Downward to the Earth
Widely rated among the finest SF novels about colonialism; its sacramental aliens and penitent imperialist predate (and arguably outclass) several famous successors, Avatar included.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Foreigner about?
Two centuries after a lost human ship marooned its colonists on the world of the atevi — tall, black-skinned, steel-eyed beings whose fourteen words for betrayal and zero for 'love' proved hard to discover before the War of the Landing — one human, the paidhi Bren Cameron, is licensed to live among them, translating and rationing out human technology. Then someone tries to assassinate him, which is legal, filed correctly, and the first move in a power struggle that drags Bren beyond every treaty line. Cherryh keeps the reader locked in Bren's second-guessing skull: fluent, terrified and falling, unforgivably, into something the atevi have no word for.
Why it matters
The launch of SF's longest-running first-contact study (twenty-plus volumes and counting) and the genre's most sustained meditation on translation as survival.
Where does it sit in the series?
Cherryh's long-running first-contact saga: Bren Cameron, sole human translator to the alien atevi, navigating a species for whom 'liking' is not a concept but assassination is a legal institution.
In the Guide from Foreigner:
- Foreigner (1994)
Read next
Speaker for the Dead
Swept the Hugo and Nebula the year after Ender's Game did — an unrepeated double — and established the 'ramen/varelse' hierarchy of alienness that xeno-ethics discussions in the genre still borrow.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Half of the most influential SF artefact of the twentieth century.