FOREIGNER: Discussion Post #1, Spoiler Edition

[krait]

If you have discussion points you wish to bring up but which include spoilers, please post them here. Then link your comment in the general post, so those who want to avoid being spoiled can do so!

Comments

delectable tea!

[cheyinka]

So, in Book Two, Section II, there's a line which, knowing Bren's experiences with cuisine, is... well, it's very something:

There was, in their reliance on food from orbit, a most pressing reason to identify grasses, and dissect seeds, and figure out their processes and their chemistry, where it was like Earth's and where it was different: ecologically different, the Guild had said, probably full of toxins, not to meddle with.

But the Guild was going to be wrong on that one, if the results held—God, the tests were looking good, down to the chemical level where it really counted: there were starches and sugars they recognized, no toxins in the seeds that, the Phoenix histories informed them, could be processed and cooked in ways human beings had done for a staple food for thousands of years.

I really, really wonder when the humans first discovered that plant life, animal life, and atevi food and drinks were the All Alkaloids All the Time Channel. Was it the first meal Ian shared with Manadgi? I mean, if Bren had to worry about not being poisoned by accident, Ian didn't even know that there were foods that would be deadly poison rather than delectable tea. (On the other hand, Ian might have tested everything to make sure he could eat it...)

[pebblerocker]

(Are we spoiling for just the rest of the first novel here, or the whole series? This comment has to do with the third and fourth books IIRC.)

I note that already, 122 years later, Ian thinks of the planet as "the place Taylor found for them" -- already mythologising Taylor as a great hero, saviour of them all, when from what we saw in the first part it was other people who searched out and chose the best place to head for as an escape; they just pointed Taylor at it and he took them there. Later in the series Taylor becomes even more of a heroic figure, and his children are something like demigods. Interesting that station-builders as well as ship-folk think that way.

[blnchflr]

Do later books divulge how/why they got off-course to begin with?