Tag Archives: Springbreeze Farm

Carpe Diem – Chapter 20

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Springbreeze Farm and Environs

In which Borril is not pretty.

The language lesson in this chapter is one of my favourite parts of the novel.

It is apparently just over a month since Val Con gave Miri the stick-knife in Econsey, which occurred a day or two before they left Lufkit on the 242nd day of the year, so this is somewhere in the vicinity of day 270 (and Edger’s interlude on Kago, instead of happening a week after they landed on this world, as the placement of the chapter suggests, happened a week before). That leaves, between their captivity with the Juntavas and their landfall on Zhena Trelu’s world, about two weeks for trying to get the derelict yacht working, Jump, and scouting from orbit. It didn’t feel like that long when it was happening, but I suppose it’s not impossible, though it is an awfully long time to be living on pretzel-bread, water, and salmon.

Miri, arranging the breakfast things, is described moving with surprising swiftness, an attribute which in this series is usually a sign of a pilot, or at least one with pilot potential. Miri isn’t a pilot, and has never mentioned having the potential or the interest, but given the life she’s led it’s not unlikely that the possibility has never occurred to her.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 16

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Springbreeze Farm

In which Val Con shows Miri the Rainbow.

This the first we’ve heard of Clonak ter’Meulen in a while — indeed, since before Val Con’s father left to pursue his Balance, and that was a very long time ago. It won’t be nearly so long until we hear of him again.

Val Con’s thought implies that he hasn’t been into his own mental safe-space at the end of the Rainbow in a long time, perhaps since he fell into the hands of the Department; it seems like the the kind of thing the Department would want to keep a person from having access to. When he tried to run the Rainbow in Agent of Change, he got diverted into one of the programs the Department bolted onto his brain before he got to the point where the stairway and the door appear.

I mentioned, back when Justin Hostro was showing off his wealth by having a Belansium planetscape, that I’d never before managed to make the connection between that and the Belansium planetscapes in “Phoenix”. I’d also never managed to make the connection between either of those and Miri here discovering that her mental safe-space includes a Belansium. (And consequently, I’d never quite understood why she was worried, which is presumably that she knows she lacks the means to have acquired a Belansium legally.) I’m pretty bad at names generally, unless they’re repeated several times in a context which says to pay attention to them, so it’s totally normal for me to have forgotten a name that was mentioned in passing many chapters ago even if I’m reading a series all at once. Or perhaps especially if I’m reading a series all at once, when each new name is quickly followed by others demanding attention. I’m doing a lot better at connecting names during this re-read partly because I’m spacing the chapters out (which gives each set of names a chance to settle into memory before the next lot arrive), partly because I’m specifically looking for connections, and perhaps mostly because I’m taking extensive notes.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 15

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Springbreeze Farm

In which Miri gets the milk confused with the pickles.

Or maybe this would have been the best chapter to reiterate my inability to word good when it comes to the emotional stuff.

Miri mentions that the image on the obverse of the cantra coin is “linked stars”. That might be a non-specific allusion to interstellar navigation, or, depending on the pattern in which they’re linked and remembering that Cantra herself presumably had a hand in the design, be a specific allusion to Tor An’s lost home, the Ring Stars. (I wonder what the image on the reverse of the coin is.)

Personal story to pad out the word count: The closest I came to learning a second language was in high school; I did German for three years before I had to give it up for tertiary-entrance maths (very few people at my school wanted to do both, so the school scheduled them against one another). That meant I missed out on the senior year immersion trip, which might have given it a solid foundation, and I haven’t found myself using it much in the years since, so much of what I learned has slipped away. My usual joke is that I can remember enough to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, and “I’ll have a slice of the black forest cake, please”.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 12

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Springbreeze Farm

In which Meri and Corvill stay for the night.

Sometimes it seems like every time I choose to make a general observation not specifically inspired by the particular chapter at hand, it turns out I’d have done better to wait until the next chapter, either because it invalidates the observation or because it turns out to be an even better occasion to have made it.

(In other words, no eloquence will be forthcoming regarding the emotional and character aspects of this chapter either.)

And now it’s time for another general observation that hopefully I won’t regret when I get to the next chapter:

Because this is a re-read, I know already that it will eventually be established that the so-called Department of the Interior is a rogue organization with friends in high places but no official standing. So it’s been interesting, re-reading Agent of Change and now Carpe Diem, that so far there’s been no indication that the Department is not an office of the Liaden government, carrying out that government’s policies. (The one hint in that direction, perhaps, is Shan mentioning that he’s never heard of the Department — but then, to be unheard of is only what one might expect from a covert organization.) Val Con’s recollection here, in particular, definitely gives the impression that the Department was an authority that could require obedience — or at least that it had succeeded in convincing Val Con that that was what it was.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 11

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Springbreeze Farm

In which Zhena Trelu has guests for dinner.

This seems like a good time to mention again that I do appreciate the emotional and character aspects of the Liaden stories, and in fact they’re a big part of why these are some of my favourite things to read, but I’m not very good at appreciating them verbally. So instead you get observations like these:

In the local calendar, the year is somewhat after 1475, which indicates that local civilization’s been going for a while. Whether it’s actually been going longer than the Standard Calendar, which is only up to Year 1392, depends on how long the years are.

The technique of illuminating a word’s pronunciation by describing the efforts of someone unfamiliar with it gets an extensive workout in this chapter, both for words new to our protagonists, like “Borril”, and words long familiar, like “Korval”. It’s largely thanks to this chapter that I got a strong grip on the correct pronunciation of “Korval” — but I’ve just realised on this re-reading that I’ve been mispronouncing “Borril” for years.