This third section starts, quite literally, with a bang, as Bren is forced to defend himself against an unknown assassin, using a gun he just received as a gift from Tabini, an important atevi leader whose association has benefited the most from contact and trade with the human colony. About two hundred years have passed since the human/atevi war that created this delicate balance. A combination of translator, observer, and diplomat, the paidhi position is an essential link between the two cultures and the only human allowed to leave the island where humanity has settled. These two sections only account for about one seventh of the novel (about 60 of my paperback’s 420 or so pages) and should probably be considered something like a prologue to the entire series, because it’s only afterwards that the real story gets started.Īs the third section of Foreigner begins, we meet Bren, the human paidhi who lives with the alien atevi. The first two sections of Foreigner fast-forward through their journey, their arrival in the new system, the horrific challenges they face as they realize there is no way home. A human colony ship got lost in space after a bad hyperspace jump. And that, dear reader, is the reason you’re seeing a review of a book that’s almost twenty years old on this blog today.įoreigner is essentially a first contact story about aliens landing on a planet and having to learn to deal with its inhabitants. So I decided to treat myself to a reread of those first six books. When I decided to indulge and pick up one of her older books (“indulge” because there were about twenty new books I should have been reading instead), I was tempted to go for book seven of the Foreigner series, but quickly realized that I just didn’t remember enough detail from the earlier books. I read the first six books in the Foreigner universe practically back to back, then for some reason completely lost track of the series for over a decade. For some reason, it’s been a few years since I picked up one of Cherryh’s books.

I’ve read about three dozen of Cherryh’s novels the only authors I’ve read more individual works by are Pratchett and, maybe, L.E. My history with this series is a bit confused.

That’s fifteen books going on sixteen, in case anyone else is in the mood for a nice meaty SF series. When I first read it, some time in the early 2000’s when the series only consisted of six books, I had no idea that this story would turn out to be five arcs of three books each, with the fifteenth novel due out in 2014 and the first book of a sixth arc reportedly in the works. Foreigner is the opening volume of what has turned out to be C.J.

Cherryh foreigner