Mail Room
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo passes the time in a queue by discussing literature.

I made a series of extremely undignified noises when Theo said who the author of Sam Tim’s Ugly Day was. I’ve mentioned that one of the joys of this re-read is discovering connections that went past me before, but I have no idea how I missed that one the first time through.

The story of Sam Tim and the family joke is interesting as an example of what Lois McMaster Bujold calls the author’s right to have a better idea later. The first time Theo appeared in a Liaden novel (which, in chronological order, is still some distance in her future), she said her father had taught her that if she were ever in really serious trouble she might take the matter to Korval, with the wording strongly suggesting that he’d said so outright. When the authors came to expand on Theo’s story, it seems, they came up against the problem that if Jen Sar Kiladi had said such a thing directly he would have consequently faced the awkward question of who he was that the troubles of him and his family might be of interest to Korval, and so instead there is this series of events which conveys the lesson to Theo indirectly. (The question is not entirely unanswerable, since Jen Sar is a pilot and we know from earlier books that Korval doesn’t mind taking a hand when a pilot is in serious trouble, but we saw at the end of Fledgling that even the fact of being a pilot is more about his past than Jen Sar would like to give out.)