What I Did With My Winter Break
Nothing that I expected to do, but life is like that, isn’t it? Family stuff, illness, reading, a lot of cat cuddles and dog snuggles. As I write this, Mr. Twinkle, our resident major-domo, is sitting on my lap, purring and, occasionally, with a well-placed claw or particularly energetic head-butt, letting me know when scritches would be welcome. When he’s bored, he growls at Kaiser, who is a sweetheart but perhaps the dumbest dog this side of Grinch. Poor Kaiser just doesn’t understand why Mr. Twinkle doesn’t love him as much as he loves Mr. Twinkle.
Three species, sharing a house. And getting along well, most of the time. Three species in one house: not unlike the books I’m starting with tonight.
I read a lot of good stuff this break, and it was a real pleasure. After I graduated with my BA in English, I found that I had lost the art of reading for fun. It was a chore; it was work, and I had trouble turning off the analytics in my head and enjoying reading again. Same thing happened after grad school. For a long time, reading was Not Fun. Writing was work.
But given time, all things revert to their mean. I still read analytically, automatically as it turns out now, but that analytic response is muted, secondary to the simple pleasure of a well-built story, a finely-tuned sentence, graceful language that pleases the mind’s ear, the chance to drop into someone else’s world and life.
So. When I wasn’t writing here at Castle Dracula, I spent my winter break reading, just for fun. Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, a fictionalized biography of the great samurai, written in a style unlike any I’ve read before that falls in my “And Now For Something Completely Different” category; James Clapper’s Facts and Fears for my non-fiction street cred; S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst — extremely interesting book that runs on multiple narrative tracks — and C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series.
All of it. In one gulp. Nineteen books.
Which is what I want to start talking about tonight. Foreigner. Not exactly fantasy, but not exactly science fiction, either. At some point, all the SF designations in the genre start to bleed into each other, anyway, and we’ll talk about, too, down the road, because I’ve been reading some fascinating theory about Speculative Fiction as an umbrella that covers a lot of SF. But tonight, I want to write about binge-reading Foreigner.
Introducing the Mighty Beast
The first volume, Foreigner, published by DAW in 1994, sets an enormous, sprawling story in motion. The first section reads like an enormous preface, one explaining how a ship full of humans went astray in hyperspace, got completely lost, and built themselves a space station at the top of a gravity well revolving around an inhabited world whose residents had only just managed steam power. Their ship went off to explore, looking for a way home, and didn’t come back. Eventually the stationers abandoned their home in the skies and parachuted down to the planet, meeting the neighbors, the atevi.
Fast forward a few hundred years. There’s been a war, humans against atevi, and the humans lost. They live now, technologically sophisticated, on the large island of Mospheira, while the atevi on the mainland deal with the humans through one selected translator, a paidhi. And the new paidhi is a young man, Bren Cameron, assigned to serve the new aji, or leader of the atevi, a charismatic young ateva named Tabini. Politics worthy of a Byzantine court, suspect loyalties and motives, all thrown into confusion when the ship, overdue for some 200 years, returns. And in the middle of it all, Bren, trying to figure things out and keep a step ahead of everyone who’s trying to kill him.
That’s pretty much the Readers’ Digest Condensed Version of how it starts. Since 1994, every couple of years Cherryh has added a new volume to the story, and since 2009 it’s been an annual event. Currently nineteen volumes in print, all focusing on Bren and his evolving role in the atevi court.
Obviously, there are practical considerations to reading a near-twenty volume work (and these are not small books — they average a bit above 100,000 words per volume — meaty novels in every sense), and practical considerations in planning and executing a story that spans nineteen volumes, with a twentieth currently in production. How to keep the readers’ attention, for one. How to avoid repetition (more on this later). How to sustain tension without falling into the trap of constantly upping the stakes to levels that defy all credulity.
How to write the series so that someone who stumbles into the middle of it can catch on without having to go back to square one right off, which many readers will never do?
That’s what I did. I went to a local book fair, a long-running seasonal business that has let me build a library on slender resources. I happened on a book in the Science Fiction section, one that took my eye because the cover was, what I would charitably call, Great American Cheese Whiz.
We’ve got the pretty boy in the white coat with the lace and the coffee-table book (actually, it’s a computer, but I didn’t know that), the enormous figure in the big shoulder pads, and in the background, someone who looked remarkably like the Bride of the Crypt-keeper, along with smoke, fire and devastation. That cover had it all going on.
I mean, rarely have I opened a book with lower expectations — I think the last time was Venus on the Half-Shell — and rarely have I been so pleasantly surprised at the quality of the novel. It was Volume 7, and I was aboard for the series. I went back to the beginning and filled in the blanks, and then on, one volume every couple of months for a few years, until I caught up.
And, I have to say, thoroughly hooked and charmed.
I’m not so hot about what some critics have written, that the series is mostly about manners, people discussing politics over tea, and the occasional shoot-out. There’s a lot more to Foreigner than your average entertaining British cozy mystery. For the next few weeks, I’d like to discuss some of the things that are at work in the series, issues of identity, humanity, alienation, and language. The series has been called “anthropological science fiction,” which label fits well, since at its heart, the novels are about what it means to be human in a non-human world, a narrative that questions how much of human nature is universal to sentient beings and how much we can chalk up to our own wacky species. And it’s about whether human nature is mutable, under what forces can people change.
