An Ilisidi story.
I can’t do it immediately. Right now I’m at a delicate spot near the end of the current book!
But one of these weeks!
So we will get this done!
An Ilisidi story.
I can’t do it immediately. Right now I’m at a delicate spot near the end of the current book!
But one of these weeks!
So we will get this done!
Don’t suppose that means you can write the fence off on your taxes though…
Only if they’re able to take an office-in-home deduction, and then only a percentage based on the square footage of the house they are using exclusively for business. DH & I had to completely remove and replace our black-top driveway a couple of years back since it held water in front of the garage & sidewalk; in the summer we had a lake after it rained and in the winter we had an ice rink. We run our businesses out of our basement, so I took a percentage of the driveway as land improvements and we’ll write that off over 15 years. Not a huge deduction, but better than nothing. And I’m sure the UPS and other delivery folks appreciate not having to wade to the front door!
Don’t you have to recapture that deduction as a reduced basis when you sell the house? 🙁
Yep. But deferring taxes is a good thing, at least according to conventional wisdom.
I love the idea of new short stories, but after you’ve finished the book – mustn’t interfere with that!
After so many people have been wanting an Ilisidi story, you have one in the cooker! Sorry it took a defunct fence to bring it out, however.
Ilisidi is quite a character, in all senses of the word. A short story, hurray!
(Today’s previous comments still hold. I’m eager to see what other things might appear.juhymkj)
One surmises you had four-footed help with the last comment, Ben? 😀
Teh kittehz have a bad habit of traipsing across my keyboard, yes.
So far, they have not produced anything too recognizable, as words, though sometimes the results are int’restin’.
An Ilisidi story. YAY!
Ilisidi was my mother’s favorite character, and she loved the few books of yours she was able to read before her death in Jan of 1996. I am absolutely certain that the Foreigner series would have remained a favorite of hers had she been able to fight off the cancer which shortened her life so drastically. You know I will buy and read anything you write long or short, but I have to admit that Foreigner series and Finisterre, Mri Wars, and Morgaine are my particular favorites, and word of a short story about Ilisidi would make my year. (I’m still curious about the name of Ilisidi’s husband, Tabini’s grandfather.)
I don’t think I ever did specify.
Help me out, people. Who were Tabini’s predecessors?
Valasi…..his father.
We started to look for that in the Who’s who in Foreigner database , and from what I remember found most names of the Shejidan aijiin between the Landing and Tabini, but no name for Illisidi’s husband.
Now, that database seems to have been stalled with a lot of books still undone, so it might still exist, but I for one can’t remember ever having seen it.
if at all, it might be mentioned in Deliverer, where Ilisidi’s history plays such a large role. I can try to go through that book for any names to add to the Who’s who this week, if that might help.
It would indeed help!
The Foreigner Database: I am restarting Inheritor. I can begin taking notes on keywords for entries. I remember very fondly Bjo Trimble’s fantastic Star Trek Concordance. I will need to look at what’s currently in the database, and a caveat, I have never edited Wiki pages before, but I can find out how.
When I reread the Chanur books, I’d like to expand my notes there.
CJ, there are a couple of Chanur story seeds you might find intriguing. I’ll email.
That should be a fun read.
P’rhaps we can get a short story of Morgaine and Vanye’s activities after “Exile’s Gate”……..????
It could happen…
I am going to have to write, needless to say, more than one short story to build that fence. So suggestions are welcome, even specific suggestions. I can’t guarantee I’ll do ’em, and may not do something else, but I’m open to suggestions.
I wouldn’t mind a story about nand’ Geigi and how he is dealing with life on the space station. He is not unlike Bren, being part of a very small contingent in a foreign land, but he must get accustomed to wacky human ways of doing things! I’m pretty sure he acquired a working amount of shipspeak very quickly, if only in self-defense; I wonder if that is where Cajeiri’s friends picked up Ragi?
I’ve always felt the scale of things was “off”. The map in “Inheritor” and the amount of time it takes to travel around, say Shejidan to Taiben or even Malguri by any form of ground transport just isn’t long enough. 🙁 I’m just up to “Betrayer” but they took that bus back from the Marid on unimproved dirt roads for the most part in a day or two? This place just isn’t continent-sized! If I were being generous, it doesn’t seem like what we know of as the “southwest” is any larger than a corner of Australia.
How big is Mospheira? Maybe the size of Sumatra; Papua New Guinea at the largest? That’s still small by earthly standards, and the planet has to be Earth-sized because the gravitational force is the same for humans.
Clearly with Alpha Station circling, atevi know the surface of the planet beyond the ashid’itat. Is it all water? Clearly lots of water (moderate climate), but Earth is 70% water but still has Eurasia, Africa, and both Americas! Where/what are the other land masses? Who’s there? Why aren’t the atevi interested?
I’d like some pre-Bren back story on Banichi and Jago, please.
And look at the different peoples on Earth and their cultural differences! In scale and scope what is the atevi culture comparable to? French? There’s so much more. And wouldn’t the humans have other envoys to other cultures? Apparently not, but is that reasonable? Humans double-dealing the atevi?
And one other niggle… Humans evolved in the savanahs around East Africa and the Rift zone. And they live there still, amongst their traces. One wonders if the area we know of is sufficiently large to have evolved the atevi?
It’s a Pangaea type continent, ie, no continent on the other side of the world, and storms that keep seafaring off the East coast and southward pretty iffy. Mospheira is about the size of England, plus a bit. The Southern Island is maybe the size of Sicily, and quite a lot of bumpy mountains lie between Shejidan and the Marid. But the continent as a whole stretches out further eastward, with a massive Continental Divide that really doesn’t divide too neatly: it’s mountainous and snowy in the middle, and I’m sure there’s a compensatory desert in there somewhere… I’ve always taken a bit too much mental ‘fold in the middle’ to cove what’s in there, but it’s a distance.
