Tag Archives: Leafydale Place

Saltation – Chapter 17

Leave a Reply

Ops
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo’s advisors advise her.

It’s clear from the conversation Theo’s advisors have with her when they get back to the Academy that their hand-talk discussion on the trip back covered a lot of ground on the topic of What Are We Going To Do About Theo? — not just in general, and for the future, but also in quite a bit of detail regarding how they would approach Theo with their conclusions. The moment when yos’Senchul surprises Theo to make the point about how she reacts to the unexpected — right when Veradantha is drawing her attention by talking about how she reacts to the unexpected — has the feel of having been choreographed in advance.

I wonder if there was any particular reason for Veradantha to pick Jankalim and Theopholis for her list to demonstrate that aspects of culture are universal. (It happens that Jankalim and Theopholis are respectively the first and last planets visited by the protagonists in Conflict of Honors. Theopholis has some striking cultural details, including a peculiarly unpleasant penalty for pre-meditated murder; Jankalim we didn’t really get to see much of, culture-wise.)

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 41

3 Replies

Delgado

In which Kamele and Theo go home.

Immediately, Theo is thrown into a situation that shows how much she’s changed in the six months she’s been away. (Incidentally, considering they spent maybe a week on Melchiza, that means they spent the better part of three months on Vashtara in each direction. Kind of drives home what a serious undertaking the trip was.) The terminal is the kind of chaotic jostling situation that would have been a disaster during her “clumsy” phase, but not only does she not create any disasters, she deftly avoids several that might have been caused by the inattention of the people around her. And the fact that Kamele essentially chose to throw her into this situation by sending her off to get the luggage unattended shows that Kamele trusted she would be able to get through it unscathed.

(On the other hand, the luggage scene also shows Theo with a new habit that’s going to cause her some trouble in Saltation. Continuity!)

Boy, that terminal helper is really inadvertant. Somehow, I doubt that the comment Kamele left on his feedback form was a complimentary one.

I’m pretty sure the reunion in this chapter is the first time in the book we’ve seen the entire family interacting; we’ve had Theo with Jen Sar, Theo with Kamele, and Kamele with Jen Sar, but not all three, for the entire time the family has been living separately. The occasional moments when all three have been in the same place together (such as when Theo showed Kamele and Jen Sar the snake AI) happened off the page — until now, when the family is properly back together.

Fledgling – Chapter 38

3 Replies

Melchiza
City of Treasures

In which Kamele and Theo are reunited.

It’s all very well for the Chaperon to say that perhaps Kamele might tour the school next time she visits; even supposing there’s any likelihood of a next time, which I doubt, I somehow suspect that no matter how many visits Kamele might make it will always turn out that the schedule is too tight.

The detail about Jen Sar having installed an Orbital Traffic Scanner in his office to keep him company while Kamele and Theo are away is one of those prequel-type details that doesn’t seem particularly significant to someone following the story in chronological order, but has a special resonance to those of us who first read the series as it was published: it happens that in publication order the first time we met Professor Jen Sar Kiladi he was sitting in his office listening to the Orbital Traffic Scanner at just the right moment to change the course of his life.

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 12

6 Replies

Cultural Genetics Program
Bjornson-Bellevale College of Arts and Sciences
University of Delgado

In which Theo has dinner with her father.

So, like I was saying, after that brief moment of peace and domestic harmony, comes… more peace and domestic harmony? Whatever storm this is the calm before must be really awful.

With Kartor getting a surname this chapter, all of Four Team Three are now equipped with names both fore- and sur-.

The uncharacteristic clumsiness of Theo’s father is definitely suggestive to a reader familiar with the wider Liaden universe; we saw his old teacher pull the same trick back in Scout’s Progress.

It also brings on an observation which I’m sure is influenced by me remembering things that haven’t happened yet, but I’m going to pass it on anyway: Theo was able to catch both the objects Professor Kiladi dropped without any difficulty. Conversely, every incident of her supposed clumsiness we’ve seen has involved colliding or tangling with a person — a trend reinforced by her self-description in chapter nine. This doesn’t mean that Theo isn’t the problem, since she’s still the common thread among the incidents, but it does suggest that the problem isn’t so much a lack of control of her own movements as a flaw in her understanding of the movements of others. Put her in the middle of a crowd of people and trouble is bound to follow, but give her an inanimate object moving according to the basic laws of physics, and she’s fine.