Tag Archives: Greensward-by-Efraim

Ghost Ship – Chapter 19

Leave a Reply

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Kamele starts asking questions.

It’s difficult to talk about a chapter that’s all “where might this lead” when it’s a re-read and one already knows where it’s leading.

One thing that’s already apparent, though, is that Daav might be right in thinking Kamele is best left out of Korval’s tangle, but he’s underestimating her if he thinks she’ll just meekly stay where she was left when she knows there’s something she’s being left out of.

Saltation – Chapter 32

2 Replies

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo’s parents receive her news.

There’s some looking-back going on in this chapter; not just to Theo’s recent activities, but further back to the events of Fledgling with the news that Kamele’s friend Ella has become the Chair of EdHist and is well advanced in repairing the damage there. (Ella professed to believe, back in Fledgling, that Kamele would be the next Chair, but I think this outcome was more likely and is more useful to all concerned, given their respective attitudes to office politics.)

And then, even further back, to Staederport, which we learned in Mouse and Dragon was where Aelliana first met Jen Sar Kiladi, coincidentally on the same day that she and her co-pilot introduced Hevelin the norbear to Bruce Peltzer of the Pilots Guild.

Like Mouse and Dragon, Saltation has a lapse of some years between chapters (specifically, this chapter and the next). And, as with Mouse and Dragon, I will be putting Saltation on hold while I read the stories set in the gap — beginning, tomorrow, with a return to Eylot for “Landed Alien”. After that, it’s back to see how Clan Korval (remember Clan Korval?) is getting on.

Saltation – Chapter 12

Leave a Reply

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo’s parents find out what she’s been up to.

Cho sig’Radia’s cover letter doesn’t give any warning about what happened on Theo’s famous flight. The pilot who raised Theo might perhaps be trusted to realise that a flight which has drawn special attention and been deemed a valuable teaching aid probably involves a more-than-usual amount of adversity, but Kamele, who was raised on a Safe World and has little experience of pilots, could have used a warning.

Speaking of the pilot who raised Theo, I notice the narrator is again doing that thing of not referring to him by any particular name.

Fledgling – Chapter 42

14 Replies

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo turns fifteen.

This is one of those cases where I don’t feel inspired to talk about any of the things I might have talked about if I were reading the novel for the first time, and there weren’t many new things I noticed. Although I did notice this time Jen Sar’s fishing trip in the mountains, which I suspect was at least partly intended to lay a foundation for a tale to tell anyone who asks where the idea of the old-style Gigneri came from.

I will note that this is another novel I like more after this re-read than I thought I did after I read it the first time.

It’s not easy to establish precisely when Fledgling takes place, due to a lack of outside referents. From Theo’s age we know that it’s more than fifteen years since Jen Sar came to Delgado at the end of Mouse and Dragon — but, as Theo points out in this chapter, that’s Delgadan years, and we have no indication of whether those are longer or shorter than Standard Years, let alone by how much. All we can say with confidence is that it’s after Jen Sar’s last scene in Mouse and Dragon and before his first appearance in Plan B. (The suggested reading order by internal chronology on the authors’ web site places Fledgling after Plan B, but that’s a clear case of bending chronology for the good of the story flow and reading experience, making it in effect an entire novel-length flashback; there is no possible way Jen Sar’s scenes in Plan B happen before Fledgling.) The positions I’ve given Fledgling and Saltation in this re-read are approximations achieved by starting at the end of Saltation and counting backwards based on my memory of what occurs in them; I’m taking notes as I re-read and hopefully I’ll end up with a less approximate idea of how much time they cover. (But when I publish my own suggested reading order by internal chronology at the end of the re-read, it’s likely I’ll be adopting the strategy of bending chronology for the good of the story flow and reading experience, the good sense of which becomes more apparent to me the further the re-read progresses.)

Tomorrow: Saltation

Fledgling – Chapter 27

Leave a Reply

Vashtara
Mauve Level
Stateroom

In which Kamele didn’t tell Jen Sar who Theo’s father wasn’t.

Here it is, laid out: Theo is the daughter of Kamele and Jen Sar, a choice Kamele made aside from tradition and even though she had no way of knowing, then, how long-standing her relationship with Jen Sar would prove to be. (And despite advice to the contrary from Ella; I wonder if that’s another element in Ella not getting on with Jen Sar.) And so Theo’s inherited from her father’s side, and is now at last properly growing into, the reactions that would make her an excellent pilot if that were a career path common for daughters of Delgado.

(And also, presumably, her ability to visualise numbers and movement, in her case by way of her lacework. I guess that’s a pilot thing, because Jen Sar had reason to think the lacework would be a useful suggestion, and Win Ton understood it when Theo told him about it. But I keep thinking that it reminds me of one particular pilot who had an especial ability to visualise numbers and movement, and wondering what it might mean that in this respect she most resembles Aelliana, who of all the people closely involved in Theo’s upbringing we can be confident didn’t donate any of Theo’s genes.)

Another reason why the idea of rearranging the flashback chapters wouldn’t have worked is this chapter, which is a mixture of present-day and flashback. Getting it into chronological order would have required breaking up individual chapters, an extreme which even at my worst I thought was going too far.

Fledgling – Chapter 25

1 Reply

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Win Ton takes time out for entomology.

There are some parallels between the two scenes in this chapter. Both involve an artificial device in the form of a living thing: the Snake of Knowledge on the one hand, and the bug on the other. And while Win Ton concludes that the bug is probably working alone, Jen Sar concludes that the Snake probably isn’t.

There’s a careful bit of linguistic footwork here: It would be tempting, faced with a spying device in the form of an insect, to have the characters make something of the fact that both a spying device and an insect may be referred to using the word “bug”. However, the result would be an incongruity, as the characters are not actually speaking English, and whatever language they are speaking is unlikely to have the same homonyms. And so it is that, although the word “bug” does appear in the chapter, it is used only in one sense and not the other.

Fledgling – Chapter 19

3 Replies

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo makes use of her research.

So that wasn’t actually the first time Kamele mentioned the upcoming research trip to Theo. With regard to the concerns I mentioned last time, I actually find this the opposite of reassuring, because it means that the trip has been a topic of conversation for several days without Kamele ever once thinking to mention that Theo would be going too.

There’s an interesting narrative subtlety in this chapter: at the moment the intruder is detected, Professor Kiladi disappears from the narrative. Theo’s father exists, and takes appropriate actions, but the narrator declines to attribute those actions to the person named Jen Sar Kiladi. What with the middle section being narrated from the viewpoint of Theo, who regards him simply as “Father”, Jen Sar’s name doesn’t reappear until nearly the end of the chapter. (Readers familiar with the wider Liaden universe — a phrase I will need to find a good shorthand for if I keep using it — will know what name the narrator is not saying. Although I’m pretty sure that the person who provides the answer to Theo’s question about the ring is Aelliana again.)

In the course of writing out the previous paragraph, I’ve belatedly recognised a similar subtlety back in Chapter Twelve. In between Theo meeting up with her father and the conclusion of their conversation about what name she ought to be calling him by, the narrator avoids calling him by any name at all. (Indeed, the moment she decides to continue addressing him as “Father” is visible even before she gives voice to it, because the narrator resumes doing the same.)

Somehow, knowing the history of the Gallowglass Chair and of this particular incumbent, it did not surprise me that the staff of office is a sword cane. I wonder if that’s standard for every Chair endowed by the Gallowglass Foundation, or an individual improvisation. (I don’t for a moment consider the possibility that it might be a custom of this University: this is Delgado, after all. I expect Admin would be horrified if they had the slightest idea one of their professors was walking around with a bladed weapon.)

Fledgling – Chapter 16

3 Replies

Retrospection on an Introduction
Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Kamele and Jen Sar took a step forward in their relationship.

The second of the full-chapter flashbacks, and it perhaps says something that I let the first one go by without remarking on how it fits into the idea of re-reading the series in chronological order. Which is, clearly, that a flashback chapter belongs where it’s been put by the author, because even if it’s describing chronologically-distant events, the remembering of those events is happening at this point in the story, and it matters to this story that it’s happening here. To have moved these chapters to before the beginning of the novel because that’s when the events-being-remembered happened would have been to do an injury to the story.

(If you were around for the planning stages of this re-read, you may recall that I lost sight of that at one point, when I was deep in the analytical “timeline-all-the-things” headspace that made a full-series chronological re-read possible. I want to take this opportunity to apologise for the mess that conversation was, and to express my gratitude for being talked down from doing anything then that I would have regretted when I found my way back to that other, wiser headspace which knows why a full-series re-read is worth doing.)

About Tra’sia, cha’leken!, the “expression of joy” that Jen Sar declined to translate: We have seen “tra’sia” before only as part of the phrase “tra’sia volecta”, a Liaden greeting for which we have not, to my recollection, ever been given a word-for-word translation. What we do know is that it’s Low Liaden, used for family and close friends; in High Liaden, one might instead say “Entranzia volecta”. We have not seen “cha’leken” before at all, though we have seen “cha’leket”, which is used to refer to a person for whom one feels a sibling’s affection; it might mean a person for whom one feels affection equally strong but of a different nature.

So, the full phrase might perhaps mean something approximately like, “Greetings, beloved!”, or perhaps, “This is a good thing, beloved” (if “tra’sia volecta” is something like “good morning” and “tra’sia” is more like “good” than “morning”). Another possibility is that it’s the Liaden equivalent of the “I see you, sister” that Priscilla gives Lina in Conflict of Honors.

And whatever it means, I have a strong suspicion that the reason Jen Sar was chagrined about it is that it was Aelliana who said it and not him.

Fledgling – Chapter 5

7 Replies

City of Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo goes shopping.

This is a quiet chapter in terms of what actually happens, but it introduces a lot of details that will crop up again later, especially during Theo’s bus trip.

Theo’s memories of her father in this chapter contain several call-backs to Scout’s Progress and Mouse and Dragon, with his ring and the toasted cheese sandwiches.

Mmmmm, toasted cheese sandwiches. I haven’t had a good toasted cheese sandwich in ages. I don’t seem to be able to find cheese that toasts well, lately.

Fledgling – Chapter 1

3 Replies

Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Theo Waitley has to leave home.

A new novel, and a new character — and also some old ones, as Theo’s parents are Kamele Waitley and Jen Sar Kiladi, who we last saw newly-acquainted at the end of Mouse and Dragon.

Part of the interest of reading Fledgling the first time, for me, was seeing the way the authors expanded on hints about Kiladi’s life on Delgado that had been given in other stories written earlier but set later: Kiladi’s office; Theo; the family tradition about Delm Korval, which is rather different and somewhat more complicated than the first-published mention of it suggested… and Kamele Waitley, who was honestly a complete surprise to me (for reasons I think I’ll save for when she actually appears).

This chapter also contains the first mentions of several new details about Delgado that will continue to unfold over the course of the novel, including the Office of Safety, the Chapelia, and the matriarchal system in which Theo is her mother’s daughter and Jen Sar’s relationship with them both continues only so long as Kamele chooses to continue it.

With the benefit of knowing what’s coming, I can see and appreciate the clever dance the authors have done to distract the reader from the fact that we’re not shown where Coyster went at the end of the chapter.

Am I alone in really wanting to read those books on Theo’s shelf?