I'm surprised how much I enjoyed seeing the human populace for once instead of just dealing with them (or not dealing at all) from the mainland where the Atevi rule. :) Or not livestock, but clannish and fearful refugees from 200 years ago thinking they still have a good handle on things when in reality they're just being tolerated by a very understanding Atevi. The island where all the humans are kept penned in like livestock. Oddly enough, the simple solution takes this series in a seriously awesome direction I'm surprised hasn't been explored as fully as now: Mospheira. What the hell are they going to do with all those station refugees? Atevi won't take them and there's definitely not enough resources to keep them for long on the station around the Atevi world. Non-aggression treaty and Rosetta Stone signed, in hand, and now shipped downwell, Bren and crew have a brand new problem. Oddly enough, I was fully expecting more space, more diplomacy, and more aliens, but that's done for now. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps.

Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She is the author of more than forty novels. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field.

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J.

Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh