Foreigner

"C. J. Cherryh is probably the author who has the most direct influence on me in the science fiction universe. There are other authors from other genres that have had a similar influence. But C. J. Cherryh is how I learned to write politics. Her work is enormously interested in both the structures of political systems – sometimes those are also military systems, or corporate systems – and the internal effects of those systems on character, on people. Those people are sometimes aliens, and sometimes humans. Foreigner is the first book of a long series. I do suggest that if you want to read them, you read them in order; but this first one is totally standalone, you can just read that one by itself. It’s the story of a man named Bren Cameron. He is an ambassador from a stranded colony of humans to an alien civilization, the atevi , who live on the world that the humans have landed on. It’s really about Bren trying to figure out how atevi society works, where it matches up to human society – and where it really doesn’t. He does this through a political lens because he’s working in a political situation: he’s an ambassador, and he’s dealing with heads of state in various ways. What he’s really doing is thinking about sociology, which to me is a political tool. Doing comparative sociology on the fly, live, is in many ways how all people involved in politics have to work – whatever system they’re working in, politics is made out of people. Frustratingly! I work professionally in politics myself, and this has become even clearer to me! Foreigner is really about alienness, and mapping human techne of politics on to a completely different system, which has different emotional, economic and social triggers. Where that can go wrong, and where that can go right. Politics is a thing that can happen to a person. A person can also happen to politics, if it’s the right person. But as a writer, and also as a reader, I am very often looking for books that deal with the psychological impact of trying to work through a political event or system or goal, because it’s much larger than I think people sometimes imagine. It can be as impactful and as stressful as more kinetic forms of conflict. Yes. It helps a great deal, makes it easier – it’s a way of talking to the reader really, and bringing them with you. I don’t separate things very much. I’m not very good at it! I trained as a historian originally, which means it’s very difficult for me not to consider everything to be interrelated. And I always feel slightly guilty admitting this, but I did not outline, and I didn’t really do a ton of planning, at least for the first half. I just wrote it. Eventually it became an unwieldy object, and I had to sit down and figure out what I actually wanted to do. But nor am I really one of those discovery draft writers who writes a million words they don’t use… There’s just something very generative about trying to pile up interesting things as you go, without locking it down. It creates a simulation of the complexity of the real world. I doubt I could design something, just sitting down with me and a piece of paper, that would have the kind of fractal consequences that you can have by allowing a certain amount of… not random action, but undesignated action – undesignated as to what it’s for – into a plot. Of course, the active experience of doing this feels like just throwing things at the wall. Eventually, it becomes a shape. I’ve described it as adding things to a supersaturated solution: eventually it will get crystals. And then you know what it is! I went back into the first half of the book and added a great deal of scaffolding to get to what I eventually wanted. But the shape of what I eventually wanted was created by the confluence of everything that I had found interesting or desirable to write about. ‘Fun’ is the wrong word; ‘desirable’ is a question of what fascinations emerge from the process, what made it feel real. A Memory Called Empire is the first half of a two-book series, the Teixcalaan series. They are about an ambassador from a small space station, called Lsel Station, to the vast interstellar empire of Teixcalaan. We follow what happens to her when she first has to investigate the murder of her predecessor in her job, and then attempt to stop a genocidal war – or not! They’re about assimilation. They’re about imperialism. They’re about languages. And they’re what I did instead of writing the book that was supposed to be the book of my postdoc, about Byzantine and Armenian history of the 11th century."