Foreigner:Your as cold as ICE.
mattd
mattd at useoz.com
Mon Dec 24 03:33:39 PST 2001
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.
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list