Rereading Foreigner & Invader
Sep. 23rd, 2022 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitI keep meaning to post about rereading the Foreigner series, and instead I keep rereading. I'm moving so fast through things that I hardly remember what happened in each book! Oops. Here's some notes on what I remember of my reactions to the first two.
Foreigner really does a great job setting up the worldbuilding; things felt natural and I picked them up as things as I went along.
Malguri is high on my list of fictional places I wish I could visit! Despite the plumbing, heh.
Nokhada!! I love Bren's agonies of learning to ride. :D Both physical, and emotional. Also love that Ilisidi's idea of how to test an alien of unknown loyalties is to throw him on a high-ranked mecheita and find out how he takes to being led over a cliff!
Jago and Banichi become such strong characters right away - the whole situation with Banichi taking the gun from Bren and teling him to say that Banichi fired it, and giving Bren his own gun, launches him right into the emotional centre of everything and it just gets more tangled from there! Jago, too, with her strange, emphatic, I will not betray you at Malguri, and the complex interactions they have with Cenedi. From a rereading perspective, it's fascinating to try to figure out what's going on with them emotionally; I'd say that they are both discovering they might feel man'chi for Bren himself as well as for Tabini, which - if it's true - surely must be quite the gut-punch for themm! Man'chi to their alien charge, who feels no such thing, and on top of that isn't entirely allied with Tabini who holds their primary loyalty? Yikes.
Every time I reread this book, I'm hit all over again by the ending! Now THAT is a good reveal. An entire novel's worth of confusion and doubt suddenly makes sense, and yet on another level all the uncertainty Bren himself feels about the revealed situation is apparent. Mystery judo! Bren and I were confused about why things were happening but certain that the reason was a bad one; now Bren and I are very clear on why everything happened but don't know how to feel about the reason. :D
Excellent titling. There's so much going on there, given the backdrop. Who is the invader? Atevi regard both human presences as invaders; Mospheira is at a fever pitch of fearing atevi attack; and all against the background of Bren's presence on the mainland, the insertion of human technology into atevi society, and the infiltration of Mospheira's political system by xenophobic elements.
Speaking of, there were some bits in this book that were almost too relatable, on the political front.
I give you this:
There were people who'd never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn't their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative party, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money - those whose whole political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn't fit their imaginary past.
And they played to an undereducated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet - which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.
[...]
But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue - because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn't speak Mosphei; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.
Yeah.
Foreigner really does a great job setting up the worldbuilding; things felt natural and I picked them up as things as I went along.
Malguri is high on my list of fictional places I wish I could visit! Despite the plumbing, heh.
Nokhada!! I love Bren's agonies of learning to ride. :D Both physical, and emotional. Also love that Ilisidi's idea of how to test an alien of unknown loyalties is to throw him on a high-ranked mecheita and find out how he takes to being led over a cliff!
Jago and Banichi become such strong characters right away - the whole situation with Banichi taking the gun from Bren and teling him to say that Banichi fired it, and giving Bren his own gun, launches him right into the emotional centre of everything and it just gets more tangled from there! Jago, too, with her strange, emphatic, I will not betray you at Malguri, and the complex interactions they have with Cenedi. From a rereading perspective, it's fascinating to try to figure out what's going on with them emotionally; I'd say that they are both discovering they might feel man'chi for Bren himself as well as for Tabini, which - if it's true - surely must be quite the gut-punch for themm! Man'chi to their alien charge, who feels no such thing, and on top of that isn't entirely allied with Tabini who holds their primary loyalty? Yikes.
Every time I reread this book, I'm hit all over again by the ending! Now THAT is a good reveal. An entire novel's worth of confusion and doubt suddenly makes sense, and yet on another level all the uncertainty Bren himself feels about the revealed situation is apparent. Mystery judo! Bren and I were confused about why things were happening but certain that the reason was a bad one; now Bren and I are very clear on why everything happened but don't know how to feel about the reason. :D
Excellent titling. There's so much going on there, given the backdrop. Who is the invader? Atevi regard both human presences as invaders; Mospheira is at a fever pitch of fearing atevi attack; and all against the background of Bren's presence on the mainland, the insertion of human technology into atevi society, and the infiltration of Mospheira's political system by xenophobic elements.
Speaking of, there were some bits in this book that were almost too relatable, on the political front.
I give you this:
There were people who'd never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn't their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative party, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money - those whose whole political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn't fit their imaginary past.
And they played to an undereducated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet - which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.
[...]
But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue - because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn't speak Mosphei; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.
Yeah.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-24 07:38 am (UTC)Re-reading the earliest books in light of the latest books (I don't know how far behind you are, so I'm going to be vague), you can see instances of "that's gonna be important later" but also sometimes "the author had a better idea and/or retconned later and/or was maybe lying". Knowing how intertwined Ilisidi and her staff become with Bren and his makes the first Malguri section interesting. Also knowing how Bren changes and grows into a role as diplomat and also atevi lord makes poor naive Bren in the early days just so adorable.
My favorite bit from the most recent books are the atevaboos, a term I coined. I had flashbacks to anime club in the early 2000s.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-24 03:41 pm (UTC)Yes, there are definitely "the author had a better idea (or forgot the first idea)" moments that I've noticed or confirmed. Not least of them being that Bren gets blonder as the series goes on: his hair is directly described as "brown" in Foreigner, but by Precursor he is described as "blond," - which, I'm sorry, I just cannot accept. I imprinted hard on first-book Bren, CJ! I can't change my mental image of Bren and I don't want to, either. :P
Atevaboos sound hilarious, and I have been thinking along those lines since finishing Inheritor with its first contacts between atevi and the ship crew on the station; the way everyone adores Ilisidi certainly sets the stage for such things in the future with closer contact.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 06:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-27 02:30 pm (UTC)Every time I reread this book, I'm hit all over again by the ending! Now THAT is a good reveal.
Cherryh is so good at the dramatic reveal that changes everything! She does quite a few of them in this series: Jase, Reunion, etc. I think that's probably one of the reasons it left such an impact on me.
Speaking of, there were some bits in this book that were almost too relatable, on the political front.
Yeah, it was depressingly relevant and accurate.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-29 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-30 07:05 pm (UTC)I need to start again at the beginning before I can read new books published since I last read the series.
Heh, that's why I started this! I was going to reread just the first book, because I realised I was behind and picked up the newest ones. Now it turns out I'm one "latest" later than I thought - a full trilogy - and also my rereading the first book seems to have careened into a full-series reread I hadn't planned on, like Nokhada spotting Babsidi in the distance. :D