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Strangers
Cover Artist: Scott Grimando
The return of a classic science fiction novel by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and editor Gardner Dozois!
Hundreds of years in the future, Earthmen have moved out into the galaxy of inhabited worlds, but only through the gift of advanced technology from alien interstellar traders. Earthmen do not dominate among inhabited worlds, as many races are older and wiser -- in fact, space travelers from Earth are second-class citizens or worse on most of the planets they visit.
Joseph Farber, an artist, is part of the uncomfortable and decadent Earth colony among the alien Cian on the planet Weinunnach. As with many earthling spacefarers, Farber suffers a decline in spirits when faced with the utter difference of alien cultures, yet he is deeply moved by the rituals of the Cian -- and by Liraun, a humanoid Cian, with whom he falls in love. And though love between races is forbidden, he allows himself to be genetically altered so that he and Liraun may marry and interbreed. But the couple soon discovers that the fundamental differences between their races and cultures prevent adequate communication between them. This lack of communication leads to a powerful climax of tragedy and revelation.
Gardner Dozis is the twelve-time Hugo Award-winning editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and the Year's Best Science Fiction collections, and two-time Nebula Award-winning author.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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About the author
Gardner Dozois
645 books358 followersGardner Raymond Dozois was an American science fiction author and editor. He was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, both as an editor and a writer of short fiction.
Wikipedia entry: Gardner Dozois
http://us.macmillan.com/author/gardne...
Wikipedia entry: Gardner Dozois
http://us.macmillan.com/author/gardne...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 16, 2025
This is an SF novel by the author Gardner Dozois, most known for his year best SF collections (won 16 Hugos as best editor!), the first of which was published in 1984. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for November 2025 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. This novel was nominated for Nebula in 1979, lost to Dreamsnake. The novel is actually an extension of 1974 novella, which was nominated in 1975 for Hugo, but lost to “A Song for Lya”, George R. R. Martin (Analog Jun 1974).
The book starts with a bunch on loud Earthmen (tourists?) at a religious/traditional (they are unsure) festival on the planet Weinunnach. Locals, Cian, are extremely human-like, even if their origin is closer to cats than apes. One of the Earthmen is Joseph Farber.
Two decades ago, when Earth was plagued by a series of vicious and nearly terminal “tactical” wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution, whose natural resources were nearly depleted alien Silver Enye had opened it up for trade by inducing her to join the Commercial Alliance. And now Earth is spared an immediate self-destruction, but it is just a small world at the outskirts.
The aliens believe that trade is beneficial to all participants, so among other places, Earth opened a trading post at Weinunnach. The protagonist, Farber, is not a trader, he is a graphic artist, who uses a newly available tech to create renderings the planet in his mind, so they are turned into video/pictures, to be sold back home on Earth. As a both reclusive and temperamental person, he fell in love with Cian woman named Liraun. Moreover, she falls in love with him too. Decades before The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, there was an active and mutually-satisfying sexual relationship between quite different species. And like in the abovementioned book, it cringes me a bit: I have no problem with any number of consenting adult humans of any gender and sex having such relations, but this one on some subconscious level, reminds me of zoophilia even if reasonably I understand that the consent is on, so not my business to pry…
Our Romeo and Juliet face disapproval regarding their union – from Earthmen's side, chiefly old vile racism, while Cian are ok only with marriages that bring children. And the latter option is chosen, Farber’s each cell are changed, so he is fertile with Cian. However, this is only the start of their problems…
Sometimes novellas or even shorter works are made into good novels, like Flowers for Algernon. However, I think this isn’t one of them. I haven’t read the novella version yet, but some plot twists of the novel weren’t that surprising for me. I guess, like The Year of the Quiet Sun in 1971, the people who nominated it were just supporting an active fandom member and not the novel per se.
The book starts with a bunch on loud Earthmen (tourists?) at a religious/traditional (they are unsure) festival on the planet Weinunnach. Locals, Cian, are extremely human-like, even if their origin is closer to cats than apes. One of the Earthmen is Joseph Farber.
Two decades ago, when Earth was plagued by a series of vicious and nearly terminal “tactical” wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution, whose natural resources were nearly depleted alien Silver Enye had opened it up for trade by inducing her to join the Commercial Alliance. And now Earth is spared an immediate self-destruction, but it is just a small world at the outskirts.
