I’m giving the page a second section because page 1 was starting to behave oddly.
As always, wait at least 30 days from issue of the book before starting to discuss. And give our overseas friends some extra leeway: the distribution system doesn’t reach everywhere as fast!
I haven’t been here in a while and I’m lost. Where are the old foreigner discussions and the whizmatron that said when the next one is coming out?
Look in the sidebar on this page for the links to other threads.
The whizmatron is on the front page.
Thanks!
Are there Arctic dwelling atevi- like, native peoples? (Like Inuit on Earth).
No. The world is kind of like a Pangaea Earth, with most land gathered together in one spot—not as large as Pangaea, but with both poles bare of permanent ice. The exceptions are Mospheira and the Southern Island, the bottom of which does ice. But the extreme geologic violence that hits the rift between the Southern Island and the mainland did in the early civilization that arose on the Southern Island some 2000-3000 years ago. A tidal wave took out civilisation down there, and the refugees on the southern coast of the mainland gathered mostly in the Marid, which itself suffers occasional tremors. If a wave ever hit there, it would be very bad. But so far, most of the geological violence has been the uplift and fracture of the Southern Island.
Would you say that the super continent is in the process of breaking up like Pangaea did? Or is it more of the end result of separate continents recombining?
It’s just total brain teasing speculation, but I’m interested in geology and geologic events.
Bren and Toby: how old are they? Are they twins?
By my reckoning, Bren should be about 37, or very nearly so, as he was almost 27 in the first book. Toby is the younger of the two, but looks a bit older than his brother due his life on the sea.
But does it actually say somewhere that Toby is the younger brother? Because I’m trying to figure out when a younger brother would have time to go through med school, start a family, buy a house on the north Coast and run a medical practice.
Inheritor, PB, p. 73, “He couldn’t go home and fix things for his younger brother.”
Why *do* atevi keep their hair long? How long has that been a thing? I mean, everyone we’ve met seems to have long braided hair, usually displaying a ribbon of some type. Does having short hair mean something bad? Would cutting an ateva’s hair be used as a form of punishment? It’s never really mentioned in the books.
It would be a serious loss. Consider that most straight-hair cultures kept their hair long through most of history, except those that, like the Egyptians, shaved it off, and Alexander, for military reasons, wanted his troops barbered. Roman men gave up their locks, women didn’t, and northern Europe didn’t either, possibly for warmth. But shaving, braiding, even plastering with cremes and mud have served to tame the mess. It’s a means of self-decor, and the English/American, then European trend to drab dress and uniform looks for men have prevailed over much of the globe. Personally, I wish both genders would go for decorative, but here am I, jeans and tee-shirt, so I have no legit complaint.
All I want for cristmas is the new Foreiger book…..but I know thats not going to happen. So I hope for spring instead and my birthday (april)…..pleeease? 🙂
I recently read the book “A Memory called Empire” by a new author, Arkady Martine, that was very clearly much inspired by the Foreigner series.
It doesn’t yet reach the level of CJ’s writing, but it shows promise, and might be enjoyable for others here who love the Foreigner books.
It’s not a knock-off, but ms.Martine clearly loves the Foreigner books (she said something like that in an interview, which lead me to reading her book) and that echoes through this book. The idea of an ambassador far from their homeland adjusting to a culture they’ve studied and loved is familiar, as is some of the tension arc as they get enmeshed in politics that are dangerous for them personally as well as their home, and the building of bridges of trust with some key people (Nineteen Adze held some echoes of Illisidi for me, though their situations are not that similar).
But the worldbuilding, the situation and the cultures are very different, and interesting – a star-spanning empire bent on conquests with an aging and infirm emperor, and an independent mining spacestation where important memory-lines are preserved.
It’s supposed to be the first of a series, but like Foreigner itself it works well enough as a standalone book.
Thank you for the book recommendation, Hanneke. I’ve put a hold on it at my library.
I’ve been reading the series from the beginning with an eye toward human foods that may show up in Sandra’s kitchen. Tomatoes and carrots are the only vegetables that are named for sure, but several others are strongly suggested by mention of certain dishes. Pizza sauce implies at least garlic and basil, and possibly mushrooms, to go with the tomatoes. Canned chili requires chili peppers and cumin, and may include beans and onions. Onions are also nearly indispensable for the meatloaf and ersatz meatloaf mentioned in the books. Hot dogs are mentioned, but their source seems to be native meat products.
Not mentioned, somewhat to my surprise, is either cabbage or potatoes. No sauerkraut for the hot dogs, no mash with the meatloaf, and no chips with the fried fish that Tano enjoyed so much. I was also disappointed in my hunt for any mention of ginger, so far. No ginger snaps or ginger ale. Most tragically, without ginger, chili, and garlic to season your cabbage, carrots, and mushrooms, you really can’t make a decent pot sticker. #Sad
This is a scanty pantry. If anyone else has found any human foods that made the journey to the Atevi world, would you please be so kind as to leave a reply here?
Chesty, I’d written a long response but it disappeared before I could post it.
It came down to: spices and herbs used in named dishes change over distance and time.
Pizza sauce might be flavored with oregano instead of garlic and basilicum, and it would still smell ‘italian’ (at least it would to my family).
If people lack an ingredient or cannot use it, they’ll leave it out or substitute another, and still call the dish by its original name.
For instance, I cannot eat garlic or onions or spicy peppers, but I make variations on all the dishes you mention without those ingredients, and still call them by the same names. My homemade spaghetti/lasagna sauce is pure sieved tomatoes with lots of chopped vegetables (celery, carrot, leek and cauliflower) with only a little salt from the sieved tomatoes, and maybe (but not often) a pinch or oregano or lavas. It might not be very italian, but I prefer it, and still call the result lasagna or spaghetti (eaten with way less pasta and way more sauce than the original, too, and some grated cheese that does not have to be Parmesan).
The original colonists probably ate the bland mass-produced stuff the Phoenix crew is used to, during the years travelling and building the station.
Once on-planet, they’d have to re-invent cooking, based on the available (mostly local) resources and the recipes they’d brought with them.
This could mean that any one-pot bean-based dish with a peppery flavoring gets called chili, regardless of what else goes in the pot and what exactly is used to impart the peppery seasoning – an equivalent to black pepper, cajun or chili pepper, or even peppermint (after decades or more of bland food they’d probably consider real chili peppers inedibly hot!).
The beans too might be from a safe Atevi plant (non alkaloid), not a traditional human imported strain.
So unless the books mention them by name I’d say its not sure any of the things you mention, based on the names of the dishes, are really in use and grown from human stock, or if they use Atevi-native alternatives.
The original colonists did have seeds, but they didn’t want to upset the Atevi world’s ecology, so if there was a safe native alternative they might not have chosen to plant their earth-native version, as long as the human population could get a full nutritional diet without it.
Or they might grow lots of things in sealed hydroponic greenhouses, avoiding the chance of contamination, and have a lot more human staples, vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices in use on Mospheira than we’ve seen on the mainland…
Thank you for the long reply, Hanneke. I did consider most of the things you pointed out, but I still found the mention of tomatoes and carrots, and only tomatoes and carrots, to be oddly specific. I still suspect that herself has deliberately been vague about the subject of human foods to allow room for later inclusion of items that serve the story telling. While I have no wish to hem her in, I did want to search out anything already mentioned to avoid conflict in future books. Since I could only find tomatoes and carrots, that part shouldn’t be a problem. Yet it does seem strange that only those two items survived the journey.
tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers and carrots, along with “seeds of herbs and spices” were mentioned fairly early on. Atevi relish tomatoes, potatoes and peppers, but the vegetables have to be processed to avoid starts on mainland soil.
Oregano would also be wanted for the pizza and other Italian and Mediterranean foods.
Aa wild guess: Hydroponics and soil-based gardens aboard Phoenix would likely be an easy source for fresh herbs and spices, and they could carry a seed bank as well, plus digital registers of genotypes of potentially thousands of examples of lifeforms. That is, thousands of examples per species. They could carry ova and sperm for multiple animal species as well as humans.
If the humans from the ship landed with enough of these in sealed form, then created sealed biosphere domes (or similar) then they might have a way of keeping Earth-human food sources from contaminating the Atevi-Earth ecosystem.) Just a wild guess.
Be t noted, in her (unrelated) Alliance/Union novels, stations and sometimes ships have gardens of some kind plus frozen foods, but also seafood is often mentioned as a basic food source. Presumably other protein and carbohydrate sources, vegetables, fungi, meat, poultry, etc. are available in the A/U universe, plus what’s grown on Pell and Cyteeeen, so comparing that with Foreigner, we can probably say they have a fairly reasonable food pantry selection.
But now I wonder what CJ herself has to say about food sources the humans kept.
Milk and dairy; bell peppers, celery, besides the onions and garlic and carrots and tomatoes; they’d want cheese and butter too, so milk and yeast for bread and some other fungi for cheese-making. — The more I think of all the products we typically use every day and what goes into making them, hmm, the humans would need a lot of Earth-native products, or they’d need human-safe atevi-/earth equivalents, substitutes.
They have wine and brandy, and bread, so they probably have something like beer, and they’d definitely have a yeast-equivalent. (Yeast are pretty basic as animals go. Or as plants.) There are the orangelles, which apparently aren’t citrus in any sense we’d recognize. In the first book, the first scientists down were examining grasses that weren’t wild, so grains that are humanly recognizable exist. Pickling, so they have salt (and probably something like vinegar – that’s a micro-organism acting on wine).
Oh, yeah! Thanks for the reminder about alcoholic beverages, P J Evans. Of course the ship humans found a way to make those. Vodka, for sure. Possibly whiskey? That might be a nice trade item, if it’s any good. As for the basic yeasts and stuff for food, I remember Dr. Kroger saying that they had better than just the paste and oil gunk they had to eat for a while. I’m no food scientist, but maybe someone else on this forum could tell us some of the possibilities in that direction? Anyone?
Thanks for the response, BlueCatShip. Your mention of celery reminds me that celery, carrots, and onions are the basis for a long history of recipes from Europe. Sadly, I’ve tried Asian, Mexican, Indian and other cuisines, but the essentials for their recipes are outside my experience. Perhaps they could be summed up in a few vital ingredients too (assuming the colonists were international in nature), but I’ll have to ask for help on that. The variety of “must have” ingredients for all the ethnic foods out there could rapidly become unwieldy. I’m not sure about the hydroponics aboard the ship, but the colonists are/were another story. No telling what all they brought down. Well, except for tomatoes and carrots.
Another thing I recently read again made me curious. Tabini seemed interested in the subject of golf. Any chance a golf course might show up on the Atevi mainland? Also, considering the seafaring nature of the Marid, what about a regatta? Do they already have something like that? It occurred to me that Toby might be involved in that sort of thing, eventually. A seafaring community conspiracy?
he was interested in the sense of “why would someone do that, that’s weird”, until Bren told him that “people gamble on it”, which Tabini immediately understood. It seems humans and atevi hold gambling in common.
Is Resurgence coming out in audio? I looked for it but no hits so far. Bought the Kindle and am reading it. But I miss Daniel Thomas May or whatever his name is!
Another Audio question… where would one go to check for a release date of the audiobooks? I’ve tried DAW but nothing there. Audible has a “coming soon” section that lists books as far out as November 2020 but I don’t know how often that gets updated. I had a TBI a couple of years ago and visual reading is very difficult so I rely on Audio Books. Any information would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!!
I’d love to know this too. I keep checking for the audiobook of Alliance Rising, and of course, Resurgence is just now out in ebook and print. Emergence has been available for some time via audio.
@Raeann — As best I can tell, it can be up to a year, sometimes more, before an audiobook gets produced and released via Audible.com. I would expect we’ll get Alliance Rising maybe this year. I wish they could time the audio releases closer to the print and ebook releases.
I have had better luck with the Mac and Windows Kindle apps, for ability to enlarge text, and an iPad does pretty well on this with the Kindle app. Ironically, the largest Kindle Fire tablet, even when set on “huge” type in the Display and Accessibility settings, is only slightly larger than regular type sizes, and appears about 12pt to 14pt to me. (I could be wrong there.) Maybe that can help you.
I have had mixed results with a “Koolertron 5 inch digital video magnifier.” It’s about the size of a digital camera, and appears to be based on one, with a 5 inch screen.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0752YMC52/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I also keep a 10x Whitman pocket magnifier with me nearly all the time. (You may also want to look for 16x magnifiers.)
I’m legally blind to start with and dealing with encroaching cataracts on top of that. Not sure when or if the cataracts will get resolved.
So I deal with things at heavy magnification these days, and I’m relying more on audio too.
I hope CJ can tell us something about expected release dates or producition schedule. I can still use ebooks, but audiobooks are a godsend too. The readers for her books do a pretty good job, though once in a while, a pronunciation from their dialects surprises me. They do a good job reading the alien words, most of the time, thanks to CJ’s input.
I hope that might help you a little.
Thank you BCS! At this point I only have my smart phone for digital media…PC, iPad and Kindle all died a couple of years ago. I might have to break down and get the physical book! I don’t remember it taking as long as a year for the last book to be released in Audio but it could just be I don’t remember (more TBI complications). At least I have my sight…it sounds like you are dealing with a lot!! I know authors don’t have much input as far as audio versions, but maybe CJ knows at least an estimated timeline. Good luck and thanks again for responding to my comment!
You’re welcome! — I’m bumping this so (I hope) it will show up easier so CJ can notice it and reply.
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@CJ or blog maintainer (Chuck?) — Is there a way to show either a larger number of recent replies in the left sidebar, or else to show recently replied to topics / pages, so that items like this don’t disappear too quickly from view on the left sidebar? So that CJ has a good chance to see questions from fans, since the blog gets frequent activity, not just from me, but from all of us fans.
HI – I use my iMac to convert the ebooks to txt files and then to MP3 files which I can listen to. The Mac voices are not the best but it is much better than trying to read while I am driving.
So is it about time to talk spoilers to the latest book?
So lets get into it. One thing that really got me in Resurgence was the idea that the after effect of human colonization and the war of the landing had on the west coast clans in their social structure.
It’s always interesting which items of Mosphei tech made it to Itevi culture and which did not. Sometimes (as in the case of the slingshota) the process was purely by accident. Sometimes (as with fixed wing but not rotor aircraft) the process was a political decision. (And with the new state of technical parity and open access will this still prevail?) But the amazing thing is that bicycle technology doesn’t seem to have crossed the straight. Mospheirans ride bicycles ; Julie Cameron broke bones in a cycling accident, but Atevi, although a lot of their journeys (walks to the nearest village) would seem to be suitable distances and road conditions for cycling, don’t seem to have bikes. You’d think that Cajeiri, with his fondness for the foreign film archive, would have noticed and said, “what are those things? That looks interesting!
Bicycles seem to do better with paved roads, and that would limit them on the continent. (Historically, it was bicycles -> pneumatic tires -> paved roads. Early automobiles were bicycle technology applied to carriages, with added engines.)
And to what extent do the Guilds control technology within their area of responsibility? Do they have a concept of “proprietary” or licenced goods or tech? We see almost nothing of “ordinary” Atevi, just the elites, so it’s hard to guess.
I had thought that the condition of Atevi roads might be a limiting factor, but for faster but short local trips I don’t think so. Early Atevi bikes are much more likely to be mountain-bike or trike-with-market-basket than road racers. Atevi have many fewer roads and they seem to be double track or mown, with gravel to fill the pot-holes. These are all quite rideable. Just a way of walking down to the local village to pick up a bit of cloth and some thread, but quicker. And towns, which do have paved streets, are large enough to make faster-than-on-foot an advantage.
The humans really wanted to limit the spread of automobiles, for societal and ecologic reasons.
Maybe they were afraid that the widespread use of cycles would naturally lead to paths being improved, making it easier for cars to be used on them?
Practically the only way to avoid that is making them too narrow for cars, and that’s hard to make rural villages stick to.
On the other hand, the bike is such an efficient way of locomotion, and of carrying things (in baskets or panniers) especially in towns where there are paved roads, it is a bit surprising not to have them. If Atevi are teaching themselves to ski from Bren’s catalogs and advertisement mail, it would seem logical to add bikes too, even if humans didn’t spread the technology on purpose.
North-American car blindness at work?
If a track is wide enough for a cart, it will be wide enough for a 4-wheeled motorized vehicle. Agree about bicycles being a logical next iteration. Internal-combustion engine + bicycles = motorcycles, which is perhaps something Mospheira wants to keep a lid on, although I’m sure, like light planes, it would be rapidly adopted. Aren’t trucks used in the cities? I swear I’ve seen reference to them in the streets of Shejidan, moving produce and goods.
There was a short story called ‘The Camel’s Nose’, set in the notoriously technophobic world of Darkover. A young person was frustrated with transportati9on in the city, and invented a bicycle
Darnit! Posted before I was done!
Pushback occurred from stable owners (naturally), so she challenged the loudest one to a race, to determine if she would be permitted to use her invention. It was a case of small technologic innovation perhaps opening the door for more. A mixed benefit, and one which I’m sure both Tabini and Mospheira would want to control.
I would think a tricycle or 4-wheeled bike or a rickshaw analogue might be a thing. Atevi surely know about wheels, so I’d think they’d come up with some sort of cart, wagon, or carriage.
Hmm, but do mecheiti deal well with pulling loads, wagons, etc?
Or are we on the wrong track, and the atevi use something else, another low-tech method, and then adapted it? I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t already come up with something before human contact, given that they were somewhere near the late 1600’s to 1700’s in development before contact, near to or already had steam engines and trains, and then kept innovating into 20th century tech levels by the time Bren came along. My feeling is, CJ just hasn’t mentioned much of whatever atevi use.
Somehow I have trouble imagining mecheiti pulling carts or ploughs. But hand carts (pushed or pulled) have probably been very common. The wide popularity of mechanized trucks in villages suggests that they were replacements for a common earlier unpowered version. Is there some other creature used as a draft animal (as opposed to mecheiti used as riding animals)? Bren has never been on a farm, so might not have paid any attention to the animals common there. Plenty of cultures have built cities without draft animals (e.g. the Mayans), but grain-based agriculture is hard without them. The railroad must have been a replacement/improvement on some other existing technology, or it would have been a huge disruption. Bren, at least, sees rail as a natural exension of Atevi culture. That suggests some kind of wagon train prior to steam technology. I would guess there is some non-mecheita draft animal (strong but slow-paced and less aggressive) used in agriculture and early trade/transportation between associations. Perhaps this animal also prefers traveling in or near herds, so only relatively large wagon trains were common across distances. Guarded by mecheita riders, of course. 😉
Atevi live close together with their associations, and are less interested in interacting with other associations as individuals. So perhaps “personal” vehicles (like bicycles) never really got a start. Anyone an individual would interact with could be expected to be within walking distance? The Dur small airplane seems to be unusual enough to be worth remarking on, as is Tatiseigi’s motorcar. These are luxuries of the nobility, not common devices.
With each village being (historically) more or less self-sufficient, a limited amount of trade with the local aiji’s seat may have sufficed for most of them, with maybe a regular trusted peddlar annex newscrier doing the rounds. A hand-wagon might do for that, or a pack-train of mecheiti.
The larger towns may have had trade caravans going between them. Those too might be (larger) mecheiti pack-trains, like camel-trains trading through the deserts where no carts could go.
Trade would be in high-value, rare and mostly low-mass or low-volume goods, not low-value bulk goods.
If they did have an oxen-equivalent to pull carts, I’d expect those to still be in use in the more rural villages and/or by the more conservative farmers.
Wagons in the form of the early steam trains would be a big improvement over pack trains of mecheiti or people, and a truck for local use could carry a lot more than a handcart.
But tracks suitable for handcarts are also suitable for bikes, and bikes or trikes work well as ‘beasts of burden’, like a pack mule or donkey except not through rough terrain. With a crate on the front and a luggage rack and panniers on the back they can carry a surprising amount of stuff as well as a person. A box-bike or cargo-bike can transport even more, including people (like children who can’t walk that far or carry all their own stuff yet).
They were very common as delivery vehicles for the local butcher, baker, greengrocer and milkman, sending their boy around town to deliver all the regular customers’ standing orders, or letting a cook or housekeeper visit a lot of shops to order things but not having to carry it all home herself. Much more efficient than hand- carrying everything.
Though with Atevi being stronger and bigger, they could carry more than a human – but I rather expect that also means they need to eat proportionately more, their larger clothing weighs more, etc. so it sort-of evens out.
Your point on the utility of bikes as transport is well taken. The Viet-Cong supported themselves to a worrisome extent with bikes along the Ho-Chi-Minh Trail.
Is there any reason to suppose that the Atevi wouldn’t have selectively bred the mecheiti for greater utility for a variety of necessary functions, including as pack animals? They’d clearly domesticated mecheiti. We’ve done that for millenia, beginning with using whatever was available! Before the 17th Century and the Plains Indians captured and learned to ride escaped Spanish horses to become one of the world’s best light cavalry fighting forces, they traveled with dogs pulling travois!
Yes, and a century ago dog-carts could still be used around town, e.g. to carry a few milk urns for the dairy farmer/milkman delivering fresh milk door to door. (The travois are of course better than wheels if there are no paths.) But we haven’t seen the atevi have anything like domesticated dogs – the mecheiti are used to sniff out tracks and trail a fugitive, as we’ve seen mentioned.
Using the mecheiti as pack animals, following the ridden leaders of the herd, and seen to by a mounted handler, has also been mentioned, when Bren has taken a mecheiti-back trip with Illisidi.
I’m not sure mecheiti could be trained to pull carts, in a neat long strung-out row along a track, with the leaders in front obscured by the wagons, but it is possible.
Training them to pull a plow, without the rest of the herd around to trample the just-plowed ground, might be a lot harder or even impossible.
On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need (a) mecheiti to pull a plow; a less deep tilling of the fields might work as well or better, depending on the circumstances.
I remember from geography lessons long ago that deep plowing, with a plow pulled by horses or oxen, can destroy more fragile soils and let them erode or blow away until no good tillable soil is left. This was an example of European colonizers’ arrogance destroying a centuries-old established agricultural area when they replaced the ‘backward’ tradition of getting one’s wife to pull a very shallow plow to till a small field with the ‘advanced’ idea of using a draft animal. I’ve forgotten where this happened exactly, probably somewhere in Africa, though it might have been somewhere else, during the age of European colonization around the world. Isn’t that what happened to the North American Great Plains as well, giving the Dust Bowl the chance to get as bad as it got in the 1930s?
As the Atevi do not like to keep herds of domesticated animals for food, they probably also do not have a great abundance of extra fertilizer to add to their fields, and may depend on a gentler tilling, using compost for vegetable plots and green fertilizers (like sowing clover in fallow fields and then digging it in) to slowly build up a layer of good topsoil, that doesn’t need the deep turning-over from heavy plowing.
With the way Atevi hunt wild animals for meat, the pattern of letting a flock graze on poor uncultivated land in daytime, and bringing them in overnight and over winter to collect the manure to spread on the fields wouldn’t work. It’s an ages-old pattern used on poor sandy or high peaty soils, transferring nutrients e.g. from the outlying wild heather moors to the cultivated fields closer around the village through the sheep dung collected from their stables. All winter the shepherd would let the soiled bedding build up, adding fresh bedding material on top of the ever-higher layer on the floor; then in spring when the flock went out again they’d dig out the solidly trampled and composted meter or so thick layer to spread on the fields. After working that hard to get the fertilizer, they would not waste any of it plowing it in deeper than it needed to be for their crops.
I wonder if that, combined with the lack of long-distance bulk commerce before the arrival of trains, might have limited the Atevi from spreading into some less fertile areas?
“No till” farming is an “in thing” again in the USA, in a green effort to sequester carbon directly, and save diesel fuel running the tractors doing the tilling.