So, on a cold winter afternoon when I was recovering from a particularly nasty cold, I went back to Volume 1 and started to binge-read. I learned a few things particular to the Foreigner Series.
It Wasn’t Meant to be Read Like This
Cherryh has a particular challenge: how to write so as not to alienate new readers who stumbled in, like I did. There has to be enough backstory to orient and engage a new reader, or someone coming to the new book a year or more since reading the last book. And after nineteen volumes, that’s a lot of backstory.
The level of repetition is tedious, no argument. Or it was, in the first couple of volumes. Over time, however, Cherryh develops backstory as a narrative device. With each repetition, there’s another layer, another perspective, the addition of at least one salient detail that shifts the reader’s understanding of the event. Ramirez’s motivations, for example, in establishing, leaving, returning to and finally abandoning Reunion Station unfold slowly over time; Bren’s understanding of the disaster at Reunion develops as he digs deeper, sifts through lies and subterfuge and cross-motivations, until he comes to understand the magnitude of subversion, misplaced assumptions and simple bad luck that slagged the station.
So, yeah. The short version: lots of repetition in what one might uncharitably call info-dumping or, were one in a friendlier frame of mind, backstory. You wouldn’t notice it so much if you didn’t, say, read all nineteen volumes in nineteen days. But you also wouldn’t notice the slow building of detail and shifting of perspective that Cherryh achieves. Bren collects other characters’ perspectives of events in order to try to achieve some kind of objectivity, not for its own sake, but because other people depend on him for advice, for safety, and at times for existence itself. It’s a skill that becomes essential when the kyo turn up, with their enemy on the other edge of their territory and all that complication entails.
Cajeiri and Damiri also engage in the same activity as they pick their way through atevi politics. It deepens the narrative on all points, if you can read the same story a dozen times, each with a slightly different slant. After a while, the exercise is a bit like Rashomon. There’s a payoff, if you’re patient.
Does Bren Go Atevi?
Throughout the series, his enemies certainly think so. From time to time, Bren questions himself, whether he becomes so acculturated to atevi culture that he loses track of his humanity.
He and his aishid mounted the last steps up to the wooden pier, where cameras and onlookers abounded, spilling onto solid land, behind flimsy yellow barriers. Mospheirans who didn’t work at the airports or shipyards were getting their first-ever firsthand look, not only at atevi, but also seeing one of their own, the human paidhi who had served Mospheira, who had walked the streets of Port Jackson looking no different from themselves, turning up in full-on atevi court dress—which everyone knew he wore, but Mospheira had never seen him in that mode. That he was here now representing atevi interests, as they could well guess, that was what the paidhi-aiji was supposed to do, but Mospheirans had never had that called to their attention—until now—and they had to figure what to make of it—along with the news that atevi had done the negotiating with the kyo. Atevi weren’t exactly enemies. But they were the majority. They weren’t enemies. But they notoriously didn’t understand the word friendship.
And atevi hadn’t set foot officially on Mospheira in two centuries.
So what did it mean? they might ask themselves. The paidhiin had been the go-betweens for them for two hundred years, the only go-betweens, and here was their paidhi not going between any longer, but coming ashore with an armed atevi guard, and getting an official welcome from their President, to talk about what had just happened up in the heavens? What did it mean for them?
He couldn’t be what he had been—not when he wore what he wore now. He maintained the demeanor of an atevi official, the solemnity of an atevi official.
(Convergence, 2017, pp. 86-87)
When Bren reflects on his own nature, he reminds himself he has ties to Mospheira that he trusts to keep him culturally stable: his brother Toby, his adopted brother Jase, his friend Shawn Tyers, but mostly Toby.
“My mind is stuck somewhere between the kyo—and atevi—and ship-folk and stationers. I need this passage. I need to take a few slow breaths and reconnect with Mospheira. I need to speak Mosphei’, and hear the accent.”
“We don’t have an accent,” Toby said. Old joke. Toby was trying to drag him back to sense. Which was what Toby could do.
(Convergence, pp. 57-58)
But there’s no doubt that Bren culturally becomes atevi, and not just in title as Tabini names him the Lord of Najida and Lord of the Heavens. There’s the question of where home is, and it’s clear that, when all of Najida turns out to welcome the paidhi home from space and his triumphant negotiations with the kyo on behalf of the atevi and humans, Bren has planted his stake:
God only knew how so very many people had gotten to this remote train station, or how they proposed to get back, but here they were.
He bowed. He gave a profound, lengthy bow, and the people fell silent and bowed. He looked up and the solemnity remained all around him.
He touched his heart. “One is profoundly affected, nadiin-ji. This is my home. This, above all other places, has become my home. Thank you. Thank you all.”
(Convergence, p. 49)
Of course, identity is not as simple or clear as where home lies. That’s where we’ll pick up next week, looking at human nature in the Foreigner universe.
If you haven’t yet found it, Kossack wkernochan has been writing a series of close readings of Lord of the Rings that’s original, thoughtful, and very interesting. A new diary almost every evening, and all well-done. You should check it out: Tolkien’s LOTR Like You’ve Never Heard It.
Notes
The entire Foreigner series by C. J. Cherryh has been published by DAW, beginning in 1994. The twentieth volume, Resurgence, is currently in production.