Tag Archives: Otto El

Landed Alien

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In which Kara ven’Arith takes a very long tenday tour.

I take note of the way Kara’s mother and Kara’s delm are always mentioned in this story in the same breath, and the way those mentions are worded, and in addition consider the similar mention of Kara’s mother early in Saltation, and the conclusion I draw is that this is one of those Liaden melant’i situations where “mother” and “delm” are two hats worn by a single person but spoken of separately because the same person might be required to consider a situation differently depending on which set of eyes she’s regarding it with.

The Station Master is another addition to the list of characters for whom the authors of have chosen not to provide gendered pronouns. I might not have found it worth mentioning, but that there’s a sentence near the end of the story which attracted attention by going somewhat out of its way to avoid a pronoun.

Tomorrow: Agent of Change

Saltation – Chapter 12

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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.

Saltation – Chapter 6

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Lunch Break
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which everyone is talking about Theo Waitley.

Theo is the celebrity of the moment; there were news crews watching the air chase, and they caught her tricky landing too. She’s uncomfortable with all the attention, which, as Asu says, is better than if she were to start expecting it as her due.

We learn a thing or two more about Hap Harney, including that it was something of an understatement to say that Chelly knew him, and also that he’s been described as “public menace number one”. We still haven’t heard, though, what it was he actually did.

It’s maybe worth noting that this chapter has both a mention of Chelly having an ex-boyfriend and the fact that of the questions being fired at Theo by her temporary crowd of admirers, the sexually suggestive one comes from another girl. We’ve had enough such things happen in past books to get the idea that they’re not uncommon in the Liaden universe, but this is the first time we’ve seen them happen around Theo, so her reaction tells us something about her and perhaps by extension about Delgado. In the event, she doesn’t seem to find anything unusual about either thing, which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected given the way all the talk around First Pair in Fledgling seemed to take a heterosexual context for granted.

Saltation – Chapter 4

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Academy Flight GT S14
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo’s day is not great.

A mysterious aircraft pursued and shot down by four others. The urgency with which the Academy called on its own aircraft to get out of the sky suggests that they had some idea what was going on, and some reason to suppose that the four pursuing craft might not limit their attentions to the particular craft they were pursuing.

Theo manages a difficult landing in a sequence I feel probably deserves to be talked about, not just acknowledged, but I don’t have the whatever to appreciate it in detail.

Asu takes a while to notice what’s going on outside her own concerns, but at least when she does notice she seems suitably concerned and has some idea how to respond appropriately. (And the fact that she knows Theo’s tea preferences without needing to ask suggests that she does sometimes pay more attention to other people.) This is not to say that Chelly doesn’t want to help, but he seems like he might be under the kind of stress that hinders, rather than helps, efforts to think about what to do; I can relate.