10 KiB
[WIP][FF]Business as Usual: Scene 1.8
-
Author: u/Farmerbob1 Level 1 author*
-
Score: 7
-
Created: 2016-05-18T18:18:31
Post:
Comments:
u/alexeyr [+2] Steersman (17 days later)
I like this, but some nitpicks (which may already have been made), as I read:
Lung the organ and Lung the Chinese dragon are pronounced with different vowels.
Is there still a Wall Street after the Golden Morning? New York was destroyed, I think. Though it could still be used as a figure of speech.
I don't think Vlad would be that surprised by books being available. Paarfi is writing at that time, after all, I seem to remember other mentions of reading for entertainment as well.
Wait, this is Earth-Bet Brockton Bay, not a new city on one of the alternate Earths? Because it was very definitely destroyed by Scion.
"I stared at Loiosh. Do you really think Teacher could control my mind if he gave us a power like Imp’s that would work on electronics?" Why would Vlad think Teacher couldn't?
If it's Earth Bet, Bitch shouldn't be at the meeting.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (18 days later)
Will review and reply when I have a keyboard. I will say that #5 is exactly how I want it. Vlad and Loiosh are more a single mental entity than it seems on the surface. My belief os that when they argue, it is really a single mind deliberating. Vlad knows Teacher's power will almosy certainly make him a mental puppet - but he really hates that Dragon can spy on him so easily, so he's considering things that he knows are bad ideas.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (19 days later)
More answers:
1 I discussed this in the thread. If it were an original work, I'd fix it, but it is a derivative wrk, and the vast majority of people don't know the pronunciation, only the spelling. Lady Teldra technically wouldn't allow Vlad to misunderstand. Still, it is too tempting to poke at from Loiosh/Vlad's point of view, as they are being incorrigible smartasses.
2 Vlad was reading old magazine articles. Wall street likely still does exist. There are a LOT of alternate New Yorks.
3 Vlad wasn't surprised by books being available. He was surprised to find them in a pile of refuse. Books are mentioned in the Jhereg stories, but they are uncommon. Book and broadsheet availability in the Jheregverse seems to track with early post-printing-press in our world.
4 I was thinking that Brockton Bay survived in some fashion, but re-reading Bitches epilogue clearly indicated that it didn't. Boston did.
5 answered below
6 Tattletale and Bitch do still speak. Miss Militia even made certain to pass on a message that TT wanted to speak with Bitch again. Perhaps this meeting is what TT wanted to talk to her about... grin
Thank you for pointing out some loose ends. I will address 4 and 6 in the next chapter. The rest either can't be addressed without cutting something I want to stay (1), or don't seem to require attention (2, 3, 5). If you want to press a point, feel free. You might change my mind if you are convincing and can point me at things that counter my view about 2, 3, 5.
u/alexeyr [+2] Steersman (20 days later)
For 3, there is also "These people are so spoiled. I order a book, and it arrives in a week, and they apologize?" I don't think book orders would typically take much longer in Dragaera. Outside of the capital or the major cities, perhaps.
For 5, Loiosh replies "You don’t have the brain-thing that capes have, but I don’t think taking the risk would be smart." This looks to me like they agree there is a chance that Teacher could give Vlad powers without being able to control him, they are just considering how likely it is. But I don't see why they think it's possible at all. Or why the absence of the "brain-thing" is relevant: Teacher can give powers and control the recipient whether they had powers already or not.
For 6, at any rate Bitch has been off-world for a long time (and they can't be on Earth Gimel to fix 4, because it doesn't have big cities yet). And they haven't talked long enough that MM actually needed to pass the message :) So Vlad would likely know of Bitch as a former Undersider, not a current one.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (20 days later)
Hmm. You might be right about delivery times for books in Dragaera, but a lot of commerce happens by cart and ship. Books, especially valuable ones, might be carried by teleporting couriers in the Empire, but not in Eastern lands.
Vlad and Loiosh don't understand how Teacher's power works exactly, but they know enough to only consider approaching him if the situation is far more dire than the situation they find themselves in.
I may need to reconsider Bitch's role in the story.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 minutes later)
Recently I mentioned this writing project here and there seemed to be some interest. Vlad does seem to be reasonably rational but I'll warn you that he does compartmentalize a lot. I'm not entirely certain if this really qualifies as rational writing, but I'm doing my best to write a believable and interesting Vlad Taltos crossover into Worm.
u/None [+3] (an hour later)
[deleted]
u/Escapement [+3] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (3 hours later)
I was the one who recc'd that series here. Most of the characters have reasons that seem fairly reasonable for their goals, and while the reader usually can't put everything together beforehand it's still really well written and interesting. One of Vlad's defining characteristic as a protagonist is his skepticism and tendency to think about things in an interesting and incisive way - he's not necessarily using anything like the scientific method, but he is using a lot of skepticism and careful analysis and reasoning and deduction that makes sense.
I rank the series extremely highly. I really like the worldbuilding in the series - the Dragaerans are rubber forehead aliens to an extent (physically - not that different) but they have a very well developed and interesting society that is far more believably foreign than the vast, vast majority of aliens in fiction.
I like that Brust does a bunch of experimenting with his books in various ways. His characters change and grow over time, and become different. He also makes the books structurally different in a lot of ways as well - he mixes up the voice and structure of his Dragaera books a lot. In particular, Dragon is told nonlinearly through repeated flashbacks, Athyra is told through the perspective of a different character, Orca is told as a sort of 'tale within a tale' framing where characters relate events to one another nonlinearly... one book has the entire thing structured around a laundry list, where every chapter lists one stain/rip/etc to be laundered as a result of the chapter. Basically, there's tons of playing with foreshadowing and nonlinear plotting and readers' expectations in a lot of really neat ways. There are a lot of longrunning series where each novel is basically the same as the last, and the Taltos books avert that the most of any fantasy series I have ever read.
I strongly recommend reading in publication order, not by the series chronology.
Finally, Brust's other work is mostly pretty good. His Khaavren Romances are a pastiche of Dumas in the world of Dragaera and I really loved them - but the writing style (including dialogue styled after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) is really dramatically not for everyone. Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille has an amazing premise that seems really amazingly cool but the conclusion and so forth is super disappointing (complete failure to follow through). Agyar is a pretty good prototypical urban fantasy vampire novel. Freedom and Necessity is a crazy detailed epistolary novel that explores a really realistically crafted 19th century England, with a big focus on political philisophy stuff (Marxism) that is fairly well done. Brokedown Palace is a fairly good fairytale retelling. To Reign in Hell is basically a Zelazny pastiche - it's pretty solidly done in Zelazny's style, if you like Creatures of Light and Darkness or Lord of Lights you will probably enjoy this. The Incrementalists is the sort of thing where the basic idea is probably super interesting to anyone interested in EA-adjacent ideas, but the actual EA-type-stuff is sort of infuriating by the standards of anyone who is into EA already, and the other stuff is not terribly interesting. The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars is a work about a failed artist and it's trying to be artsy and stuff and it didn't really work at all for me. Finally, The Gypsy is the worst thing that either Steven Brust or coauthor Megan Lindholm (AKA Robin Hobb) have ever been involved in.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (2 hours later)
I really enjoy the series. Vlad is very intelligent, probably a level 2, but the story is written in something of a Sherlock Holmes style, where Vlad's eventual solution to whatever problem he is resolving is nearly impossible to guess because the reader doesn't have enough information.
The books are also written non-chronologically, making it a bit harder to follow the thread.
However, it is possible that the books are written non-chronologically as a plot device. Time travel may be possible, though it hasn't been performed by Vlad yet.
The story is narrated by Vlad himself, and he does talk to the fourth wall occasionally. He also appears to be somewhat of a untrustworthy narrator. Again, this might be plot related.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about trying to determine if the Vlad Taltos books are rational or not is that despite appearing to be non-rational, the overall arc of stories may, in fact, turn out to be rational. (Other than Doyle-like information hiding. That's clearly a thing.)