Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Having now listened all the way through the entire Liaden Universe oeuvre, I'm now listening to C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner, the first of Foreigner series, one of my all time favourites. This will be a mixed audio/ebook read, but the intent is primarily to listen, rather than read. I've already got all the books in the series, so won't have to buy any new ones. At least until they release the next one, sometime next spring I suspect. The books are all read by Daniel Thomas May who does a very good job, IMO, and many of the books are WhisperSync for Voice enabled. Though unfortunately, not all. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Argh, I got so caught up in this series again that I'm doing as much reading as listening. What a superb series, and the performance by Daniel Thomas May is absolutely spot on.
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Well, so far that's definitely the case. I've finished the re-listen/re-read of
Foreigner,
Invader, and
Inheritor, and am well into
Precursor. And I'm enjoying the series as much this time as last.
C.J. Cherryh is a master at creating and describing an alien culture and its interface(s) with other cultures, human or non-human. This series is entirely told in the first person of Bren Cameron, the sole human contact/interface between the foreign, human culture and the native Atevi and their planet. Humans are now restricted to a single (large) island after a devastating war that was caused by the interaction and intermingling of the humans with the Atevi. Bren's title is "padhi" (roughly, "translator") and his job is to control the flow of technology from the humans on the island to the Atevi to prevent too rapid change in the Atevi society which could lead to another war. He is the sole human who is allowed to live on the mainland.
By the point of
Precursor, humans and Atevi are technologically equivalent and are moving up to the space station the humans had come down from and to which their ship has suddenly returned, after ~400 years.
What makes these books work is the consistent world view and the conflicts that result because of the biologically controlled differences in thought between the two races. They are not always fast moving, with some lengthy stream of consciousness from Bren that can get a bit much sometimes, but then things can suddenly move quite quickly. Overall, a compelling series and extremely well narrated by Daniel Thomas May. All books in the series are finally available both as eBooks and Audible books, with some of them being WhisperSync for Voice enabled if you have hardware that supports it.