Bookshelf: Foreigner

I read a little bit of everything; I always have. My dad loves science fiction, so I read some of that. My mom likes historical fiction, so I read some of that. You already know that romance novels are among my greatest guilty pleasures. I went through a phase in middle school where I read Madeleine L'Engle and any kind of poetry I could get my hands on, almost exclusively. I'm a compulsive shopper in bookstores and libraries: if it looks interesting, I'll take it. Shakespeare? Absolutely. Hosseini? You bet. A random book on the psychology of women? Why not? The latest take on the relationships between the founding fathers? Yes, please!

So when my dad and my brother both suggested a sci-fi series that starts with a book called Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh (one of their favorite authors, whom I had never read before), I shrugged and figured I'd get around to it eventually. When they mentioned the series is about an interpreter, I opened the first book the next day. And, just so you can't say you weren't warned: sci-fi series + interpreter living in a foreign culture + author-invented language = this is going to be a very geeky post.

The basic premise of the series, the first book of which was published in 1994 and the most recent of which - the 12th - came out this year, is that a human spaceship gets lost on its way to a potential colony and, after much struggle (which is greatly abbreviated in the beginning of the first book and fleshed out as it coincides with the present-day storyline throughout the series), finds its way to an inhabited planet in another solar system. Much infighting later, some of the colonists get tired of living on a ship and make their way down to the planet, where, predictably, clashes with the native population (the atevi) ensue. Fast forward 200 years (part of that "greatly abbreviated" portion) and you have a human population that's confined to a specific geographic area where the atevi are not allowed to venture, and one human who serves the aiji (the atevi leader), and by extension the entire atevi population, in the capacity of cultural and linguistic interpreter (known in Ragi, the atevi language, as the paidhi).

When the storyline's present day begins in Foreigner, it's a 20-something man named Bren Cameron who holds the position of paidhi. The plot starts out complicated and becomes more so, but is interesting and fun to follow through the lens of Bren-ji's (a familiar form of address, in Ragi) flexible and seeking mind. I'm in the middle of the third book, Inheritor, and am very glad I won't have to leave Bren and his friends (although that concept does not exist in Ragi, something with which Bren struggles frequently) anytime soon.

I'm not actually sure what the average sci-fi reader would appreciate most about this series. Maybe the fact that the atevi culture is so well-established in the author's mind, and that the focus is much more on them and the paidhi's growing understanding of them than on the human population, which mostly lurks in the background and pops in and out of Bren's thoughts with telegrams and memories. Maybe the fact that the human population in the story originated from a time when humans were space-faring, but have lost their ability to reach space and the entire world, the atevi foremost, is on the brink of achieving that capability together.

I'm not sure how the average sci-fi reader views this series because I'm so captivated by Cherryh's treatment of Bren Cameron's psyche as an interpreter immersed in a foreign language and culture that I can't seem to stop geeking out about the storyline on a linguistic and cultural level long enough to geek out about it on a science fiction level.

As far as I can tell, the Ragi language is Cherryh's invention, of which - at least at the back of the first two books - she explains the pronunciation. You pick up bits and pieces of the structure and cadence of the language throughout the books, both from the scattered phrases Cherryh includes in Ragi, and from Bren's thought processes about the language, its ties to and expressions of the atevi culture and the specific difficulties he experiences when he has to switch back to Mosphei', his native, human language. In the book I'm reading now, pieces of the language are laid out a little more explicitly, since Bren is teaching it to another character.

Equally as interesting as the Ragi language itself is Cherryh's grasp of the psychological impact of acquiring fluency. The frustration Bren struggles with when trying to deal with what should be his native language and culture is exactly what I felt when I came back to the U.S. after a year in France: things that should have been normal annoyed me, I fumbled trying to communicate in my own first language and generally felt like there was a wall of one-way glass between me and what I had once considered the every day. In Inheritor, one passage in particular made me burst out laughing at its accuracy:

There were moments lately when not only the right word wouldn't come, no word would come, in any language... Deep fluency started by spurts and moments.

This feeling of a total inability to communicate, in any language, is something that hit my friends and I somewhere in our second or third month of immersion and cropped up at random times for the next month or two. We called it the "black hole" between French and English and, fortunately, were able to laugh about it, frustrating as it was, because we were all going through it together. Finding the same experience in a sci-fi book was completely unexpected, but gives me even more respect for C.J. Cherryh and her thoroughness.

So if you like sci-fi, or culture, or language, or are just looking for a reading list to keep you busy for a while, I definitely recommend picking up a copy of Foreigner and letting it suck you into the series, and into the complex world of Bren Cameron and the atevi.

(Bonus: Ms. Cherryh, a former Latin teacher, has Latin lessons on her website. Far from traditional, but they're very interestingly and effectively put together!)