With Inheritor (1996), it is not clear whether Cherryh extended her future history of the Alliance-Union Universe, or began a chronicle of an entirely new one with Foreigner (1994), a novel of first contact between human colonists marooned on a far-off planet by the crew of their starship Phoenix and the inhabitants of that world, the magnetic, inscrutable atevi, with whom the humans, segregating themselves strictly to their enclave on the island of Mospheira, have uneasily coexisted for some two centuries.

The only contact allowed between the two races occurs through the person of the human paidhi, a translatordiplomat charged with living among the atevi to dole out morsels of Earth's technology in return for raw materials the humans must have to survive. The atevi society uses registered assassination to maintain law and order; they live by shifting alliances defined and contracted by a psychological makeup utterly foreign...