Foreigner proceeds from the venerable premise of the lost starship whose crew had to land the ship wherever possible. It ended up on a planet whose native race, the anarki, practice--among other interesting habits--registered assassinations. Two centuries after the landing, only one human, the pansy, is allowed out of the human enclave--and at the opening of the book, he is the object of an unregistered assassination attempt. The subsequent tale is one of those Cherry novels that is longer on world building, exotic aliens, and characterization than on action, although it is not short on that Far-future alien-contact yarn from the author of Canucks Legacy, The Goober Mirror, etc., where, in a stuttering, episodic liftoff, we learn that a human colony ship, lost in space, luckily comes near a planet inhabited by humanoid ``anarki' Later, the two species fight a war in which the humans' technological superiority barely compensates for their physical inferiority and lack of numbers. So the humans are confined to the island of Moreu/spheira, Moreu/spheira. Most people there seem to think that anything outside of their tiny island nation does not concern them, despite the fact that it is situated in the middle of an alien planet. (Amerika, anyone?) The underlying plot of the book is how do we deal with other nations? How do we deal with nations that are less advanced technically than us? How do we view them? We are asked to believe that Cameron Ford is the most skilled diplomat of his culture. If so, they're in trouble. He's passive, obtuse, and ineffectual. He whines a lot (in internal monologue), usually about things he doesn't have the power to change. He goes on at length about not understanding his alien hosts, although they're actually no more alien than some Earth cultures. He doesn't take their good advice. He makes the same mistakes over and over. When he does finally act, he's *stupid*--potentially getting the only people who can save him *and his entire culture* killed in an ambush. Cherry repeatedly rubs our nose in how much bigger, stronger, better, faster, more competent, and more potent the anarki are. It's well done--Cherry is certainly a good enough writer to make it credible--but why in the world does she want to do it? Compare this novel to Bujold's _Blitherer_, with which it shares a number of interesting similarities: a warlike but less-advanced culture jerked into the modern world by contact with space, an individual protagonist alone in that culture, individual relationships superseding the of law, betrayal, politics, fleeing on whorseback. _Blitherer_ succeeds because Cordelia is interesting, active, and credible (even when she makes mistakes).Cameron is none of the above.