This series centers on the descendants of a ship lost in transit from Earth en route to found a new space station. It consists of a series of semi-encapsulated trilogy arcs (or sequences) that focus on the life of Bren Cameron, the human paidhi, a translator-diplomat to the court of the ruling atevi race. Currently twenty novels have been published between 1994 and 2018. Cherryh has also self-published two ebook short story prequels to the series, “Deliberations” (October 2012) and “Invitations” (August 2013).
Cherryh calls the series “First Contact”. Four of the books were shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
A spaceship hurtles through hyperspace, and ends up not where they expected. In fact, they have no clue as to where in space they are, the ship is not functioning well, and frankly, they are screwed. They were on their way to build a space station and there are hundreds of folks on board.
After this opening explanatory sequence, we are plopped into the current world of the nearest planet to where the ship ended up, which turns out to be inhabited by a race of humans, very tall, very black, whose technology has advanced to the steam age. The people in the ship had built a station, and finally a kind of shuttle ship that could drop people off onto the world below, but not return.
The humans eventually fight a war with the inhabitants, the Atevi, and are pushed to inhabit exclusively large island, and after negotiating some peace terms, are doling out advanced technological info bit by bit in order not to distrupt the Atevi society, to maintain the political balance of Atevi’s various groups, but are doing so in order that the Atevi will eventually gain enough technology to build spacefaring ships so the humans can leave the planet. Only one human, the paidhi (interpreter), is allowed to live among atevi and learn one of their languages. All communication between the atevi and the humans is via this single point of contact.
One of the problems is that there are factions of the Atevi who believe in numbers, number counting and in felicitous and infelicitous numbers. They believe the humans are secretly plotting against them in order to take all their resources.
Things are going along fairly well, with our protagonist Paidhi Bren building a good relationship with Tabini (the Aiji, the head of the most powerful atevi clan, keystone of the atevi western association, and thus effective supreme ruler of the atevi government), when the spaceship from which the humans on the planet came to the planet, returns from its 200 year journey to try to discover where in space they are.
This returns sets up fears on both sides of the planet inhabitants. Why has the ship returned? What do they want? And the atevi want to know if they will be shooting death rays at them.
Bren is kidnapped by a dissident faction of Tabini’s government, and Tabini’s politically savvy grandmother may or may not be involved. He is finally released, after being beaten up pretty badly and then finding out about the return of the ship, and returns to his job on the Atevi side to find his rival for his job, a woman named Hanks, firmly ensconced and unwilling to accept that he has returned, and claiming she took over because no one knew what happened to Bren and even if he were alive.
Thus ends volume one.
What Has Been Read Cannot Be Unread 