enne📚 reviewed Explorer by C.J. Cherryh (Foreigner, #6)
Explorer
4.0 stars
“They seem perfectly civilized,” she said. “One can hardly see why we have had these difficulties.”
This to me is probably my favorite Foreigner book. If I could put any theme on the whole trilogy, it's that we should meet aliens with politeness and manners, rather than with fear and deception and guns.
In this book, Bren comes into his own as the newly appointed lord of space. He simultaneously feels like it's a paper title but we also get to see how much this continues to separate himself from his own staff; he is buoyed up by the work that they do to support him, but that he realizes that he can no longer (or perhaps never could) interact with them casually, as his presence disrupts them and causes them to focus on what they can do to support him rather than relax.
There's …
“They seem perfectly civilized,” she said. “One can hardly see why we have had these difficulties.”
This to me is probably my favorite Foreigner book. If I could put any theme on the whole trilogy, it's that we should meet aliens with politeness and manners, rather than with fear and deception and guns.
In this book, Bren comes into his own as the newly appointed lord of space. He simultaneously feels like it's a paper title but we also get to see how much this continues to separate himself from his own staff; he is buoyed up by the work that they do to support him, but that he realizes that he can no longer (or perhaps never could) interact with them casually, as his presence disrupts them and causes them to focus on what they can do to support him rather than relax.
There's a lot more action in this book, with Bren doing a rare bit of solo espionage and negotiating on the fly. Not that these books need action to be good, but there's a pacing expectation from the previous books where there's a pile of politics and diplomacy to set the stakes until things break down, secrets escape, and there's a need for diplomacy by other means. I think this lack is one of the things that makes the previous book Defender feel so staid.
Sex indeterminate in folds of skin, if the location of the distinction was involved neither with respiration nor digestion, and the young, connected with that process, had to get out of the body somehow: again, design seemed to follow gravity. He as a pronoun was a convenience, not a firm conviction.
The new aliens are... well, not that alien. Or, like the atevi, they are psychologically alien rather than biologically. There's a lampshading of gosh it's convenient that these aliens can breathe our air and aren't poisoned by our food even if it isn't perfectly ideal.
But also, this is a series about linguistics and psychology and not one about weird biology and gender. That ship sailed in the first book, as much as I complained about it there. It's fine, but I personally also want every alien to be an exploration of gender too.