Dutiful Passage
In which Padi makes connections and Shan receives news from home.
The looper families Shan mentions are among those who have appeared or been mentioned in the Jethri-era stories: the Smiths were the first family to have norbears travelling with them, the Tragers were friendly with Jethri’s family, and the Wildes did that ill-fated bit of experimenting with Old Tech.
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Dudley Avenue and Farley Lane
Lady Kareen’s House
In which Kareen has a visit from her sister.
Well, that answers some of the questions I had.
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The Bedel
In which Udari speaks.
I wonder which kompani Alosha and Silain will choose, if it comes down to it. Silain, as Droi mentions, has her own ties to the people of Surebleak, but she might feel that her duty takes her back to the ship. Alosha doesn’t appear conflicted and doesn’t have any particular ties that we know about.
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Jelaza Kazone
In which Val Con receives a letter from an old family friend.
Timeline sorting: The last two Surebleak chapters of Neogenesis each focus, as this chapter does, on half the delm starting the morning’s work. This one appears to fit between those two; it’s the morning after the first of them, in which Val Con receives the news from Tinsori Light. The second, in which Miri receives an unexpected visitor, appears to yet be in the future.
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[Note: This story was originally published in the chapbook Fortune’s Favors as an untitled fragment, but on being reprinted in A Liaden Universe Constellation, Volume 5 it was given the title “Opportunity to Seize”. Accordingly, I have renamed this blog entry, which was previously “Neogenesis – Outtake”.]
Surebleak
Dudley Lane and Farley Avenue
In which Daav, Aelliana, and Kamele embrace opportunity.
As I read the afterword, this chapter was left out of the novel only because there wasn’t a convenient place to put it without interrupting the flow of the story, not because the events it describes have been superceded. Therefore, unless and until there’s a more definite declaration (or Accepting the Lance comes out and blatantly contradicts it), I’m going to assume it’s canonical.
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Surebleak
In which it’s a new day.
It looks like we’re done with dramatic confrontations for now, and are into the part of the book where things are wound down and tied off. There were a couple more dramatic confrontations I was expecting, but maybe they’re being saved for next time.
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In which Val Con and Miri have a busy morning.
I like “a salute so smart it could have driven itself into town”. And Val Con’s interactions with the cat.
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In which Val Con and Miri are not getting much sleep tonight.
Chapter 20 is shaping up to be a long chapter, to the point that I’m almost wondering if I need to subdivide the sections even further. Makes sense, though, since this is the chapter where a whole bunch of plot strands come together, not just from this book but from the four books preceding it.
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Surebleak
In which Korval goes visiting.
Kamele has a come a long way in her understanding of risk and safety since we first met her.
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Surebleak
In which we are reunited with various people already resident on Surebleak.
As the first chapter of the latest book of a series, this is mainly concerned with reminding the reader (or introducing them if they’re entering the series here) who everyone is and what they’ve been up to. It’s quite a long chapter, which might simply be that it’s a long series and there are a lot of characters to catch up on — but then, we don’t catch up on everybody, which suggests that these might be just the characters we need to know about to follow what’s going to happen in this novel. Which suggests there’s going to be a lot happening.
(Just how long a chapter the first chapter is depends whether the first part of the novel set on Surebleak, divided into three sections headed I, II & III, is one chapter or three. I wrote the paragraph above thinking of the whole thing as one chapter, but on reflection, I think I’m going to blog it as three chapters, if only so that the blog entries are a reasonable length.)
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