The aliens believe that trade is beneficial to all participants, so among other places, Earth opened a trading post at Weinunnach. The protagonist, Farber, is not a trader, he is a graphic artist, who uses a newly available tech to create renderings the planet in his mind, so they are turned into video/pictures, to be sold back home on Earth. As a both reclusive and temperamental person, he fell in love with Cian woman named Liraun. Moreover, she falls in love with him too. Decades before The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, there was an active and mutually-satisfying sexual relationship between quite different species. And like in the abovementioned book, it cringes me a bit: I have no problem with any number of consenting adult humans of any gender and sex having such relations, but this one on some subconscious level, reminds me of zoophilia even if reasonably I understand that the consent is on, so not my business to pry…
Our Romeo and Juliet face disapproval regarding their union – from Earthmen's side, chiefly old vile racism, while Cian are ok only with marriages that bring children. And the latter option is chosen, Farber’s each cell are changed, so he is fertile with Cian. However, this is only the start of their problems…
Sometimes novellas or even shorter works are made into good novels, like Flowers for Algernon. However, I think this isn’t one of them. I haven’t read the novella version yet, but some plot twists of the novel weren’t that surprising for me. I guess, like The Year of the Quiet Sun in 1971, the people who nominated it were just supporting an active fandom member and not the novel per se.
January 18, 2014
What a crappy, crappy book. It's like the author thought, "Hmm, science fiction is all about expanding our ideas of humanity and sentience? Nah, I'll just be really sexist."
(This review contains spoilers, but I promise, you really don't care.)
Two things were so bad I bookmarked the pages so that I could reproduce them here:
--On page four of this book, the only named female character to that point is called a "fucking bitch" and a "cunt." (To be precise, "cunt" is actually referring to all human females, but inspired by her actions.)
--p43: "Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun's apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to be 'liberated.' Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways."
Here's my recap: human dude is frustrated that his human ladyfriend is manipulating him into sex after they've been dating for a few days. So he wanders off during a festival and meets a lady alien. He takes her home and has sex with her. The next day another dude is making fun of him for it and calls the alien a "nigger." (Note that word choice aside, there's no indication of why the aliens are looked down upon except that apparently that one dude thinks they smell bad and their vaginas are sideways?) Our "hero" decides he wants to marry the alien because she's really submissive and stuff, and his friend adds, "You can fuck niggers if you want but don't you think about marrying them! We don't marry our niggers back home" (p56). So he goes to the alien council and asks to marry her, and they'll agree only if he changes his genes (?!) so that he can reproduce with the alien. Uh, sure. So he does that, and they get married, and his alien wife asks him if he wants to force her to have children, and he says yes ("'My wife,' he said with great seriousness, meeting her gaze, 'I have dicided [sic] that this is the time for you to conceive, and to bear your children.' ... Then he said: 'There's no need for you to be afraid.' And, very gently: 'You're a woman; this would have come to you eventually no matter how long you waited.'"). So she gets pregnant, and then he realizes that alien mothers can't give birth without dying. And then she dies. The end.
And I just. What.
(Coming back to this review later to add that in addition to all the other problems, every human in this book is DUMB AS A BRICK. So women in the alien society are born with their father's last names, take their husband's names when they get married, and then at some mysterious time they take a third name, everyone the same one. There are a couple conversations about how mysterious this all is, and what could possibly be the impetus for the third name??? I'll give you a minute... Yup, it happens when they get pregnant. Also, every woman in the alien society dies when she gives birth, and somehow no one has ever noticed that alien women mysteriously disappear and there are no mothers. There's some claptrap [word of the week!] about how they're all suspicious of strangers and they won't let anyone study them, but seriously, humans have interacted with these aliens long enough to learn their language fluently but they don't notice that they've never seen a mother? It's another example of sexism, because clearly the author can't imagine, and therefore the characters can't imagine, the idea of a mother doing anything other than sitting around in her house raising her kids and being invisible. But it's also just bad science and bad science fiction.)
(This review contains spoilers, but I promise, you really don't care.)
Two things were so bad I bookmarked the pages so that I could reproduce them here:
--On page four of this book, the only named female character to that point is called a "fucking bitch" and a "cunt." (To be precise, "cunt" is actually referring to all human females, but inspired by her actions.)
--p43: "Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun's apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to be 'liberated.' Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways."
