes what they mean to reflect toxicly masculine tendencies. This fantastic work leads to a gender reversal tactic that I adore. I've only ever respected one other gender reversal book this much, Y: The Last Man by BK Vaughan.

Conspirator by CJ Cherryh

This is the first book of the fourth trilogy of the Foreigner Series, book 10 in the series. Okay, we’ve wrapped up the coup, right? Bren and Tabini can get back to governing the atevi, right? No way. Due to a housing shortage, Bren ends up having to go to his estate on the coast. In just arriving, light shows conspiracies everywhere, and they all point back to the Marid, the Southern Reach of the atevi world.

The cell phone plague now preoccupied humans on the island of Mospheira, a plague making them walk into traffic while in conversation that preempted their awareness of their surroundings; a compulsion that suddenly rendered them incapable of ignoring a phone call in the presence of actual people they should be dealing with.

The opening of this book meanders: Bren to the estate with Barb and Toby, then Cajeiri arrives, then Ilisidi, then Tabini, then he leaves, then new bodyguards arrive from Tabini, and then, finally, we get to the start of the story. The directionless opening only interests when Bren’s arrival allows things to go wrong immediately, small things like a neighboring estate owing his estate some money, and these mushroom into very big things that threaten civil war—not because Bren cares about a couple thousand moneys that much, he doesn't have that much of an ego, but because these small symptoms are emblematic of a much larger root cause. And once the reader realizes that these small wrongs lead to major fractures, the book works brilliantly.

Now he had to ask himself which language he was thinking in. Now he routinely limited his human impulses and curtailed his human instincts, shaping himself into something else . . . A good talent, up to a point. He didn’t know if he’d passed that point. Maybe he’d passed it somewhere in that voyage, when they’d all gone out to get a human station removed from where it had no right to be. . . .

That’s not to say that specific scenes in the early portions of the book are bad—Cajeiri almost drowning is one of those scenes I look back on as one of the best in the whole series so far. But by being disjointed, the confusion I feel wondering what’s going to be important and what’s not—Cajeiri almost drowning ends up mostly unimportant, who gives the info to help rescue him ends up most important—helps color the whole opening poorly.

Aijiborn: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect. If he lived to grow up.

I am a Cherryh fan. I know she often starts slowly, establishing the characters and situation, then putting new info into the mix to stir everything up suddenly for a breakneck finish that leaves the reader to figure out some of the plot and actions. I like this tactic and think, to some extent, that Neuromancer also pulls this off very well. (I don’t necessarily feel compelled to write like this, though I like reading it.) But in this one book it seems more like Cherryh casts around looking for a plot, looking for a story. And I think this because so few of these early scenes change characters fundamentally: the scenes themselves seem mostly forgotten in a series where almost every scene ends up being important later.

People could get killed over bad information. Information and the misconstruction of information was, history told him, exactly the sort of thing that had led humans and atevi to war—bad information coming too fast, too easy interaction, too many people who thought they understood each other.

The ending, where the Edi and Gan tribes start to ally with Ilisidi and Bren, kind of comes as a surprise. The book is about uncovering the conspiracy of Baiji, and Cherryh throws in some false leads—those unrevisited scenes I discuss above. And that the conspiracy uncovers two potential allies as well interests me, but could have used more foreshadowing. If I knew more about the Edi and Gan before they showed up, it would have been easier to feel more importance to their arrival.

“Mountain air is chill. It stimulates the wit, young man. Choler only ruins one’s digestion.” It was good advice. He had been in Great-grandmother’s mountains. He had been in the snow. He understood. And like nand’ Bren’s rock, paper, scissors—he had seen how wit beat choler, every time.

So that’s the book: a setup for what becomes a great story arc. But the opening is rough around the edges. It didn’t deter me from reading more, but I could see somebody not liking this book more than the other books in the series. The most interesting part for the series as a whole would certainly be that we finally get a glimpse of a stupid atevi, Baiji, and how that brain works, the flipside of the way the culture is setup, the bad potential to the good we've seen so far.

He just didn’t have the vision of the future he’d used to have. It was all dark up ahead, and he couldn’t see.

+++

Bren took his former seat, trying to find in himself what he had used to feel, some sense of sympathy for a dead enemy, regret for the waste. It was there, but it was scant at the moment.

Deliverer by CJ Cherryh

This book closes the third trilogy of the Foreigner series, the trilogy about the coup against Tabini. Days after the end of the last book, an Eastern lord working with the still-alive pretender kidnaps Tabini’s heir, Cajeiri. Bren and his friends head east to try and recover the eight-year-old boy. While there, Cherryh fleshes out the East to a depth she hasn’t before. In the opening book of the whole series, Ilisidi kidnaps Bren to the East, but Bren doesn’t yet understand what he should, and what he knows now. So, in this book, the readers finally come to grips with the East as a culture and political force, as well as some of the characters who exist out there. This showing that Cherryh does helps add complexity to the whole series. She often recasts past events in the light of future information, and here this whole book does that. But even within this book, the early dinner with the Eastern lords in the western capital is consistently shifting in the characters’ understandings as new information comes to light. Nothing is forgotten or unimportant.

It had been five days since the shooting stopped. They had had time to do a bit of mopping-up, some of it bloody, and they had done a bit of repair—and now messages flowed. Air service resumed, though it was sporadic. The trains ran.

But the most surprising aspect is that she adds a second voice. The whole series has been solely from Bren’s point of view up until now, when Cajeiri gets a voice as well. This addition helps solidify the focus of this third trilogy on the heir. This tactic fits this book into Cherryh’s ouvre more directly—she usually has multiple points of view that the reader follows. The immediate impetus for this appears to be Cajeiri’s kidnapping—it’s hard to discuss the kidnapped with Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative when Bren is elsewhere. So, Cajeiri gets a voice, and he’s an eight year old boy. A remarkable boy, sure, whose important life experiences outweigh most adults, but he’s still eight and chafing under adult control.

Well, he supposed he had had adventures enough for one year at least, riding on mecheiti and buses and trains and being shot at—he had shot a man himself, because he had to, to save their lives, but he had no wish to remember that part, which was not glorious, or an adventure, or anything but terrible. He thought it ought to have changed him—but it was mostly just not there in his thinking.

In terms of the counter-revolution, this book shows the pretender shuffling his plans for the opportunity of getting control of Cajeiri. In other words, the last gasp of the pretender. And this last gasp intrigues me in that it shows something Bren’s perspective doesn’t: the pretender still thinks he has a chance. I don’t think he’s stupid, due to the success of his earlier coup, so somebody is out there supporting him. Somebody is on his side. And Bren and Ilisidi rush into a rescue attempt without knowing who, because the rescue attempt is something they can do.

At very least, it was a plan, and it was something to do, rather than sit in the bed and be scared. And when he got out, oh, some people were going to be in trouble.

The theme here is doing what you can when you can. The pretender has an allied lord kidnap Cajeiri, Cajeiri escapes, Bren kills the pretender, Ilisidi tries to patch up relations with her cousin, and all are simply doing the best of limited options available to them. The kidnapping forces events to happen, pushes the characters to reactions. But Cajeiri could’ve just as easily submitted instead of attempting escape based on the Count of Monte Cristo. Ilisidi could’ve asked somebody else to attempt rescue. Bren could’ve held his fire at the end. The pretender could’ve surrendered. But no, these characters have motivations and priorities that drive them to these actions. It’s an important warning to examine where habits and priorities could drive anybody.

He hated most of all being shunted aside and told he was a child. Most of all—loneliness, after being in the center of things, was entirely unjust, and such injustice—hurt. Hurt made him sulk. And sulking only worried the servants and brought them to hover around him.

So, that first part. Beyond being Cherryh’s usual contemplative context-setting, this introduces a kid unhappy with what his life is offering him at the moment. And the whole thing seems a bit too overlong before the kidnapping happens. The last book was a split narrative—in the house, convoy to the capital, and retaking power being three distinct portions. The book before that was split between on the space ship, and then the counter-revolution. But this book starts out without much tension—too much telling and not enough showing of tension. Then Cajeiri gets kidnapped and the tension explodes, but I wish there was some other opening here, something to get the tension going right off the bat, or earlier. I wondered why, after Tabini took power, this trilogy was still progressing. Well, because the pretender needed to die, but he’s hardly discussed throughout. Anyways, I liked the book, but some minor dissatisfaction exists. The lander seems like it could be interpreted as a deus ex machina, but it's been so heavily discussed that I didn't take it that way.

Pretender by CJ Cherryh

The second of the counter-revolution trilogy within the larger Foreigner series. The setup at the end of the last book⁠—getting everybody into one place except the pretender to the throne⁠—explodes here. Battles take place in the house they’re all stuffed into, enemy Assassin’s Guild shows up in the house, and then everybody gets on busses, planes, and trains and heads into the capital to try and take back power. Followed, for the first time in this series, a sort of epilogue. I mean, the fighting stops about two chapters before the book ends⁠—I expect Cherryh to end her books right after the central conflict is resolved. Her typical tactic is to start somewhere where the tension isn't immediately apparent yet, build out the characters and context for the first third of the book which increases the tension drastically, then an explosion of action for two thirds of the book, and end about ten pages before the reader fully grasps what's going on, leaving the book to further unravel in the reader's mind—which works because of the rationality driving the characters. But here she pauses and shows some of the fallout, the start of knitting the world back together after the coup and counter-revolution. This pacing works for me. Instead of sitting and contemplating potential fallout⁠—like in the last trilogy how they rescue the Reunion stationers, then the next book starts with them about to drop out of lightspeed into atevi space, and readers must fill in the year-long gap. Here we get a sense of what happens in that gap, and it shines. Instead of ending on a bang, Cherryh lets us down slowly. I hope this tactic is something she’ll use again in the future. It’s great to see an author experimenting with her story-telling tactics this late in her career.

Ilisidi snapped, the head of the cane tucked against her chest. "Damned fools! Two years of managing for themselves and they develop their own channels, excluding all higher authority! Delusions. Delusions of competency. This will not be acceptable."

Political priorities rule this book, as clans come and go and discuss other clans. There’s complexity and foreshadowing throughout. But, as a reader who doesn’t exist in this world, it would be easy for an author to lose me here. Yet Cherryh doesn’t forget her readers. She knows that her readers don’t need to get lost in the details, but that her characters do. So she communicates enough to show and tell Bren getting lost in the details, but not enough to stress the reader’s patience. It’s a fine line and she walks it well.

"There is word of other foreigners, unknown to us—" A small murmur that quickly faded as he continued, "—but there will always be foreigners. The universe is very large. The more we know, as a world, the more authority we have."

The theme of this book simply shows change, and all that changes because of change. Everything is interconnected⁠—hence the complex loyalties of the clans discussed. And as technology has come and changed the world, in ways Bren and Tabini had planned for, it has done far more. Unexpected change happens around every atevi and how they react to the changing technology. In other words, everything that we learned through the last seven books has changed⁠—including how the main characters react to that change. Tabini and Bren react, plan, and act, worried about timing and collateral damage throughout. It seems Cherryh concludes that change just is, not that it’s good or bad. But how one reacts to that change does start to show positives and negatives, and it’s the important aspect.

They all had changed. The world had changed. And changed again.

