Foreigner:Your as cold as ICE.

[mattd]

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.