Shipyear 65
Tripday 143
Third Shift
16.00 hours
In which Shan has some explanations.
This is a significant turning point for Shan and Priscilla, with Shan finally explaining what’s going on and the two of them agreeing on a future course of action.
We get another mention of that elusive person, Anne’s brother Richard, and perhaps the most extensive account of him, in Shan’s description of his conflation of Liadens with elves. Shan doesn’t say why Richard picked on Val Con for the role of “king of Elfland”, but presumably it’s because he had heard some account of the Contract which once prompted Anne to accuse Val Con’s father of being King of Liad. In which case, I’m pretty sure this is the first intimation, in published order, of the existence of the Contract.
This time through, I noticed something curious about a flippant comment Shan makes to Priscilla abut the norbear, Master Frodo: Ken Rik labels him terminally cute. But Ken Rik likes snakes.
I would say this comment implies that Shan…and by extension perhaps all Liaden culture…dislikes snakes perhaps even as much as Terrans do during our time. This is a stretch, but I’m going to claim that this aversion is one more indication that Terrans and Liadens spring from the same roots. 😉
[Bah! After a reset, I am no longer recognized by the site, so once again, I achieve a new “logo”.]
[Actually, you’ve got your old icon back: check it against the comments at the bottom of the Recent Comments list and you’ll see. The icons are procedurally generated from your email address, so as long as you use the same address you’ll have the same icon; somewhere earlier this month a typo crept into your email address, so you got a different icon, but the reset has cleared out the typo so you’ve got your usual icon again.]
And . . . I was too late to add this above:
I noticed one more cross-cultural reference that occurs in the same chapter, when Shan asks Priscilla: Am I being sinister enough, or should I wrap myself in a cloak and snigger?
With 3 words: sinister, cloak, and snigger, the authors evoke an instantly recognizable stereotype—the historical villain of Victorian melodrama. In fact, the image could probably be evoked with just two words: sinister and cloak! But wait…why would a Liaden have this same cultural stereotype? And why does it work across cultures in this universe? We assume Priscilla—who is from Sintia, a Terran world—also recognized it, although her response does not exactly confirm this. Priscilla: Can you snigger?
Hmmm…maybe the Liaden melant’i plays use the same stereotypes? Certainly our hints about these plays would cast them into a similar mold as our Victorian melodrama. Don’t we have one (or more) example in one of the books of a character modeling their response on what they picked up from a melant’i play…which shocked the Liaden who was on the receiving end?
p.s. Ah…I thought I recognized the old icon (posted before I could see it) and wondered what had triggered that. Nice to have the original returned!
This one, since he’s not bringing another Liaden into it, might be something he learned from his Terran mother, or one of her friends — I could see it being something he picked up from Jerzy, for instance.