Tag Archives: Connor Phillips

Agent of Change – Chapter 7

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In which preparations are made for dinner.

I went back and checked “To Cut an Edge” again, and it says that the stick-knife is a standard part of a Scout’s kit. That surprised me a bit; I’d have said it seemed more like a spy’s weapon than a Scout’s. On reflection, though, Scouts by the nature of their profession spend a lot of time in uncertain situations, and this can’t be the first time in Val Con’s career where it was wise to be armed without seeming to be.

I’m not sure why Selector’s response to Edger about the deal with Justin Hostro is so grumpy. Annoyed at how much Edger is talking up the deal, maybe. Or just generally ill-disposed to anything involving the Cavern of Flawed Knives. Any thoughts?

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 4

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In which Val Con and Miri make some calls.

Miri and Val Con are clearly starting to relax into each other’s company: they’ve begun bantering.

Val Con speaks more truth than he realises when he promises Liz he will take the best care of Miri he can, for as long as he can.

Here’s an interesting exercise for a writer: the character has a small box containing everything most valuable to her in the world — what, specifically, is in it? To answer the question for a character who’s only been in the story for four chapters would require either a considerable knowledge of parts of her backstory that haven’t made it into the story yet, or a certain talent for improvisation together with a willingness to assume explanations will present themselves as needed. Or both, mixed in some proportion. (Explanations for some of Miri’s keepsakes will subsequently become apparent, but not all. Which is as it should be; a character whose past can be entirely told is likely a character lacking in depth.)

Signs that this novel was written in the 1980s: the primary medium for data storage and retrieval is tape.

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.