(SFF Bingo): Foreigner, by CJ Cherryh

I think I'd seen this series mentioned somewhere before as inspiring "A Memory Called Empire" and maybe other stuff. First contact, alien linguistics stuff, sure why not, let's try.

Cherryh mentions in a foreword for the 10th anniversary that her editor was responsible for having her include the first scenes. Interesting disparity for the "book in parts" bingo square:

Part One (15 pages): A human spaceship carrying "Earth's whole damned colonial program" gets lost in space and winds up far from where they were trying to go and has to keep searching for an inhabitable solar system.
Part Two (34 pages): 150 years later. The atevi, the local species, have some technological sophistication and recognize that the appearance of the "foreign star" has something to do with the powerful machines that have recently started tearing up the terrain. From the human POV, there was a schism between the Pilots' Guild, who want to leave the atevi planet alone and look elsewhere, versus the rest of the station, who want to land and take advantage of the hospitable climate there. The latter finally decide to land and try to force the pilots' hand, but are conscientious about trying to stay out of the atevi's way. When the atevi eventually make contact, the startled human radios back to his buddies like "please don't react with force, we're really gonna try and communicate peacefully here." I liked this part, with the alternating atevi and human POVs, and wanted more.
Part Three (358 pages): 200 years after that. Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the human ambassador/translator among the atevi, while the rest of humankind lives on an island. One day an assassin breaks into his quarters, and he's forced to take precautions and eventually evacuate. Making things worse, atevi don't really have a concept of individual fondness or friendship, so he's constantly going "I kind of like these security guards, why are they treating me as if I was a child and not telling me anything that's going on...oh wait it's dangerous to project 'like' onto them, they don't do 'like.'"

Just math-wise, the back of the book says "it had been nearly five centuries" since the original spaceship disappeared. 150+200=??? Also, there are about four million humans on the planet at the time of the main plot. How enormous was the original ship?

Atevi, especially less modern ones, are very superstitious about numerical feng shui.

The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
...
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number--but a million didn't seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue...

And if you play cards with them, they can and will count cards. I enjoyed that part.

In addition to an absence of humanlike emotions, atevi can also be literal-minded and tend not to show facial expressions. Which made for some interesting parallels with autism, with Bren as the minority POV character being frustrated at trying to communicate to people whose brains work very differently from his. Not sure how much of that I'm just projecting.

Unfortunately, it feels like a great deal of the plot is "high-ranking atevi pressure Bren into doing something, he doesn't really have a choice but to comply, and grudgingly goes along with it." Repeat for 350 pages. You can understand his feelings of being treated like a child; it's frustrating for us, too, that he doesn't get to exercise a lot of agency. Basically he's just trying to keep up with the atevi, who are much stronger and more physically durable than him, without complaining, and hoping that he'll earn their respect that way. There's a little bit of speculation as to "maybe the aiji [political leader] is just testing me." Later, when he's in the custody of more rural, conservative atevi, it's like, are they trying to assassinate him or do they just forget how flimsy humans are? If he endures their brutal treatment enough, will he eventually win them over? He tries to protect the individuals he finds himself caring about, and then people slap him in the face because Atevi Don't Do That.

The subtext is "humans tried to stay out of the way and not do a colonialism, but after the hopeful beginnings of Part II, atevi politics were so warlike and assassination-driven that war was inevitable anyway, that happened offscreen, and the paidhi system emerged in response." But for me it was kind of like...why bother. We do finally learn a little more about why specifically Bren is being jerked around now, beyond just "it's a test," but I felt like what we learned was pretty slight, compared to his overall lack of agency.

Early on the sentence-level prose style pinged me as verbose, but I didn't flag any specific examples and it wasn't particularly egregious overall. But there are lots of sections that are just pages of Bren introspecting and moping, with no other humans around to communicate with and no atevi POV to break it up. Again, I prefer a little more agency in my main characters.

Bingo: Book in Parts, I think a case could be made for "Stranger in a Strange Land."