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FOREIGNER: Discussion Post #7
Aaaaaaaaaand we have finally come to the end of things! This is the discussion post for chapter 14-16, our final section.
I hope everyone has had fun -- I've definitely loved the entire experience, and thank you all very much for being such amazing co-readers! :D Congratulations on making it all the way through.
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Thoughts on the last section: has it gone in directions you expected at the beginning? Has your view of Bren, the atevi, or anyone else changed dramatically? Do you have a favourite part, or a least-favourite section? Things you still want to know? Secret yearnings to ride mecheita-back over the mountains (or to never set foot near such a beast)? :D
I hope everyone has had fun -- I've definitely loved the entire experience, and thank you all very much for being such amazing co-readers! :D Congratulations on making it all the way through.
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Thoughts on the last section: has it gone in directions you expected at the beginning? Has your view of Bren, the atevi, or anyone else changed dramatically? Do you have a favourite part, or a least-favourite section? Things you still want to know? Secret yearnings to ride mecheita-back over the mountains (or to never set foot near such a beast)? :D
Reactions to the end section
You know, if this was fanfic, the author's motivations would be awfully familiar to me in all these scenes of her pretty-haired main character getting tied up and beaten and rained on and frightened and cold. Surely pro writers don't have such unseemly fascinations, I keep thinking! But with the amount of punishment Bren takes through the series, perhaps some of them do.
Without any relevant training Bren did very well (and/or was very lucky) to evade the search parties. The assassin school should give him a few courses in this sort of thing! Banichi and Jago mainly want him to learn to obey them in situation where their expertise is relevant, and stop running around unpredictably under fire, but from the bedroom intrusion to the Wigairiin fight he's acquitted himself surprisingly well -- and his guards can't always be around him.
Banichi and Jago turning up at the last possible second deserves an epic orchestral score! Hooray, they're saved! I didn't remember exactly what happened in this part so it was edge-of-seat reading for me again.
Everyone seems much happier with Bren on the plane on the way out. They're all more relaxed now that they're out of immediate danger and they've got the paidhi in their hands in one piece, but are they also pleased with him for showing much more understandable and admirable reactions than he has been? Bren giving himself up to save Ilisidi makes perfect sense to atevi, even though he's not feeling exactly what they would; are they all happier with him now he's apparently revealed where his man'chi lies and is behaving rationally?
Oh, a thought hits -- now that he's shown that he'll run to Ilisidi's side in crisis, does it mean that he's a potential opponent to Tabini, no longer Tabini's man as he's always claimed? What ARE the atevi on the plane thinking of him? I don't remember if this is explicitly discussed in the next book or not.
Re: Reactions to the end section
Re: Reactions to the end section
Especially since Ilisidi seems set to live forever. She must continue to be around so that Cherryh has an easy pool of young men to pick from!
Re: Reactions to the end section
I think it's really interesting what the paidhi's training does and doesn't include! Lessons in how to protect one's computer; but no weapons training, and nothing on how to evade detection, and living-off-the-land isn't something they have to keep current on. It's almost like they want paidhiin in trouble to die, so long as they lock their tech up first...
much happier with Bren on the plane on the way out
I halfway cracked up and halfway boggled when Bren said, "You were mad at me" and Jago replied "No". Just "no", as if no explanation were required! Clearly there's something even Bren's not interpreting, here...
Oooh, I just went back and read the plane bit, and this time I noticed this:
Bren caught a breath and slumped, bloody as he was, into the airplane seat, with Banichi and Cenedi in eye-to-eye confrontation and everyone on the plane but him and Jago in Ilisidi's man'chi.
"Him and Jago" -- that's Banichi and Jago. Not Bren. Bren's counting himself under Ilisidi's man'chi, most definitely!
does it mean that he's a potential opponent to Tabini
Well, at this point Ilisidi has betrayed her co-conspirators and is working on Tabini's side, intending to return his lost human to him. So maybe right now they've essentially written it off as "he's doing what Tabini wants, for whatever reason; let's make that happen and worry about his ultimate loyalty later"?
I think it does come up in later books, but not in the next one. So I'm putting this comment in the spoiler thread to be safe.
And thanks to our host!
Actually I think I'd really like a mecheiti ride through the wilderness, if no bombs were falling and there wasn't too much rain.
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"Leaving [the computer] for anyone else was asking too much of Fortune and relying far too much on Chance." So it seems
And then Bren goes to make sure the shot ateva is dead before leaving him - once again, the human desire to "leave no one behind". Bren, these people want you dead, I think the ateva would have been okay with being found by someone who isn't one of the rebels, if he'd been alive! :[
I love the "false password equals mixed up everything" setting - much nicer than "wrong password erases everything", which is, I think, the best we have now.
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Heh, yeah, definitely -- give me the omega-wolf mecheita, please! One who's not going to try to shove her way forward through the herd while careening down hills. :D
I loved the computer stuff, too -- and it makes much more sense, at least in a preserve-the-owner's-life way! Scrambling means they might take time to take the computer to an expert; erased would just mean you throw it away and kill (or try to torture the missing info out of) its owner. Not to mention that, if said owner does manage to escape, he might need the computer again! So erasing it would reduce his chances of surviving after an escape/arranging for pickup.
I want Bren's setup on my own computer. :D
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Thoughts and observations:
1. Mecheiti can be induced to ignore herd-ranking, at least for a little while!? Wonder what exactly this says about atevi...
