Precursor: Foreigner Sequence 2, Book 1

Very good read

I had forgotten just how good the foreigner books are. I am so glad I found this one on Kindle and decided to give it a go. It is a little odd to have to hold in your mind simultaneously the human emotions and the atevi emotions or lack of them. A bit like sudoku. A mind exercise. Will definitely read the next one.

She is really brilliant with characterisation, besides writing fast paced storylines.

This is a typically excellent sequel in the Foreigner series from CJC. This picks up from the previous book, Inheritor, where the background is the appearence of the Ship and the drive to build a shuttle. The story covers the final production of the shuttle and the focus moves up to the Space station and Contact with the third species, the men of the Ship. Once again CJC imagination conjures a convincing protrayal of how a contained environment affects species mentality and social structures - and we are introduced to a third and unique political system and how it might interact with the planet based human and Atevi political systems, already interlinked. CJC continues to give maximum bang for the buck, with every minute of wirting time between this and the last book clearly worthwhile spent - the plotlines are fresh, the characters are strong, consistent and continually developing. It may seem like a long wait, but its worth it - and the previous books are so good that each re-reading illuminates more detail and more complexities in the storylines

CJ Cherry should write less and develop more the characters and situations.The novel gets boring and boring, because it uses the Mc Guffin (a hidden menace that in the end maybe does not come true) continuously to stretch the plot on and on. She should learn from pulp writers, having to cope with the urgency of weekly instalments and limits in the numbers of words.I've got nothing against exploring the man/alien interface, but this goes too far for my patience. She could have used have the pages, and none the worse.I gave the book to Oxfam without finishing.

No one does politics in space quite like CJC. Having convinced us in the Foreigner trilogy of the difficulties of the human-atevi interface, Precursor goes on to make us think again about the humans.An acute understanding of psyches (alien and human) give CJC's work an intelligence sometimes lacking in other first contact (and assimilation) novels. If you like the Foreigner trilogy, you might also like Downbelow Station and The Faded Sun trilogy.

I had been a little anxious that a sequel trilogy may lose some of the drive, originality and sheer unpredictabilty of the original 'Foreigner' trilogy. I was wrong. I read this in one long night and am now in the all too familiar position of desparately awaiting the next one. What with this and the 'Fortress' sequence, CJC is definitly keep my reading life interesting!