Tag Archives: unclear date

Intelligent Design

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In which Trealla Fantrol gets a new butler.

This is another story where I wonder how it comes over to a reader who hadn’t read any of the later-set novels featuring yos’Galan’s robot butler, and who therefore didn’t know where it was going from the moment Roderick Spode appeared. (I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of Roderick Spode. The story gives us no cause to suppose that that wasn’t actually his name, but it seems like a bit of a tidy coincidence if it was.)

Incidentally, I notice Jeeves is not the only inhabitant of Trealla Fantrol mentioned here with a name from a Terran story: the cat Merlin, mentioned as an earlier beneficiary of Val Con’s hunches, is another. Presumably that means he’s a more recent arrival than Anne.

It’s interesting that Val Con’s sense for a person in danger responds just as much to a machine person as to a living creature, but it cuts in both directions. There’s the obvious implication that the retired unit is a real person despite being composed of wires and code. But there’s a complication introduced in the fact that he was sending out a distress signal at the time Val Con got his hunch: assuming for the sake of discussion that it’s not just a coincidence, the idea that the distress signal might have actually been what triggered the hunch suggests that on some level technological signals and psychic communication might be the same thing. And after some of the sufficiently-advanced-technology shenanigans that went on the prequel duology, I definitely suspect the authors of doing this deliberately.

This is one of the stories that doesn’t have a definite position in the chronological order. Shan is not yet 20 Standard Years old, which is about the most solid indicator in the story. It’s set approximately around the same time as “Heirloom”, and I take it to be somewhat after, since there’s mention of Nova serving an apprenticeship with Luken and she didn’t seem in “Heirloom” to have had much previous involvement with Luken’s trade.

Tomorrow: “A Matter of Dreams”

The Wine of Memory

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In which Master Lute gives a friend more help than he knew he was capable of.

It’s amazing, the details one notices when one starts paying attention. As for instance: this story is also in the wrong place; I had never realised before, but it goes between “Where the Goddess Sends” and “A Spell for the Lost”. (I’m beginning to think that when this big re-read is over, I’m going to have to do another smaller one, just the Moonhawk and Lute stories, to get them straight in my head.)

Moonhawk and Lute have been travelling together for just a few days, and Moonhawk has just mastered her first piece of Craft Magic. She’s already started snarking about how he’s a terrible teacher, and he about how she’s a disrespectful apprentice. And he’s already started offering her new perspectives on the relationship between the Temple and the towns.

The anecdote about Rowan learning to read also says something about the way society works on Sintia. (Incidentally, this is the first story, in the order we’ve been reading them, to explicitly name the setting as Sintia.)

More characters named after plants (though this time with some orthographic variations), including merlot (a grape varietal used in winemaking), vervain, rowan, and juniper. (This Rowan is the second we’ve encountered recently; the Witch of Dyan Circle who was hunting Lute down in “Moon’s Honor” also bore that name.)

Speaking of plants, the association of rosemary with memory is a piece of folklore of long standing. (“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”)

These stories do really well at the atmospheric spell-casting scenes.

I like the way Lute’s attempt to help Veverain turned out. It’s got some interesting implications (and I bet this is another story Priscilla’s teachers didn’t tell properly if they told it at all).

I like the story about how Tween the cat came to be named.

In fact, I like this story period. It’s my favourite of the Moonhawk and Lute set.

A Spell for the Lost

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In which Moonhawk and Lute, pooling their varied resources, find that which is lost.

Moonhawk and Lute have been travelling together for a month now. Underneath all the teasing banter, Lute has come to regard Moonhawk highly, surprising Moonhawk when she gets an idea of how worried he is for her safety. What she thinks of him is not as clear, since he doesn’t do anything to frighten her the way she frightens him.

Speaking of frightening, the scene where Moonhawk is working her spell is very atmospheric.

We learn that Moonhawk is from Dyan City (like that other Moonhawk, and that settles the question I had about whether Dyan and Huntress are the same). One of the undercurrents of these stories makes another appearance with Lute’s comment about the differences between life in the cities and elsewhere.

