Tag Archives: Kelmont Jaeger

Carpe Diem – Chapter 36

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Liad

In which Tyl Von sig’Alda gets his orders.

After the earlier chapters about Tyl Von sig’Alda being set explicitly in Envolima City, it’s worth noting that this chapter declines to be specific about where on Liad the control center of the Department is located. Except that it’s underground.

And that it is intended to “one day be the command post for a galaxy”, which doesn’t help locate it physically, but does a great deal to reveal the Department’s intentions. They’re not only interested in limited actions for the preservation of Liad; they’re out for conquest. All according to The Plan. (It’s always a bad sign when an organization is dedicated to something called “The Plan”, don’t you find?)

The other thing this chapter doesn’t say, in the midst of all this preparation for sending sig’Alda after Val Con, is how they know where to send him. Did his analysis of Val Con’s options produce that precise a result? Or maybe they don’t actually know yet, and are just putting the wheels in motion so that he’ll be ready to go at a moment’s notice when they do know where he’s going.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 19

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Liad
Envolima City

In which Tyl Von sig’Alda seeks that which is lost.

The tour of the plot strands continues.

This is the only time I can recall Envolima City being mentioned. Most things that happen on Liad happen either in Solcintra or Chonselta.

The description of Korval as pursuing its own interests to the incidental benefit of Liad makes an interesting contrast to the Department of the Interior, which as will become apparent considers itself as working for the good of Liad but when it comes down to it defines “the good of Liad” as that which is good for the Department.

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 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.