One thing Cherryh dwells on echoes me learning about Beowulf in college. In Beowulf the old sword is better because it has lasted, proving that it was made well. In our day and age, the new phone is better because it has the latest and greatest. This story shows and tries to explain a culture going through that change. Atevi culture is big on traditions and hierarchy. Within this general preference, the traditionalists hold much influence. The old man whose house they occupy spent top dollar for security, automobiles, etc, and expects them to last as heirlooms like his other collections, yet the new comes in and outperforms the old. His secure phones endanger everybody instead of protecting, act more like megaphones. This story helps illuminate a lot of the industrial revolution underpinnings of the whole series.

No, no, no, their lord would say: he bought quality to defend his house and his province. Quality items once purchased ought to be good for decades if not the next generation—Lord Tatiseigi had no understanding at all of how radically the advent of electronics and computers had changed that basic precept of atevi economy. Quality things lasted for generations, did they not? One bought the most expensive and it was clearly going to last for decades.

And throughout all this change, where do you find the wise thing to do? What still matters? Timing, information, people, capabilities, understanding shortcomings, and keeping your head. These questions and answers face Bren and company throughout the novel, and it keeps a fascinating pace of information and action.

We have become much wiser, since. Let us deal with the next encounter at the safe distance of our station, where we and our human residents can establish our authority, take sensible charge of negotiations, and keep human fools and atevi fools—and we each have them in numbers!—from dealing with these new foreigners, who doubtless have fools of their own.

This book is great, really delving into ideas introduced in earlier books against the backdrop of counter-revolutionary fighting, and the invasion of the capital. Some of my favorite books strike this balance: action driving the characters forward, while the author delves deeply into interesting issues and character development. If I had any minor quibble, it would be that the unexpected couple of end chapters, the sort of epilogue, started off fairly directionless due to Bren not knowing what comes next⁠—Cherryh’s tightly focused voice and Bren being overwhelmed by the situation. But within a few pages it made sense and the whole thing worked brilliantly.

"Never forget confusion and folly, which always attend change, do they not?"

Destroyer by CJ Cherryh

This book begins the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. This book surprised me, as all of these books have in different ways. After settling some things with the Kyo and Reunion Station in the last book, here Bren and friends head back towards the atevi world. Upon arrival, they find that Tabini was overthrown eight months ago. This step surprised me. I took for granted Tabini’s hold on power. Yet it makes sense that he loses power—Cherryh pulls no punches, and after six books saying that too much technology too fast will break a culture, she follows through and breaks the atevi culture. Moves like this prove Cherryh’s strengths as a storyteller.

He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

At the same time, the characters worry that Tabini might be dead—nobody takes it too seriously except Bren in his deepest funks, but the rumor does run around a bit. And though Tabini shows up in the final pages, it got me thinking about these characters and this world and focusing a bit more on the heir—I question what will happen when Tabini will die. And this refocusing on Cajeiri, the heir, turns out to be a part of what this whole sub-trilogy is about. Again, strong storytelling.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus, why humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did.

The theme here combines two thoughts into one: faulty assumptions leading to poor actions on the part of the main characters and the usurper, and that home doesn’t exist. One thing Bren mentions a few times in the series is that home to the atevi is where their staff are, their servants and family and security. He starts to feel this way too. And this poignant theme rings true—I remember returning from college and things had changed. Here Bren has had no contact with atevi for two years, and the home he left differs from the home he returns to—both because of his assumptions proving false, and because he has changed. Yet his associations remain, and even though he doesn’t understand certain things as easily as he once did, his comfort still depends on his associations or friends being near.

“Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.” Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it . . . didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

That slow start in space sets the stage for the second two thirds of the story, when the plot begins to rely upon Bren’s nascent counter-revolution. But it sets the stage in more subtle ways. Peace was kept on the ship through informing the newcomers from Reunion of the political stability and fresh-food paradise of the atevi planet and its station. Immediately upon dropping out of space, this assumption proves untrue. And Bren feels that he has failed those people by promising stability. Upon learning the revolution’s details, this feeling of personal failure colors his perception of events. The setup provides a strong foundation for this story.

“So what’s a letter between brothers more or less? Is the news out there that bad?”
“It may be good, or bad, or the usual scary mix of things. It’ll still touch off the crazies.”
“Oh, God, everything touches off the crazies. That’s why they’re crazy."

In all, this is a good, good book. But something keeps me from thinking it is great. Probably my own misunderstanding of the role Cajeiri later plays in events—he was kind of a secondary character until now, and I probably assumed he would continue to be and so I didn’t grasp immediately what Cherryh was doing with this story. But well worth reading and the following two books do a better job of putting Cajeiri at the fore.

He found a grin of his own in reply, thinking, damn, if we die, we die moving, don’t we, not sitting still and letting our lives fade out?

+++

No one had yet uttered a word about their destination, which might be here, or days off, but likely all this hurry was to meant put distance between them and the bus, and any likelihood of the opposition tracking Ilisidi and the boy.

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But he found something morally refreshing, being sore in very inconvenient places, sitting on a rock beside a gurgling spring.

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They started off, the young people planted firmly in the center of the column, with the dowager, and with him. For a while he listened to Nawari instructing the young people, advising the new arrivals what to do and what contingencies to consider if they should come under fire. And the dowager sternly advising Cajeiri that if he picked shelter, he should now adjust his thinking and pick shelter wide enough for three. Hell of a thing, he said to himself. Hell of a thing for three kids to have to think of. The older generation had a few things to answer for.

+++

Only over his own dead body . . . granted numerous people would happily arrange that. God, there was so much water under the bridge. Planets were so complicated, compared to the steel worlds he’d lived in the last few years.

+++

Curious how the brain wore the body out, and how it didn’t work the other way around.

+++

Damn the situation. Damn the Kadigidi. He passionately hated gunfire. It always meant someone like him hadn’t done his job. And there was far too much evidence of that all around him.

+++

Power-seeking. Political games. The old, old reason. Hell of a mess, was what it was.

+++

But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

+++

But there was no room for second thoughts. Gravity had them.

+++

There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

+++

And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

+++

But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was. Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

+++

For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first.

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The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos . . . but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

Explorer by CJ Cherryh

This book stands among Cherryh’s best. Bren and friends’ reuniting Phoenix and Reunion station does what it says on the tin: an exploration of places nobody from the unnamed atevi planet has ever gone, and many people still don’t believe exists. Here we go. Journey narrative, political intrigue, situations turning into clusters, and meeting an alien species; unravelling the Ramirez mystery that helped carry the last couple of books, teaching the aiji’s heir what’s what in the universe, and gunfights⁠—Bren in lots of gunfights. Well, okay, like two gunfights, but still. In one of them Bren liberates a political prisoner from as deep inside hostile territory as possible.

Figure it. If there were two humans, there were two sides, and if both had a pulse, politics would be at work somewhere in the business.

This action packed-book concludes this trilogy. One thing I want to just mention in passing about the trilogy: it follows Cherryh’s usual pacing across three books⁠—meaning that Precursor opens the three fairly tamely, then Defender ramps up the tensions and complicates the situations once understandings have been reached, then Explorer explodes with action, new information recontextualizing earlier understandings, and follows the characters through their rational courses.

“Yolanda kept her standoffishness from local culture. I didn’t. I fell far more deeply not just into downworld culture, but into atevi culture, and the one thing that both infuriates me and encourages me is that Ramirez appointed me to succeed him. Me. My view of the universe. My atevi-contaminated, impure view of the universe humans have to live in. It’s not a degree of importance I ever wanted, I’ll tell you. But the thought that Ramirez meant to do it, that he actually approved what I am—is what gives me the courage to get out of bed and go on duty.”

This specific book’s pacing also shows the strength of Cherryh’s storytelling. Her book begins just before arrival at Reunion station, which allows the scene to be set before rushing into an alien encounter, and an encounter with long-lost humans. On the brink of the unknown, Cherryh establishes the relationships between characters, then pushes them through that fog-bank, and they don’t understand what they see. They find an alien ship, the human station, and neither matches what the characters expected. Classic Cherryh pacing: set the scene through the characters, their relations, and what worries them; then explore those worries through revelations or journeys; then resolve through logical reactions by the characters; all in a mix of psychological depth, adventure, political intrigue, physical violence, and change. Solid and stunning.

Separation of nations that have once met is dangerous: that seems the most accurate expression of kyo views of politics. What has met will meet again. What cannot stay in contact is a constant danger of miscalculation. Curious notion. Possibly even demonstrable, in history. One wonders whether this is a refined philosophy, out of successful experience. One is very certain we need to go slow with this.

The story illuminates the theme: Bren and company take responsibility for solving a problem they didn’t create. Instead of leaving Reunion station to die, they roll into the area and immediately take steps to correct Ramirez’ mistake of not communicating with the kyo, Phoenix’ difficulties dealing with Reunion, atevi-human interactions, and he tries to moderate the interactions of the three human factions (ship, station, Mospheiran) and all of their subfactions (ship-Jase, ship-Sabin, ship-Guild). This strong theme advocates fixing problems when and where you find them, through humility, and not kicking the can down the road to a future generation.

Play it by ear. Adapt. Abandon the plan. Look for the new pattern in events as they fell. It was not the human view of crisis management. But it was profoundly atevi, profoundly valid. Had not such thinking even become Mospheiran, over the centuries? Had not the paidhiin worked and fought within the university and the government to get that flexibility with their neighbors installed in place of a more rigid, history-conscious policy?

Cherryh has firmly established herself as one of my favorite authors, and one of the best science fiction authors. This trilogy here, books 4-6 in the Foreigner series, certainly help that. Bren changes over the course of this book, becoming less formal and more action oriented. Finally coming to terms with the life he left behind. A great book.

Defender by CJ Cherryh

Three years after Bren and company take the space station, Bren spends the first third of the book confused at the pieces moving around the situation: himself, robots, Ramirez, Geigi, Jase, Yolanda, Ginny, Ilsidi, Tabini’s heir, a long dead ruler’s funeral, and the silence of Tabini keeping Bren in the dark. Then he spends the second two thirds helping push those pieces as fast as possible, hoping he pushes in the correct direction. All while dealing with family emergencies from a vast distance. This story of conspiracy, political intrigue, and negotiation relies on a competent Bren dealing with rapidly changing situations to come up with potential solutions. When first introduced to Bren, back in the first trilogy, 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. However, her we see diplomat Bren in full force. In short, Bren’s effectiveness and understanding drive the plot—thanks in large part to CJ Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person perspective.

“I don’t envy you in that regard. But you came out sane. And decent. And worthwhile. It’s what we do, more than who we are, that makes our personal lives a mess. If we didn’t do what we do for a job, ordinary people might figure out how to get along with us.”

But that doesn’t mean Bren understands everything. At many points, Bren wonders why Tabini wanted him at the funeral on the planet. But when the reveal comes a third of the way in, he realizes that Tabini didn’t need him there so much as need him away from the station. This makes sense based on Tabini’s character, as Cherryh’s characters usually make sense. I already know Tabini uses those around him as assets—he devotes himself to their safety, but only to a point. They all are expendable for the greater good, as Tabini is in charge of the greater good. But beyond that, his secretive ways and desire to double check everything make sense in this specific situation—which Bren and the reader do not understand until later in the book. Also, the atevi-human interface gets in the way, as Bren wants to like Tabini and feels slighted at Tabini keeping him in the dark. This feeling reinforces the alienness of Bren and the atevi. Alienness always works both ways.

God hope the house of cards he and Tabini had built lasted long enough to provide a pattern for the girders of a whole new world.

The plot again shows Cherryh setting up a situation, then dripping and implying information about the characters to the reader, meaning that the ending falls rationally out of the people involved. I want to dwell on this for a few more sentences because this tendency brilliantly guides a lot of Cherryh’s work, and all of the books in this Foreigner series so far. She holds back information from Bren and the reader—due to her tightly focused, third person narrative—to help set up tension and mystery. But she also pulls no punches—a passing statement early in the book that the ship is fueled and can move at any time comes home at the end when it undocks from the station. This pace of revealing information drives Cherryh’s plot pacing: slightly too long for a reveal in Voyager in Night, perfect pacing in Precursor.

“Gently, gently, young man,” Ilisidi said. “Haste only startles what you wish to catch. Stalk your desires. Don’t snatch.”

The theme here shows Bren dealing with assumptions, learning truths, and then trying to react in wise ways to the new situation. This applicable theme seems a bit broad, sure, to some extent all books are about this theme. But Cherryh really dives into the theme, throwing misunderstandings, surprises, and multiple opinions at the reader to show how Bren’s rational note-taking and thinking helps prioritize problems and isolate unknowns, suggesting ways to deal with the unknowns. And then, because she pulls no punches, we see him trying various responses, some successful, some not. This willingness to let Bren not succeed every time perfectly shows Cherryh’s strength at creating characters. If Bren ever succeeds without cost, I would stop reading these books.

Atevi relied on a rational universe. Humans on the island enclave of Mospheira had faith in miracles. Humans on the starship over their heads had more faith in a second armed starship and a planetful of allies, in a universe otherwise sparse with life.

The one thing I would say about this book is that it wouldn’t make much sense without first reading Precursor, at least. Ilsidi and Tabini are really sketched in here, as characters, and the reader could easily be lost without having some sense of how those characters react to reality. But, being a sequel in a series I think should build off of each book, this potential negative is actually a positive to me. I’m glad Cherryh didn’t spend twenty more pages explaining these two characters.

“We do not forget,” Tabini continued, as nerve and flesh all but liquefied in relief and bodyguards stood down from red alert. Tabini swept on, in possession of all attention. Thank God no program dropped. Breathing itself was at a minimum. Tabini’s oratory was all fortunate threes now, rapid, hammering into nerves still resounding to two strokes of the bell, still waiting for the resolution of their universe. “We do not break our strong connections with all that Valasi-aiji built. We do not abrogate our traditions. The more knowledge we acquire, the more we rationally comprehend the universe, the more we control our own destiny—”

One last comment here. Cherryh baits and hooks the reader, she doesn’t pull punches. But she also bait and double or triple hooks the reader. When Ramirez moves to his deathbed, Cherryh hooked me hard. I know things are going to blow up with the ship then, and maybe the station too. But then Ramirez lets out that the other station that suffered an alien attack, Reunion, has survivors aboard. Now I’m hooked again, with this juicy problem facing the characters. And right then, Ilsidi and Tabini’s heir appear on the station. And Bren’s mom starts maybe dying. And Jill leaves Toby. Cherryh just piles on the problems and the book can’t be read fast enough from there. Bait and double hook. I need to do this more in my own writing.

His security had not been idle. Never, ever think it. “So you have suspicions.”
“It’s our tendency, is it not?”

I adore this book. Where Precursor stands among Cherryh’s best work, this one falls just barely short of that. Bren doesn’t change so much as his understanding of his relationships with those around him change. And only having one character so far, that lack of change did drag the book down a bit for me. This shows a book more about adventurous negotiation than character development, and I always advocate for character development. Don’t get me wrong though: this book is about the characters, firmly about them and not the adventure, but because those characters don’t change much, the book doesn’t hit me as hard as Precursor did. However, this is probably my second favorite in the series so far. Good book. Solidly good book. Well worth the read after Precursor.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and folded his hands and stopped where he was, listening, waiting while a very sick woman tried to gather her faculties.
“First off, tell the dowager she’s a right damn bastard.”
It was no time for a translator to argue. Mitigation, however, was a reasonable tactic. “Aiji-ma, Sabin-aiji has heard our suspicions regarding Tamun and received assurances from me and Gin-aiji that we have not arranged a coup of our own. She addresses you with an untranslatable term sometimes meaning extreme disrepute, sometimes indicating respect for an opponent.”
Ilisidi’s mouth drew down in wicked satisfaction. “Return the compliment, paidhi.”
“Captain, she says you’re a right damn bastard, too.”

Precursor by CJ Cherryh

This series of books seems to be composed of trilogies so far. So, according to CJ Cherryh, pick any third book and if you like it, continue with that trilogy. This book starts the second arc.

As a space plane carries atevi to the stars for the first time, they dock at an abandoned space station and begin to negotiate directly with Phoenix, the recently returned excession-spaceship. Three factions attempt to negotiate for what they need and want, while Bren, the interpreter and the person who understands the most about all three factions, tries to find a position that is best for all three. Conspiracy, complex political maneuvering, and watching how different technology levels and environments has affected different cultures differently.

Nonchalance was a position from which, if wrong, there was very little chance of recovery.

The story structure here fascinates me. Outside of a paragraph or two, no intro-info-dump afflicts the opening chapters. Rather, Bren leaves his family and Mospheira, heading back to say goodbye to Jase, who has been invited upstairs. When he boards the plane, surprised by the presence of a Mospheiran delegation to the station, he screws up initial contact with them. He fails to anticipate his own participation in the trip. Then he says goodbye to Jase and dines with Ilsidi. Only then does Tabini order him to go to the station. Alienating part of the Mospheiran delegation starts looking like a screw-up, instead of the warning he had intended. He realizes he enters this situation half-cocked, not having had time or foresight to debrief Jase first. And then opening negotiations with Ramirez go well, very well. Ramirez and Ogun see the reason of Bren’s arguments, the Mospheiran delegation overcomes their resentment and agree in principle, and everything goes better than expected. At that point, two-thirds of the book remains to be read. This tension of everything going well but so much book left to read crushes the hope Bren feels⁠—the reader knows some shoe is about to drop. But this setup brilliantly establishes the scene, what the reader needs to know for the next two-thirds of the book to work, shows Cherryh in control of the story and deftly maneuvering the reader’s experience to draw them into the story. With just one main character and point of view, she creates a complex situation and context that the rest of the story naturally and rationally falls out of.

And a great deal that was human wasn’t within his power to choose anymore. He’d already lost everyone on the island; he was about to lose his only human companion on the mainland. He wasn’t happy about it, but that was the choice far higher powers made.

And this tactic is a tendency for Cherryh. Or, as she puts it, “Anticipated consequences have to really happen, and have to be dealt with… no 'it was all a dream.'” Here, Bren anticipates struggles of negotiation on the station, with both Phoenix crew and Mospheirans. When things go swimmingly, the reader knows a catch is coming, because Cherryh has already built that expectation in. Looking at her characters the reader easily knows where the catch is coming from⁠—the captains have mostly failed to clearly communicate in good faith, and one hasn’t communicated at all. Turns out that one betrays the others. In short, she builds a complex situation, and watches what unfolds. She doesn’t plan, she lets the characters carry the story. Another Cherryh quote about writing, “The whole book, for me, is character.” In other words, her books come from her characters: they build the situations, their environment defines the worldbuilding, and their personalities provide the solutions and moral dilemmas. This strong writing tactic allows the book’s meaning and depth, even when the main character is weaker than Bren. Or, in Cherry’s words, “So 'well-drawn' and 'morally strong' adult characters of whatever gender carry swords and banners only for local color. More importantly, they carry principles or hypotheses of behavior as the useful and significant tools of their trade, and they test those principles for validity constantly against the situation posed… doing it in fiction so that people who read the story can gain the life experience not by a lecture but by deep analysis and integration of that character's experiences and reactions.” Yes please, I want to read more of this.

It wasn’t humanly possible. If atevi hadn’t been a continent-spanning civilization and a constitutional monarchy to boot, with rocketry already in progress, they couldn’t possibly have done it. . . certainly not in his lifetime.

Okay, enough about the structure. The best structure doesn’t conceal boring story, and this story supports the structure. Talking about stakes, these stakes put the species at risk, but that risk comes at an unknown point in the future, whenever the alien murderers get around to maybe attacking. So, due to distance, that tension feels distant. The tension on the characters rests on personal and political will, as well as their cultural goals.
⁠—Tabini wants to push atevi to FTL-levels of technology, because he believes in technological progress. Tabini thinks of knowledge as good, and sees giving labor to Phoenix as gaining immense knowledge and experience.
⁠—Mopheirans want to define a safe, stable economic footing they can operate from in the future, natural for a people whose neighbors technologically match them but control all the natural resources. Mospheirans also want to limit their risks, having history with Phoenix using them to do the dirty, dangerous work.
⁠—Phoenix wants fuel, labor, resources to continue their way of life⁠—wandering through the stars trying to establish new colonies. Being stuck in space, they must deal with the planet’s residents. They fear the atevi and Mospheirans, though the Mospheirans less so because they know that evil, the atevi are still unknowns to them. They also really want some help fighting the aliens that murdered the residents of the last station they built.
Within those cultural desires, each character also wills their own good. Whether it’s Kroger and her lifelong obsession with robots, Tamum and his desire for power, Ramirez and his need for speed and compromise, or Bren and his goal of peace and understanding, even a little segregation if it will help. These personal intentions wrinkle the cultural ones, giving complexity to the story. But I also see how these personal goals do not contradict the culture of the character: Kroger wants safety for Mospheiran lives, and her robot obsession roots in that desire; Tabini wants knowledge and experience in a place no atevi has gone, so his compromise secures that at some risk to atevi life; Tamum wants personal power, perverting the Phoenix desire for a safe haven to refuel at and trade with.

“One certainly does ask,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what are these people scared of?”
“The aliens, sir.” “Banichi and Jago aren’t aliens. You and I are. That below is their planet.”

With these desires in mind, the story makes perfect sense. Where then does mystery come from? It comes directly from a lack of information. The story shows some good negotiations breaking down as one side quits communicating. Bren doesn’t know what occurs, neither does anybody who talks to him. As a reader, I’m just as in the dark as Bren⁠—again, Cherryh’s tightly focused, third person narrative ties the reader directly to the character deftly. Tension also arrises from this not knowing. Bren has an agreement between Tabini and Phoenix secured. But when the Phoenix principle leaves the picture, he’s left stranded, trying to understand what the range of possibilities are. This mystery clears up when more information floods the reader. Rather like Asimov’s writing tactics, though Cherryh does it better by relying on characters.

He couldn’t beg off from his job or ask why in hell human beings couldn’t use good sense. He’d asked that until he knew there was no plain and simple answer.

One consistent and astounding strength of Cherryh is creating cultures. Above, I listed the main three cultures here and their general goals. These goals come directly from the worldbuilding, from the environment. Phoenix crew, stuck on a spaceship for years, relies on rigid discipline and schedules to survive psychologically, because they relied on that physically for so long. Any outside input puts them off. Atevi ruled their planet alone for thousands of years before humans came, and still do. Therefore, their desire to catch up with this excession-spaceship shows a desire to retain their place of dominance in their own affairs. Mospheiran’s descend from people who ran from Phoenix crew’s nastier behaviors, therefore their desire for protection. Also, their lack of natural resources compared to Atevi leave them desperate to find any niche they may fit in the future. Through these environmental, historical concerns, the cultures Cherryh builds make sense, feel realistic, despite being full of aliens and unlikely technology. She writes, worldbuilds, storytells, and entertains brilliantly.

Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvation; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.

The one question, as always, in a series concerns the nature of sequels versus stand-alone works. I said in my notes on the last book, “I’m feeling that this series should have books that build on each other, not stand-alone novels, and that she's torn between the two strategies.” What I meant is that series books will often try to bring the reader up-to-speed with intro-info-dumps, or they’ll assume the reader has read the earlier books and leave new readers at a loss for understanding. Both dangerous tactics to me. Here, she clearly wants this one to stand-alone. I think this book perfectly deals with the issue⁠—a couple of paragraphs establishing context of the other books spread through the fist chapter, then trust the readers will understand and get on with the story. I don’t feel I need to have read the first three to get this one. Yet, the first three exist as context to this one, so maybe I found more to like in this one because I read the others. It would be interesting to find somebody who read this one first and discuss with them.

“So the paidhi, too, doesn’t trust implicitly.”
“I don’t trust. I find out.”

The theme here shows Bren keeping his head under fire, being flexible and humble, but also flexing his power when he needs to. Again, he has a hard job, and his regrets at what that does to his family life cause questions, but not wavering. It's a theme shot through the entire novel, that every character supports, while each add to the discussion. Loyalty to the ship, to Tabini, to Bren, to safety⁠—these all come into play as the situation changes dramatically and rapidly. But Bren's job here shows the old adage about war⁠—two seconds of terror and hours of waiting. Cherryh focuses in on the terror instead of letting the waiting drag the novel down. Bren wonders what he can do, then he does that, instead of wringing his hands at being unable to do anything. It's a theme that rings true in my life too.

“You, nadi,” he said to Banichi, “ought to be asleep.”
“A superfluous habit,” Banichi said. “Conducive to ignorance.”

I love this great book. Cherryh writes to her strengths without relying on her experience⁠—she writes a strong story and world that doesn’t offer fan-service. For me, this book exists in the same sentences as her best work. This exciting tale engages adventure, physical danger, complex political conspiracy, technology and environment providing vastly different characters and cultures, and deep personal insight to carry me away. I read the third third in a single sitting, last night, until 1 AM. I look forward to starting the next book tonight. This tour de force creates a book I intend to constantly refer to for my views of how to write well. Perhaps some small concession to showing the routine of the Phoenix crew would help new Cherryh readers, but I doubt it is necessary.

Inheritor by CJ Cherryh

This third book in the Foreigner series closes the first trilogy’s arc. It shows why Bren has been promoted and promoted by Tabini. It concludes the conflict between Bren and the Human Heritage group, as well as between Tabini and the atevi aiming to take him out. It starts six months after the landing of the two humans from the spaceship Pheonix, and unfortunately the start is rough. Cherryh spends two full chapters rehashing what came before, filling in the reader on the six past months. And this intro-info-dump detracts from the novel to me. I’m feeling that this series should have books that build on each other, not stand-alone novels, and that she's torn between the two strategies. But, once Cherryh gets into the story, some real magic happens.

You couldn’t say that human word ‘border,’ either, to limit off the land passing under them. An atevi map didn’t really have boundaries. It had land ownership—sort of. It had townships, but their edges were fuzzy. You said ‘province,’ and that was close to lines on a map, and it definitely had a geographical context, but it didn’t mean what you thought it did if you were a hard-headed human official trying to force mainland terms into Mospheiran boxes. So whatever he had experienced down there, it didn’t have edges, as the land didn’t have edges, as overlapping associations didn’t have edges.

One of the strengths of this book is that Bren and Jase have a touchy relationship. Bren’s optimism at having Jase around turns sour when Jase doesn’t offer friendship or bring a good attitude—understandable to a human raised on a spaceship coming to a planet for the first time this late in life, but necessarily quite frustrating to his teacher. Everything is offputting to him: scheduling conflicts, the food, movement, weather, a horizon. Add ontop that Jase is learning a complex culture and language, and Jase is way out of his depth and unsure what is happening around him. He takes plans made on inadequate information to be Bren breaking his trust, and this mutual distrust guides much of the novel. The central question to this thread could be paraphrased, “how to repair a relationship with a power differential that got off to a bad start.”

The stirrings of affection that good actions made in a human heart.

As Cherryh tends to do, this engaging theme plays out across the backdrop of the whole novel—almost every single scene ends up informing, progressing, frustrating, or affecting this theme. I enjoy writers who take a complex situation and change it over the course of a book. If done well, readers will follow. Cherryh does it well by making it more complex. Jase and Bren have breakthroughs, setbacks, distractions, misunderstandings—and the more the reader sees, the more complex in their mind the situation is. Sometimes a key piece of information—like Jase's father's death's fictionality—is left as a mystery to the reader until much later in the novel, when everything suddenly falls into place. Also, the other parts of this novel, the other major threads running through it, inform the stakes of their relationship, inform the state of it as effectively as the two humans do. Everything informs everything else in Cherryh’s novels, and I couldn’t be more happy to read her work.

Let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to his imagination. That was the plan. It was, though he hadn’t thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species had in common.

A second theme, and one that Jase and Bren share, is distance from family leading to reprioritizing familial connections. Their jobs keep them away from family. When Jase’s father dies—though that ends up being a codeword for Yolanda needing an escape from Mospheira—Bren struggles to comfort him, as Bren’s family is currently going through death threats and midnight phone call annoyances. Neither Jase nor Bren can do anything about either situation. This powerlessness forces both to face the possibility that something else is more important in their lives, and that’s an uncomfortable place to be. Bren believes in the greater good of broad peace. Jase believes in his own excession-ship emergency. For both, it’s a matter of do the job and give their families the best chance possible, or don’t do the job and everybody could die, including their families.

In such moments he asked himself what potentially disastrous and crazy idea he’d given his life to serve.

And that’s one thing this novel does well: tie up threads leftover from earlier books. Why did the ship come back? We now know because there is a threat within twenty light years. Will Bren and Jago ever sex? Yes. As awkward as human-alien intercourse inherently seems, after three books building it up, and a scant couple of paragraphs of sex-scene, it’s at least understandable, at least been foreshadowed enough, at least contextualized enough after the fact to not be seen as wish fulfillment. Will Human Heritage get control of all human government? No, but that’s the plot of this novel and becomes a close-run-thing. Will Tabini be able to gather enough allies to his side and overcome threats to his throne? Yes, but it requires the help of unexpected allies and personal danger to many.

“We suspect everything.” They had reached the doors. “We act on what we know.”

This tying up of threads reveals things that recast aspects of the first two novels. A mystery throughout was why Bren kept getting more and more political power. Well, this book finally explains it. Bren’s actions have directly led to Tabini gaining more allies. Ilsidi came to Tabini’s side through Bren’s explanations, actions, willingness to be tested, and forgiveness of his broken arm from the kidnapped interrogation. Geigi came to Tabini through Bren’s actions, even though those actions were largely accidental, his instincts led him to the right place. The island of Dur. The atevi public. The Assassin’s Guild. These things didn’t necessarily make sense to Bren or the reader throughout either, but by the end of this book, they do—again, Cherryh's tightly focused, third person narrative relies on the main character gaining understanding for the reader to.

Go to the leader. Always go to the leader when the bullets start to fly: rally to the leader.

And this recasting of earlier actions and motivations helps Cherryh resolve the book, gives closure. Sometimes it’s a character explaining things to Bren, sometimes it’s Bren taking those explanations and extrapolating what he learned about atevi from them into other mysteries. And sometimes it’s new information, like Jase’s end-of-book reveal about a potential rival in space. In her earlier works, Cherryh would often rehash circumstances through interior monologue, to explain to the reader what new information meant to older actions. Here she does the same, but spread across three books instead of just one. It’s a tactic that keeps me reading Cherryh, even though it sometimes manifests as a horrid intro-info-dump.

And in that one simple example he saw why humans could become so disruptive of atevi society in so short a time, just by existing, and dragging into their liking persons who really, never, ever should be associated with them in the atevi sense. Humans had created havoc without knowing the social destruction they were wreaking on the foundations of society where people could be badly bent out of their comfortable associations.

At the end of this book, I was thrilled with the series so far. But those first two chapters did detract from this book. The pacing was strange because of them. Usually there’s some action to grab the reader’s attention right off, followed by a slow rise in comprehension and tension, then an explosion of action to end the book. Here there’s just the slow rise to explosion, and it doesn’t work as well for me. Maybe she thought that because this is the third in a trilogy, the action at the end of the last book sufficed to draw the reader into this third book. And it did for me. But it also means that this book isn’t great. It’s good, but not great. Even after three books, the characters still grow, and the aliens still feel alien. Brilliant writing. In the way that everything is interconnected, this is a complex book of political conspiracies and personal relationships—just what I want.

So if their languages didn’t say quite the same thing and their bodies didn’t quite match and the niches they made that said this person satisfies enough requirements to make me happy were just a little different-shaped in their psyches, the center of that design might match, leaving just the edges hanging off. But didn’t his relationship with Barb have unmatched edges? Didn’t every close relationship?

One last thing to note here is that Cherryh seems to have grown comfortable with her world. Instead of constantly saying that some numbers are good and others are bad to the atevi, here she starts to give examples: three is good, four and two are bad. This also comes out in her word choices, as she starts to let some really beautiful sentences inhabit the novel. For example, near the end she writes, "The vast dish passed behind them, the dusk deepened to near dark, and the company stayed close around the dowager as they rode." That’s a really well written sentence, hinting at the context in ways understandable to the reader: the vastness of the central communication station on the planet looking out to the vastness of space, the timing of their arrival at dusk, the priorities and associations of the people who surround the dowager. And yet the sounds it creates are pleasing to my ear, despite being a summarized list of sorts, setting a scene, closing another scene. All that consonance will grab my attention every time.

That office building out there, the Maganuri Building, built to house the study committees proposed by the legislators opposed to the growth of government, was beginning to be plagued by sewer and electrical problems. The opposition blamed sabotage by Tabini’s agents, or by the old aristocracy, a wide range of conspiracy indeed, and no few of the commons avoided it and wouldn’t attend committee meetings there because of the reputed bad numbers.

A couple more quotes I wrote down while reading:

It was a risk. Their whole lives were a risk. But you limited them where you could.

A written mistake might fall into the hands of news services interested in catching the paidhi in such an infelicity. The press daren’t take on the aiji, mustn’t, in fact; but a lord of the Association was a fair target; and in less than a year he’d become such a person—protected, still, in certain ways, but increasingly fair game if he made a blunder that saw print.

As a minor court official, again, he’d been immune from such public relations assassinations. As a major player in affairs of state, he, like the aiji, was a target of such manipulators, and his strike in return was a standing order for commendations to any clerical who by handwriting, postal mark, or other clues, identified one of these nuisances by name, handwriting, and residence and posted them to others in the pool.

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.

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.]