The people in this story are named after plants: Cedar is a tree, and Laurel, Aster, Senna, and Tael are flowering plants. (Tael, being a plant that doesn’t exist on Earth, is carefully introduced in passing a few pages before the girl’s name is first mentioned.) The mention of Laurel, Moonhawk’s old teacher, is reassuring; it’s evidence that this kind of theme naming is widespread, and that Tael and Cedar had a better basis for their relationship than the coincidence of both having parents who named their children after vegetables. I also hope that Senna was named for one of her namesake’s more congenial properties than the one that first came to my mind; medicinally, senna is useful but unpleasant, which is not bad for a plant but would be an unhappy reputation for a person to bear.

You know who Lute reminds me of in this story? Shan yos’Galan. They have the theatrical mannerisms in common, of course, but the resemblance isn’t usually so strong. I think maybe it’s the lounging about with a glass of wine in his hand that does it.

Where the Goddess Sends

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In which Moonhawk and Lute meet and decide to travel together across the world.

If I was right yesterday, then this is the first time we’ve seen Moonhawk and Lute since the Great Migration – and my, how they’ve changed.

This Moonhawk is human, a priestess of the Goddess. This Lute is human, as well, and though he is a Master of prestidigitation, in contrast to his former self he can wield only enough actual magic to summon a small light, and even that costs him a great deal of effort.

It has to be said that this Lute is much more entertaining than the old one. (Perhaps that’s only to be expected of a man who makes his living as an entertainer.) Moonhawk has something of a dry sense of humor as well. So, come to that, does the narrator, particularly when it comes to people being knocked on the head.

This is also the first time we’ve heard of the Goddess, and won’t be the last. She comes in somewhere in every story set on Sintia, and more remarkably in several stories that aren’t; the Goddess seems to have a presence on many planets. (For those who might find an active Goddess an incongruous thing to find in a space opera, the account of the Great Weaving in Crystal Dragon implicitly provides a context.)

The world they’re travelling through is a bit of a mixture. It seems to be generally sort of medieval, but there are stories about “the ship that brought our foremothers here”, and lingering bits of technology.

Lute mentions Huntress City, famous for its electric lights. In “Moon’s Honor”, we see Dyan City, with its electric lights; I’m not sure whether these are the same city at different points in its history or if there’s more than one city with electric lights. (Dyan is said in “Moon’s Honor” to be one of “the Three Cities”, which perhaps suggests the latter.) Either way, juxtaposing the two names brings to mind the Romans’ Diana, a noted huntress and goddess of the moon. I bet the authors had her in mind, but I don’t know if the Sintians knew enough Roman mythology to be using it for place names.

The part about the two things which must without fail be said is striking, and I have always remembered it. (And since reading “Moonphase”, I have often wondered if the version of this story Priscilla learned included the two things – assuming that her teachers told this story at all.)

Moon’s Honor

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In which Moonhawk and Lute meet for the first time… again.

Well, I gave it my best shot and I blew it: Now I’ve read Moon’s Honor, I’m pretty sure it’s set after the existing trilogy of Tales of Moonhawk and Lute.

So, if you haven’t actually read it yet, you might consider leaving it for now and coming back to this post in three days. (Or not. Up to you.)

The other thing you might want to know if you haven’t read it yet is that Moon’s Honor was originally conceived as the beginning of a novel, so while the immediate situation is resolved at the end there are lots of loose threads left dangling.

(Apparently the authors couldn’t find a taker for the full novel; according to the foreword, Meisha Merlin and then Baen were more interested in more Korval novels, and everybody else they tried before Meisha Merlin just wasn’t interested. I can kind of see why, I think; I want to know what happens next, but my interest in the characters and situation got a head start from already knowing something about these people and places from other stories, and I can’t say for certain that I’d have been interested if I’d come to it cold.)

