A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda

They look down on the use of technology, seeing it as a tool that inferior races use to place themselves onto somewhat equal footing with more advanced races. The alien race with which we become most familiar is the Clan, a race that looks Human, but is a race of reclusive, arrogant, and very powerful telepaths, who consider themselves far above races without telepathic abilities. I had no difficulty soaking in the scenes that were being painted for me here, and, were I to identify a single strength of the author, this would be it. In these pages you will find creative new aliens, worlds, and cultures, which are painted with prose that, while perhaps not literary genius, certainly has its flashes of brilliance. That disclaimer out of the way, what she does so strongly in this book is to create such a wildly imaginative world (that will be the basis for a series, the rest of which I own but have never gotten around to reading). I'll say up front, this is Czerneda's debut novel, and debut novels seldom carry the strengths of an author's later works. I also found that the book read quite differently over twenty years later.

I don't think that I finished the book, which is extremely rare for me (I can count on one hand the number of books that I've began but not finished in my life), but, on this recent second reading of the novel, I found that I eventually crossed a point beyond which I remembered nothing. The world of competing cultures and fantastical alien races gripped me thoroughly. I was pulled in by the title, as I recall, and I loved the book! This was space opera before I knew what space opera was called, and all that I knew was that I loved it. The first time that I read A Thousand Words for Stranger, I was about middle school age.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda