FOREIGNER: Discussion Post #1

[krait]

Welcome to the first sixty-one pages, everybody! :D Anyone have anything to discuss?

Some ideas, since this is a reread for me (I will try to walk the delicate line between "discussion topics" and "spoilers") and thus certain details stand out to me:

1. This is the only time in the whole novel where we get an ateva's POV; before and after Manadgi, it's through-human-eyes all the way. Thoughts? (Why do it that way? What do we gain, or what is hidden, by Cherryh presenting the first contact through a nonhuman perspective? What do you get out of it, or wish had been included?)

2. While "Books" within books are certainly something I've seen before, the setup in Foreigner has always felt a little odd to me, with two very short "books" -- almost prologues -- prefacing a third, novel-length story. I'm genuinely curious about why it was set up this way! Anyone have any theories?

3. Personal reactions so far? First impressions of the atevi, or the humans of either/both Phoenix and the station?


I'll be back in a little while to post my own reactions; must run a couple of errands first, but I wanted to get the post out there in case anyone else has finished their reading!


Edit To Add: If you wish to take the discussion down a spoilery path, make any spoilery replies here and then link to them, so anyone wishing to avoid spoilers can do so!

Comments

[krait]

Honestly, the thing about female characters? That's really been irksome to me, too! Part of it's a serious limit of the setup of the series -- Bren is the only human allowed amongst atevi, so if he's male we really don't have any way to introduce other human female characters except through his infrequent visits to Mospheira... At the least till later books manage to widen the cast.

On the other hand, a few people have noticed that Bren himself reads as "codedly female" in this series: oddly enough, I was discussing it with someone a couple weeks ago on another comm.

reads rather more like hard-ish sf to me

I think that's mostly the prologues? -- once Bren and his very human perspective enter the picture, it's much more about him and his character and the way he interacts with the atevi culture. :D

I think my hard-sf-ness has improved since I first read this series, though! I remember not really understanding much of the ship part when I first read it, but it was clearer to me this time! (A "mass" is anything large enough to register significantly on readings -- could be a sun, could be a lump of rock. Basically the point is that it can be sensed by instrumentation and thus used to navigate. In the Chanur series, ships have to have a mass to aim for when they enter jump; otherwise the ship doesn't know where to come out of hyperspace and will just keep going. And the entire reason the hani have autonomy as a species is because there happened to be a cold, dead lump of rock on one of their borders with enough mass to serve as a jump point; otherwise they would be dependent on routes travelling through their ally's space.)

Haha, actually, I think the Chanur series is the reason I know what a "mass" is in terms of interstellar travel. :D Also haha the Foundation trilogy! I liked the third book, I think.

Wonder if some of the tell-not-show is related to that whole 'added afterward' thing? A sort of, "my editor says I should do this, so I banged out something quickly while I was focused on an explanation instead of a story"? Or, at least, "I don't want to invest in building a bunch of likeable characters whom I know will only get ten pages and then never show up again"?

Hmm.

[cheyinka]

Cherryh writes a lot of really vulnerable/helpless male characters - there's Bren, who is the size of an eight-year-old atevi child and probably not as strong, there's Tully from the Chanur books, who is fragile-skinned compared to the hani and unable to communicate with them except through very-imperfect machine translation, there's, uh, the azi in Downbelow Station whose name I forget... even to some extent there's Justin and Grant in Cyteen and Regenesis, who are really at the mercy of everyone around them until spoilery things happen and a teenaged girl takes them under her protection!

I'm having a really hard time remembering where one book ends and the other begins, in my mental recollection of the series, but it didn't feel to me like there weren't a lot of women. Thinking about it now, though, I think it's not until #3 or #4 that we get a human woman who's noteworthy for something other than being attached to Bren in some way. :/

[pebblerocker]

Ahh, thank you for the quick FTL explanation, I now have some grasp of the process :o)

Interesting point about Bren being coded female. When I first read the book I was really enjoying reading about the main character being in a world where everyone is bigger, stronger and more violent than he is, and it wasn't until ages later that I realised it's because that's the world I live in and I'm identifying with him unusually well because of it.