Status Updates From Foreigner (Foreigner, #1)

The story structure, sentence structure and Agatha Christie level disregard for proper punctuation is FREAKING AMAZING. I love it.

Pro: Cherryh does an incredible job at capturing the feeling of being a foreigner, alone, without agency, surrounded by an incomprehensible and unfriendly culture you have to make nice with.

Con: the reader is stuck alongside the one human character who is a foreigner without agency and nobody to talk to.

Giving up and turning to Octavia Butler, who knows how to write *alien* aliens.

Maybe I'll come back when I'm more in the mood for political intrigue with a vague sci-fi flavor.

I'm still hung up on how un-alien these aliens are in both biology history and culture. Which is fine! It's Star Trek/Wars aliens! A common sci-fi setting for exploring relatively minor cultural differences! I just was for some reason expecting something grander. I'll get over it eventually (or I'll give up on the book). It all feels subtly but distinctly dated. 1994 was another era in SFF. I'll try to love Bren.

The other thing is that all the early focus on people doing science led me to believe this would be a more interested in scientific plausibility than it is. So I'm struggling to get over the aliens being very humanoid, and basically another culture only mildly unintelligible to humans. Not an evolutionary distinct planet.
Again, if I'd only looked at the cover lol.
This story about cultures instead. I'll get there.