2. That, thousands of years after humans took to the stars, Shakespeare is still taught and cherished - delights me. :D To be or not to be, that is indeed the question Bren's facing at the moment.
3. Bren checks the bodies of the guards to make absolutely sure he's not leaving an injured person behind -- ♥ ♥ Never mind that his own survival is rather more critical to an entire species than the life of one of Ilisidi's security (and that he's not a medic, and probably couldn't do anything for a critically injured man anyway, in the dark and unsupplied), he still checks. I think that's rather touching, and also evocative given his self-acknowledged distance from human relationships -- he wants to be alone (that is, in his mind, the same as "without my mother and without Barb"), but he still can't bring himself to leave someone alone, even an ateva, whom we already know do leave their own behind when they have to. Pretty human of him!
4. On the Bren-as-bridge, and leaning toward Bren-understanding-atevi, front: on page 400 he recounts arguing with Hanks over the "country associations", that they matter to the aiji and to the Western Association as a whole; two pages later, he muses that man'chi isn't just duty, but also a grouping-instinct, "the drive that held the company together".
By that definition, Bren seems to have it. In spades. :D
5. The numbers of the plane, which can hold "ten plus crew" -- a human-made number, given its infelicity? Wonder if the ateva who protests that it holds "up to" ten and crew is a strict number-counter, trying to weasel around the infelicitous ten? Slight spoilers for later books; it reminded me of another instance of number-weaseling.
6. The uses of 'nadi' caught my attention when the dowager says something to Bren. According to the index, one says "nadi" along with every distinct statement, to convey politeness; we've seen it a lot in this book, for sure! Nonetheless, we haven't seen it as often as we might have, and sometimes it's absent in situations where the tone otherwise seems polite and the receiver doesn't seem offended. So: is the author omitting it sometimes because she doesn't want our eyes to burn out? :D Is Bren just not registering it because he's so used to it? (It's certainly included in his own speeches...) Is Bren being subtly human, and not noticing its absence so long as the person in question isn't shouting/otherwise being outright offensive?
7. This reading is the first time I really noticed that half-paragraph about Hanks: in Shejidan for a week without a word to the FO, like she'd been "dropped in a black hole"? What has Tabini done to/with her, and what is she experiencing? She's probably terrified out of her mind, even if all he's done is lock her in Bren's old apartment with a pair of "servants" to keep her there... I don't think I've ever felt sympathy for Hanks before, but she's living a small slice of Bren's nightmare (I'm cut off from the FO, nobody knows where I am, I have no way to communicate with home or influence the events/atevi going on around me, and there is no hope of rescue). Yikes.
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I'm giving up on commenting coherently on the rest of the posts, but wanted to stop and say thanks for organizing this - I did read a whole novel front to back, a much too rare occurrence these days, and it was something I wouldn't have chosen on my own, and it was something I wasn't particularly thrilled with, so I was challenged, which is good, too :o)
The biggest reason why the book didn't work for me, if you want to know (when I like something, I'm not always interested in the details of why other people didn't - I like my squee unharshed, *g*), is the tell, don't show. I felt like 90-95% of the book was tell instead of show, and not just tell, but tell and re-telling. Like, something would happen (the precious 5-10% show) or have happened in the past (more tell, *sigh*), and then Bren would think about what happened. What could have happened. What should have happened. And just in case we missed it, what did happen, again! It didn't work for me.
Also, Atevi society and mentality was somewhat clearer at the end of the novel, but for the largest part I really struggled understanding how it worked/they thought, and it was too hard a struggle with too few answers to be very satisfying for me.
But again, I'm happy I read it, so thanks!
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why the book didn't work for me, if you want to know
I do! I'm always curious about what other readers do/seek/dislike/need in a (sci-fi or fantasy) novel. :D
something would happen [...] Bren would think about what happened. What could have happened. What should have happened.
This is... partly something of a trend with Cherryh, I think. I do remember that the first novel I read by her was the first in the Chanur series, and I had trouble following it -- until everything was laid out and explained in the last twenty-five pages or so. And that that seemed to be how the next two worked, too. Useful to clueless!teenage!me, who was a bit in over my head regarding things like jump-point mass and how to follow implications/nuances in inter-alien communication; but also sort of grating/annoying, because I had to wait for The Explanation instead of following the story. Now that I'm older and love the Chanur series, I suspect it's just something Cherryh does habitually; wonder if she was an English major, who never dropped the habit of "repeat your thesis in the conclusion"? :D
The other thing is, well, I think it's partly Bren's own nature -- I remember someone commented that he seemed to do best when he just reacted instead of thinking too much, and I replied that that was rare because Bren is always thinking! In six directions at once. Including doubting himself, which is mentioned a couple times in the book -- that a decent paidhi has to continually double-check his own thinking because the languages don't overlap neatly and it's very hard to strain the instinctive human responses out of your, well, responses.
Which brings up why Cherryh would decide to write so cerebral and questioning a character... maybe because it's already her own natural impulse to dissect and explain? *grins*
I think I must have adapted to her unusual pacing somewhere between Chanur and Foreigner; at least, on my last reread of Chanur I didn't really notice the things that had bugged me before, re: her habit of summarising (and, now you bring it up, Pyanfar's habit of thinking out every possible doublecross and consequence).
Erm, don't let me put you off the possibility of reading Chanur, though? :D Nonhuman-POV first contact! Whyyyyyyy are there not more of them?!
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Instead I need to remember to track down Nor Crystal Tears at some point!