C. J. Cherryh and Martian Anthropology

I forget what brought up this subject, precisely, but it's something teinedreugan and I were discussing while pootling around Montgomery County.

A while back I learned that whatever I write, no matter what I'm doing, will wind up dealing with the persistent question of the relationship of the outsider to the community. Sometimes it's more blatant than others, but I always have that outside-looking-in quality. I don't do it intentionally, but it seems to be the sort of story that I have to tell. Or perhaps I'm just limited by my experience in being able to tell other stories. Whichever. So in the event that some lit-critter in posterity wants to analyse my stuff, that's my personal bugbear.

I think one of the reasons I'm so fond of Cherryh is that as far as I can tell, she's got a similar one. Only hers is "Where is the border between 'person' and 'alien'?" (This is pretty close to the 'outsider relationship to the community' in a lot of its manifestations, especially as she has a habit of doing things like "single member of [species|group] A in a community of [species|group B]", sometimes on multiple levels.)

( Discussion of same, cut in case of spoilerage. )

I'm not sure what I'm going on about. It's just . . . fascinating to me. These are my obsessions, y'know?