On first looking into C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner

[bibliogramma]

I have no idea why it’s taken me this long to read C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner. It’s not as if I hadn’t read some of her other books, years ago. It’s not as if I didn’t know she was a total genius at writing alien cultures (the Faded Sun books are among my favourite sf books, period, and at least partly for that reason). It’s not as if I hadn’t read dozens of reviews of the book (and the series that follows it) and references to it over the years that would have been more than enough to pique my fancy. It’s not as if I had some bizarre idea that I wouldn’t like it.

It’s just that, somehow, I’d never actually gone into a store, picked up the book, bought it, brought it home and read it.

Well, that’s all changed.

As part of my current project to finally read all the books I knew I wanted to read but somehow never got around to actually doing it, I have now acquired and read Foriegner. It was everything I’d expected from a Cherryh book about the contact of cultures, the awareness of alienness, the politics of difference. It was brilliant, and of course I plan to acquire and all the other books in the series now (I figure one a month for the next year will bring me up to date).

What can one say about a masterpiece, especially when I suspect that almost everyone reading this has already read the book and agrees with my feeling of “well, damn, there she’s gone and blown me away again”?

For the few who don’t know the book, the set-up is this: a human colony ship, using kind of hyperjump technology, goes far off track and ends up in a part of the galaxy far from Earth, far from their original destination, with no idea where they are, no way to go back and limited resources to keep on going. They head for the closest star that appears likely to have a habitable planet, and find a world already inhabited by an intelligent species, the atevi who are well on their way to industrialisation but still a long way from spaceflight.

What to do now? They have the automated equipment on board to build a space station, so they do that, to provide themselves a base. The colonists, for the most part, decide that the only thing to do is go down to the planet (a one-way trip, as they will have to built a society capable of early space flight – either on their own, or with the planet’s inhabitants, before they can get off the planet again) and try to establish a small colony somewhere that won’t be too intrusive or have too much of an effect on the atevi. The crew decide to use what resources the have or can acquire from asteroids to keep on exploring in the general region.

Skip forward 200 years. Contact with the atevi has had its problems, and some degree of violence, but has now settled into an uneasy peace between the human colony, isolated on an island, atevi. The humans have formed a trade alliance with the most powerful of the atevi social and political units known as associations (Cherryh being the exceptional writer of alien cultures that she is, not only is their cultural and political diversity among the atevi, but their high-level social organising structure is not what we think of as a nation), and they as slowly and very carefully exchanging scientific knowledge for survival, hoping to bring the atevi to a point where it will be possible for them to regain spaceflight using the atevi’s industrial capacity while trying to behave ethically and steering the atevi away from the negative consequences of an unchecked industrialisation such as Earth experienced.

Of course, there is also the problem of communicating scientific worldviews across species and cultural borders – Cherryh raises the interesting question of whether science is indeed a universal language, as many have argued, or whether the physiological nature of the organs of thought and perception in different species, the different psychological structures that will develop in beings with different biologies and hence different mating, reproductive, parenting and other behaviours, and the different cultures that can evolve among aliens, with alien brains and minds, living in alien environments, means that certain elements of scientific knowledge will be seen and used differently.

The novel focuses on the experiences of Bren Cameron, the latest in a series of paid-hi, humans who serve as translator-diplomat-advisors to the ruler of the powerful western association, which is one of the key political units among the atevi. It is his job to try to interpret, not just language, but culture and science, between the two very different species, one of which is native to the planet and numerous, the other of which is an isolated colony of interlopers with superior scientific knowledge, in such a manner as to avoid war and ecological or economic disaster.

And of course, the biggest dangers in what he’s trying to do aren’t so much what he doesn’t know about the atevi, but what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know, and what he thinks he knows, but doesn’t.