Here's my recap: human dude is frustrated that his human ladyfriend is manipulating him into sex after they've been dating for a few days. So he wanders off during a festival and meets a lady alien. He takes her home and has sex with her. The next day another dude is making fun of him for it and calls the alien a "nigger." (Note that word choice aside, there's no indication of why the aliens are looked down upon except that apparently that one dude thinks they smell bad and their vaginas are sideways?) Our "hero" decides he wants to marry the alien because she's really submissive and stuff, and his friend adds, "You can fuck niggers if you want but don't you think about marrying them! We don't marry our niggers back home" (p56). So he goes to the alien council and asks to marry her, and they'll agree only if he changes his genes (?!) so that he can reproduce with the alien. Uh, sure. So he does that, and they get married, and his alien wife asks him if he wants to force her to have children, and he says yes ("'My wife,' he said with great seriousness, meeting her gaze, 'I have dicided [sic] that this is the time for you to conceive, and to bear your children.' ... Then he said: 'There's no need for you to be afraid.' And, very gently: 'You're a woman; this would have come to you eventually no matter how long you waited.'"). So she gets pregnant, and then he realizes that alien mothers can't give birth without dying. And then she dies. The end.
And I just. What.
(Coming back to this review later to add that in addition to all the other problems, every human in this book is DUMB AS A BRICK. So women in the alien society are born with their father's last names, take their husband's names when they get married, and then at some mysterious time they take a third name, everyone the same one. There are a couple conversations about how mysterious this all is, and what could possibly be the impetus for the third name??? I'll give you a minute... Yup, it happens when they get pregnant. Also, every woman in the alien society dies when she gives birth, and somehow no one has ever noticed that alien women mysteriously disappear and there are no mothers. There's some claptrap [word of the week!] about how they're all suspicious of strangers and they won't let anyone study them, but seriously, humans have interacted with these aliens long enough to learn their language fluently but they don't notice that they've never seen a mother? It's another example of sexism, because clearly the author can't imagine, and therefore the characters can't imagine, the idea of a mother doing anything other than sitting around in her house raising her kids and being invisible. But it's also just bad science and bad science fiction.)
August 10, 2022
2,5/5. Plutôt décevant. Typique de nombreux romans de science-fiction de cette époque (publié en 1978). Une écriture un peu sèche, sexiste par moment, un univers et des idées intéressantes, mais une intrigue assez pale. Les idées et les réflexions sur la société sauvent du désastre, mais s’est trop peu pour que je me vois en recommandé la lecture.
May 21, 2008
Your typical “boy meets alien, boy has himself genetically altered to mate with alien, bad shit happens” narrative. I liked the first half of this better than the second. The opening is full of lots of interesting world-building and humans making a mess of dealing with alien cultures, all told in a frank, honest way that I wish would crop up on Stargate once in a while. The second half falls back on a much more ordinary “creepy aliens are creepy” plot, though, and also relies on the protagonist being really dumb and inobservant. Dozois also does something truly bizarre with the narrative: toward the beginning, he has several passages written as if from the perspective of an academic paper attempting to illuminate known historic events; he then abandons this device completely. Wuh…? Still, the book as a whole is more interesting and culturally sensitive than most of the other ’70s sci-fi I’ve read. Given my reaction to a lot of the genre’s “classics,” I suppose that’s not saying much, but it’s something, anyway.
April 20, 2023
Honestly, I'm kind of disgusted by this and can't quite put my thoughts into a coherent review right now. Thus felt exceedingly misogynistic and racist.
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October 25, 2025hugo & nebula group November 2025
November 24, 2021
Der Videokünstler Farber geht eine Beziehung mit einer ET-Frau ein. Die Cian sind eine der wenigen ET-Rassen, die den Menschen halbwegs ähnlich sind. Oder wohl eher: zu sein scheinen.
Ziemlich deprimierend. Ich mag es nicht so, in einem Roman einem Menschen in Zeitlupe bei der Selbstzerstörung zuzusehen.
Es ist ziemlich ähnlich wie Farmers "Die Liebenden". Handelt es sich um eine Homage oder ein Plagiat?
Die Schilderung der Fremdartigkeit der Cian ist aber beeindruckend gut gelungen. Dafür Respekt!
Ziemlich deprimierend. Ich mag es nicht so, in einem Roman einem Menschen in Zeitlupe bei der Selbstzerstörung zuzusehen.
Es ist ziemlich ähnlich wie Farmers "Die Liebenden". Handelt es sich um eine Homage oder ein Plagiat?
Die Schilderung der Fremdartigkeit der Cian ist aber beeindruckend gut gelungen. Dafür Respekt!
November 12, 2014
1988 grade F+
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews