Precursor by C.J. CherryhMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
C.J. Cherryh is not kind to her main character, Bren Cameron. She puts him through the wringer during this installment of the Foreigner series, with unexpected diplomatic assignments, family issues of several flavours, security issues, slippery negotiations with unreliable ship captains, uneasy relations with the human planetary government, among other things. If it sounds like an awful lot, it is, but Bren has earned a lot of respect, or man'chi, with his atevi staff and has their extremely competent support.
I always love it when the Empress-dowager features and she appears at both ends of this book. I'm just surprised that she didn't bring one of her riding beasts along for the ride! That would really have set the spacefarers on their ears. It becomes obvious that the atevi are just plain old smarter than these shipbound humans, who have lived for centuries in bland, unchanging environments and have become inflexible. They have completely forgotten that giving orders isn't a natural way of dealing with other beings and that you can only be boss of your own group. (Not to mention that they seem to serve glop for food. It may be nutritional, but it's still glop.)
I think Cherryh has drawn some accurate ideas about how an isolated ship's crew might develop socially, especially when they have a siege mentality. Reaching out to others or trusting trade partners are not going to come naturally to them. Plus, we only have their word on yet another alien race which has razed their second space station. Are these aliens a real threat or a bogeyman made up to chivvy the planet dwellers into co-operating? There's no known rationale for such an attack, but the atevi wonder and since I respect them most of all three groups, I wonder too.
I'm glad that the author chose to continue this series and I look forward to many happy hours of reading in my future.
Book number 389 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.
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