Here we have a Moonhawk and Lute recognisably similar to the pair from the Tales, but also different. They’re still on Sintia, which I had wondered whether would be the case. They’re brought together by the call of the Goddess, but this time it’s Lute who is called to where Moonhawk is. This Moonhawk is still a priestess, more advanced in some ways (and less so in others). This Lute is still a magician whose power lies more in the quickness of the hand than in supernatural gift, but instead of a lone wanderer he’s a member of a widespread guild. (One wonders whether, if it were possible to trace the chain of apprentices and masters back to its beginning, one would find the earlier Lute and the apprentice he took in “Where the Goddess Sends”.) He also seems to have more supernatural gift than that earlier Lute; it’s seductively easy to create a trend out of two data points, of course, but I do wonder if part of the planned arc of the Moonhawk and Lute stories is/was that each successive Lute had more of the supernatural at his beck than the one before. (And then again, Plan B suggests a third data point, and the trend still holds.)

Speaking of the overall arc, it’s also interesting that the embodied Moonhawk and Lute have a tendency to find a pattern with Lute as mentor and Moonhawk as student, considering that with the original Moonhawk and Lute it was Moonhawk who was usually in charge.

We see more of the Temple than in any other story than perhaps “Moonphase”, and there are signs already of what it will have become in that story, in the incidental stories about some of the priestesses’ attitudes, and in that very pointed exchange about where Lady Rowan’s loyalty lies.

I think Master Lute’s interplay with the Lady Rowan may be my favourite part of the story; for my favourite part of my favourite part, it’s a toss-up between the exchange about loyalty and the result of Lady Rowan commanding Lute to be silent.

An odd incidental detail that might or might not have been elaborated on had the novel been completed: in addition to the Moon, the night sky here contains two fast-moving objects referred to as the Hounds.

Eleutherios

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“Eleutherios” is, without hesitation, one of my favourite short stories in the Liaden Universe. (It occurs to me that several of my favourites are stories that stand alone, without direct ties to the characters and events of the novels; the extra work called for to establish the setting and characters pays off, I guess.)

The title is from the Greek, and means “liberation”.

One of the things I like about it is that it’s a happy ending all around (except, I suppose, for the police, but somehow I don’t find it in me to feel sorry for them, much). Niku is liberated from captivity, and Friar Julian and his church are liberated from their encroaching poverty.

I always find myself wondering how much of a hand Friar Julian’s gods had in that, because one of the other striking things about this story is that nothing Friar Julian believes about his gods is shown to be wrong. Niku may be chuckling to himself about being able to use Friar Julian’s faith to achieve his goals, but I wonder if somewhere there’s a god chuckling to himself about being able to use Niku’s unbelief in a similar manner.

During this re-read, I found myself wondering if the gods and their consorts might be, as it were, people we know; specifically, with certain details from the duology fresh in mind, it occurred to me that “a god and his consort” might be somebody’s understanding of a dramliza – and that the gods and their consorts might even be, perhaps, the same Names revered on Sintia, seen from a different angle. I am, however, less confident of this idea now than I was about halfway through; by the end of the story, there had been enough mentions of men in Friar Julian’s religion pledging to each other as life partners that I don’t even feel confident assuming that the gods’ consorts are female.

“Eleutherios” is the first story in the re-read that doesn’t have any straightforward indications of when it’s set, so perhaps I ought to say a few words about why I placed it here. The answer, in a few words, is “gut feeling”. It seems, to me, like it’s set early in the Liaden Universe, but there aren’t any details I can point to that firmly settle it, and some of the bits that feel to me like they support my theory could probably be seen to support a different theory if you happened to have one. The aspect I think I can explain most clearly is that there are parts of the culture that remind me of the culture in the Crystal duology, which suggests to me that that wasn’t so long ago; in particular, the police and their restraining chip remind me more than anything else of the bond-threads used to control runaways in the old world.

(There is a thing that needs to be said, sooner or later, about Niku’s kin, but that’s not so much relevant to this appearance as it is to their next, so I think I’ll save it until then. I may, at that time, give it a post of its own.)