Tag Archives: Chance of Personal Survival

Agent of Change – Chapter 15

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In which He Who Watches has an unpleasant day.

This chapter shows very clearly how much Val Con has come to care for Miri, even in the short time they’ve known each other. It also gives some indication how much she’s come to care for him, although she’s more reluctant to bring it out where people can see it, or to trust it (and who can blame her?).

Edger’s relation to Watcher, we learn, is that he is the brother of his mother’s sister. Which tells us something about the Clutch’s kinship system, because that’s a degree more specificity than would be necessary or meaningful among humans.

Agent of Change – Chapter 13

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In which Miri makes use of the enemy of her enemy.

I have a feeling Grandmother Cantra would have approved of Miri’s solution to the trouble she and Val Con find themselves in under the hyatts. Her advice in times of yore was that a useful ally is defined by the answers to the questions “Can he shoot?” and “Will he aim at my enemy?” No mention, I realise now, of any requirement that their choice of target be motivated by goodwill towards oneself…

Taking the approximate age given for Edger when he entered the story, and making the simplifying assumption that shells are attained at regular intervals, produces the estimate that young Sheather is about five and half centuries old. That estimate may well be out by a considerable amount in either direction, but it underlines the point I made a few chapters ago about twelve years being unlikely to be a significant portion of his life.

This is, as far as I can remember, the only mention in the series of an Yxtrang ambassador. (Multiple ambassadors, is implied by Val Con feeling the need to specify that he’s referring to the one assigned to this sector.) Interstellar diplomacy doesn’t really seem characteristic of the Yxtrang as I remember them, particularly if it might mean agreeing not to attack somebody they want to attack. Maybe it’s just an excuse for getting a close look at the defenses of places they intend to attack regardless.

Agent of Change – Chapter 9

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In which Val Con and Miri discuss their chances.

This chapter is mostly taken up with an explanation and demonstration of the capabilities and limitations of the Loop, the mental gadget Val Con has that estimates probabilities of success and survival for him. (It still has at least one trick up whatever mental gadgets have instead of sleeves, though, which we will learn about later.)

Miri is worried about Val Con because he’s just calculated and recited the odds of her dying at his hand without showing any emotion or personal investment. I don’t think she’s right about him not comprehending what he’s been saying, though; the narration notes that he had to make an effort to keep his voice emotionless. It would be interesting to know what the emotion was that he was trying not to show.

Agent of Change – Chapter 8

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In which Miri thinks on her feet.

Miri and Val Con are both older than the eighteen to twenty-five years estimated in the police bulletin: Miri is twenty-seven, and Val Con is thirty. It’s already been noted that Val Con looks significantly younger than he is; apparently Miri does too. It’s likely a Liaden thing, considering that it’s Terrans doing the estimating, and in any case the height probably has something to do with it.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about this series is that many of the minor characters, though they may appear once and then never be seen again, have distinct personalities and a sense of personal history. This chapter contains a few more examples.

Agent of Change – Chapter 6

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In which Miri and Val Con discuss family history.

One of the interesting things about Miri’s family tree is that, if Val Con’s calculation of the year named Amrasam is accurate, Miri’s grandmother was born within a year of Val Con’s father. Daav yos’Phelium waited until relatively late in life to marry and have a family, but Miri Tiazan, as we will be told later, had her daughter young, and her daughter seemingly did the same.

It may be that, in this, Daav is the odd one out. There’s a cultural imperative for every Liaden to have at least one descendant, and many Liadens who appear in the series are shown to have opted to do it early to get it out of the way. What the cultural imperative is on Surebleak I don’t know for sure, but a ghetto world with a short life expectancy would probably also tend toward young parenthood. Miri Tiazan didn’t live to see the age at which Daav yos’Phelium started seriously considering his posterity.

Agent of Change – Chapter 3

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In which the man who was not Terrence O’Grady recalls Val Con yos’Phelium.

I am reminded of something Sharon Lee says in one or another of the various places she’s talked about the origins of this novel: that when she first started telling herself stories about what eventually became the Liaden Universe, they were about Val Con the master spy on his own, but after a while Miri came into things because — as near as I can remember the wording — Val Con was in need of someone who still knew what truth looked like.

Agent of Change – Chapter 2

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In which Miri Robertson meets Val Con yos’Phelium, and he invites her to join him for dinner.

If this is Val Con yos’Phelium, much has changed for him since we last heard of him, two or three months ago for us and six or seven years for him. Back then, he was a Liaden Scout, and a First-In Scout at that — not an occupation much given to assassinating Terran supremacists. Nor is he himself a person one would have expected to take up that line of work, despite what happened to his parents (if anything, the way he and his family reacted then supports the idea that it’s uncharacteristic for him now).

And then there’s Miri, who we haven’t heard from in about twice as long. Back then, she was a girl just embarking on a career as a mercenary soldier. How that led, a decade and a bit later, to packs of gunmen laying for her in alleys… we shall have to wait and see.

(An aside: Miri’s use of arbitrary numbers tends toward multiples of seven, while Val Con’s tends toward multiples of twelve, a Liaden attribute I’ve noticed in other novels but hadn’t realised was established so early.)

Is it just me, or does the picture of Miri on the cover of the Meisha Merlin edition look an awful lot like Jamie Lee Curtis? This is not, mind you, a complaint, because either way it succeeds in looking a great deal like Miri, an achievement by no means to be taken for granted when it comes to characters on the covers of Liaden Universe novels.

Agent of Change – Chapter 1

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Standard Year 1392

In which the man who is not Terrence O’Grady shows what he can do.

It’s a sign of how the Liaden Universe has grown over the decades that it’s taken the re-read a year and change to reach this, the sentence where it all started: The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.

One thing that strikes me about this chapter, after all those prequels full of Terrans with almost-familiar names like Ristof and Jethri, is how normal the names seem here: Terry, Sam, Pete, Russ. The Terran homeworld is even called “Earth” instead of “Terra”. On reflection, though, I don’t think it’s just a case of the authors not yet having their name generators warmed up, because it serves an artistic purpose. These are people who are proudly, even aggressively, Terran, who keep close ties with Earth and don’t mix with the other cultures of the galaxy; their names, which seem normal to a reader of the 20th or 21st century, perhaps mark them in the novel’s future setting as old-fashioned, resistant to the changes that subsequent centuries have brought.