Invader, CJ Cherryh

I wasn't exactly enamoured of the first book in the Foreigner series, but I usually like the author, so I've bought more.

Bren is a stupidhead who spends most of his time apologising for being shot at. He makes things happen, but very seldom on purpose. And there's a whole lot of men around, even if the best character is someone's grandmother.

But okay, it's a long series and it's readable. Also I figure it's maybe like one of those series where he starts as an ensign? So maybe possibly he will be less stupid as he goes along?

I would say it would be difficult to be more stupid, except there's a character introduced in this one pretty much to demonstrate what more stupid looks like. Who is unfortunately a woman. A lot of the opposition are women, while current power is male. It's weird and slightly creepy. And quite a lot like a lot of Cherryh's other books. But then the vast majority of them are decades worth of time travel, being written across a long career, so, *shrugs*

Two books in, I'm still hoping it'll get good eventually. I've bought the third already though, so I'll read that too.



Cherryh's thing that she's good at is alien concepts that do not translate. People that stay fundamentally different even after you understand them. So you start out with a word that is crucial to the aliens but baffling to the humans, and the story demonstrates what it means. Aliens are wired different, and that matters. But they're not mono cultures, in this series especially, they also have cultural differences on top of the biological ones, so you get different ways the alien biological imperatives and impulses can play out.

It's just the narrator, on the whole, doesn't understand them, so there's a lot of blundering about making mistakes about it.

The hero of the series is a translator - the translator, the only one on the whole planet the treaty allows. And the untranslatables are key.

Hence looking like a stupidhead a lot.



This particular set of aliens don't have love or friendship. You can't say you like someone, it's the same word as liking a particular food and it sounds really conceptually weird to them. What they have is equally weird and mysterious to humans, including the point of view guy. He sort of blunders about trying to make friends and reminding himself there's no such thing and then still trying some more. Except then at the end whatever social connections he has managed to form end up working real well, so that's just... baffling and odd.

So I guess that's one why I don't precisely like these books. They're all about social bafflement and I can get that at home, so to speak.


But I keep on wanting to like them, because complex political thriller with aliens, and a lot of sequels, that sounds like my kind of fun. Just, so far, it's more of a way to fill in hours without it actively sucking. Which works, but, you know, I kind of keep trying to like it more.

stabby mood

I'm quite irritated today, or to put it another way, I keep thinking of stabbing stuff.
I shall play a computer game and stab only pixels, no worries, but I am very grrrr.

This morning I got a message the house I was trying to view got sold to someone else. Presumably someone who could actually view it. Somehow.
I am very frustrated because, lacking support, I can't bloody get anywhere.

Also when I phoned mum this morning she explained at greater length the perils of solo house viewing, including but not limited to a dead estate agent one time in the 80s and a weird creepy guy when mum's friend was viewing houses who said he'd been putting that house on the market for five years and wanted to show them things in his wardrobe. It was quite a long explain. But the upshot is that I should not in fact just say sod it and go see houses without another human I trust.

Also there was a detour via only hiring reputable taxis from actual taxi companies.

One of her solutions to this was to just go hire humans from an agency, but even mum swiftly noticed that means hiring humans I've never met before and have no context of and is basically going places with total strangers in the exact way she just warned me off.

It's nice that she notices this now. This is the background noise of being disabled, letting total strangers in my house every week if they're the ones that happen to turn up.

So I'm angry and frustrated and stuck.



So I went to the supermarket to buy my magazine. Which worked. So now I have a couple hours of home decorating to read whenever I'm in the mood.

I think I shall stick with stabby games for a while, I'd just get grumpy all over it at the minute.




I'm in the exact same situation I was this time last year, only it's after an extra year of trying to get people to do things they're supposed to do.

Mostly people don't even answer messages. How can I get things to change if they don't even answer messages?

Mum says I should apply my own money to the problem but I have asked of that in the past and not got useful replies. There's a thing with taxes and a thing with insurance and a lot of things. Also it would be rather a lot of money and would swiftly cut in to what I'm hoping to spend on a house.


When the point of the house is to move somewhere I wouldn't need so much support, it is frustrating that a lack of support is making it bloody difficult to buy a house.

Also, it's possible this plan is only possible until the end of the year, in which case it's already screwed because houses take more than a week to buy and everyone helpful is on leave anyway. Except I don't know, that's not what's been said lately. So I'll just keep doing the plan.



(I'd really like a plan that works.)