By my rough measurement in my Atlas, 500mi from the Isle of Wight puts you about at Loch Ness. Sicily’s more or less 200mi longways. From the Marid, let’s pick Andaluz, across the Pyrenees, Central Massif, skirt Western Alps, Bohemia, Sudeten and Carpathian Mountain ranges, with due consideration for the number of peoples one would meet, then the general impression I get is Taiben would be somewhere around Paris, Malguri would be no farther NE than say Poland?
That’s still, in comparison to Earth, a pretty small continent. If the Earth is 70% water, then the “Atevi Planet” would be ~95%? And that seems to correlate with the atevi not being “metal rich”. One wonders what the weather/climatic consequences of having so large a contiguous ocean might be.
OTOH, if an author so wanted, there’s plenty of room for other continents, perhaps other people and cultures, and both humans and atevi would be interested. There are opportunities for, ahem, “creative variations”. 😉
This might tie in with the Atevi culture of keeping large tracts of land wooded and natural. This is a two-part argument.
1- I’ve read speculation about the interior of Pangea probably having been an extreme desert, because the moisture brought in clouds from the sea would have fallen long before reaching the interior of such a large continent. Also, without the temperature buffer from seawater, the days would get very hot, and the nights might be cold – speculation was that daytime temperatures would be too extreme even for desert-adapted creatures to survive, because some proteins and enzymes can’t work and get cooked; a bit like what is being predicted for the center of Australia if global warming really hits.
2- On the other hand, I’ve also read about how the Amazon rainforest exhales enough of the moisture that falls in the coastal regions, that that water vapour gets blown in some further before falling as rain on the next bit, and so on. That article said that by the time the rains reach the Andes they’ve been recycled that way four times. If this cycle gets broken, e.g. by widespread deforestation in the first rainfall zone (grassland exhales much less water vapour than large trees), then everything inland from there will get dryer.
Taken together, this might mean that for a Pangea-size continent it would be essential to maintain enough moisture-exhaling tree cover and natural habitat to keep the rainfall-and-evaporation cycle going, if the interior is to remain habitable and/or traversable.
Tall mountains will precipitate the water from the higher air layers, like the Himalayans distill their snowfall from the monsoons, but most (sometimes almost all) will fall on the side the prevailing wind comes from. As we’ve heard Malguri can be very wet, and the East side of the mountain range around Malguri is long settled, presumably the winds are mostly from the East; and the west side of the mid-continent range is the dry part.
This fits with the impression I had that the Bergids, where Grigii the astronomer lives, are an older and lower range of mountains (high enough for skiing, but lower than the mid-continent range), and that there is probably an extended and scarcely populated hinterland between those and the East-West dividing range. These hinterlands would then be situated like the North American Midwest, between two mountain ranges blocking a lot of the moisture coming from east and west oceans. Depending on unknown geography and weather patterns it might also be similarly vulnerable to winds from the south and/or north, bringing both moisture and less desirable effects.
And now I’m wondering what effects Europe’s widespread deforestation since Roman times has had on the east bloc countries, on the European part of Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc.: would those have had more equal rainfall if iron age mankind hadn’t started using up the European forests, continuing and accelerating in recent centuries? Or does being in the temperate zone modify those effects, maybe producing enough rainfall to get all the way to the Ural? I think tropical monsoons like in the Amazon rainforest carry more water, but as they’re so concentrated maybe the rain falls out faster and the clouds get less deep inland?
“Pangea-type” vs “Pangea-sized” may be quite different. The former suggests a one-continent world. And then the question comes to the size of said continent. If it’s smallish, then its geology might reflect a fairly simple, consistent history. If much larger, as Earth’s Pangea was, it could be an amalgamation of different continents, meaning all sorts of geologies mashed together higgeldy-piggeldy.
There is a certain amount of scientific “story” describing Pangea, geologically and biologically, but it’s so different than the modern world, I’m not so sure most of us could imagine what it would really be like experientially–to not feel living on a huge Pangea was very strange indeed. And even with Pangea, I would still expect the mantle plumes, “hotspots”, like Hawaii, to have been producing islands out in the big wide ocean. There are a lot of island groups in the South Pacific! 😉
This kind of thing is one of the things I like about SciFi. Many of its stories are the “Hey, bet you never thought of this!” type. And they’re right–I learn something more!
I just re-read the entire series specifically looking for Valasi’s father’s name but it never did get mentioned…
I love me some night horses on Finisterre. Any creature that loves bacon and is interested in “foolin’ round” all winter rates high in my books…
The tourist with salt packets in her pocket, who comforts the poor banshee and helps her wash the blood out of the clothing, ruining a perfectly good tourist attraction. So concerned is she with the poor woman’s distress that she never even sees that the clothes are hers.
Interesting. Spooky. Would this mean she’s become a banshee too? Would it mean some no-good did her in, not the banshee?
—–
Tangent: Greek and Roman Mythology. There is the Latin Faunus, for a (presumably male) forest being / spirit. The Greeks had nymphs (water maiden spirits), dryads (tree maiden or mother spirits), satyrs, centaurs, and so on. — OK, but did the Greeks have male water or woodland beings / spirits besides the satyrs? Other than, say, specific myths about the tragic or honored end of some young man?
I can’t think of what the Germanic / Saxon / Norse myths had that might be comparable.
I have almost no knowledge of Celtic mythology, despite knowing a little about various kinds of faerie or wee folk, who I think were mostly Celtic, rather than Germanic.
ooooh. spooky…