Twenty years worth of misunderstandings lead to the War of the Landing, which almost wipes out the Lost Colony. However, each species makes the mistaken assumption that the other species has the same general form of government and interpersonal power structures as they do, leading to lots of misunderstandings. The humans who landed make contact with the atevi (who were just entering their Steam Age) and the humans and atevi seem to be getting on well. One faction builds jerry-rigged landing vessels and use them to land on the planet on the island of Mospheira, while the other faction takes the refueled Phoenix off into space, intent on finding long lost Earth.
Two hundred years later, there are two factions of the descendants of the original humans, and tensions between the factions have reached the breaking point. While the system does have a life bearing planet, it's already inhabited by the sentient atevi, so the humans stay in space, living in a Space Station they build in orbit around the atevi's planet. After mining fuel at the deadly star they arrived at, they travel to the nearest star system which might have a life bearing planet. However, while travelling through Hyperspace a should-be-impossible accident happens, sending the ship a much further distance than should have been possible, so far that no known star is visible through the telescopes.
The Faster Than Light starship Phoenix is sent off to construct a self-sustaining Space Station, carrying as passengers the civilians who will build and then operate the station. Cherryh's book series on inter-species politics and intrigue. The attack leaves Bren baffled, since although there are plenty of conservative atevi who hate humans enough to want him dead, the conservative atevi have always hated humans, but no one has tried to have the paidhi killed in the nearly two hundred years that the office has existed. It then gets much more exciting when, two weeks later, an assassin breaks into his apartment and he's forced to use the handgun in self defense. Some excitement is added when the aiji, the head of the atevi government, gives him a handgun as a gift, even though it's highly illegal for a human to posses a gun.
While Bren enjoys being a diplomat/translator/linguist/xenologist, it's not what you'd call an exciting job. Bren Cameron has the job of the paidhi, the sole point of contact between the human Lost Colony on the island of Mospheira and the alien atevi on whose planet the humans are living.
0 kommentar(er)
