……I could also, just in that one descriptive sentence in Deliverer—convert Irene to Bjorn, and make Bjorn wear that description.
When years intervene between books, alas, the brain goes to mush. Can someone e-mail me the ENTIRE passage where that description occurs, and tell me if Bjorn was ever described? I’d hate to have to correct it twice!
One thing with e-books, even for NYC, fixes are possible.
I have both “who’s who” and “what’s what” documents (hanging indent and alphabetized) and I make myself note down the pertinencies of every new character or place, mostly because I have chronic mushybrainosis. Since it’s also in the same program I use to write in, very easy to cut and paste info from one document to the other to keep the spelling straight, as well as physical characteristics, and significant time line events. I’m afraid that’s my only discipline as a writer. (oh, and backing those two documents up religiously!)
And, BTW, do we have the Atevi that translates into “Gods infelicitious!” noted down somewhere? Ditto “Gods felicitious!” and Tabini’s magnificent, “Gods infelicitous and blasphemous!” Inquiring fangirls want to know. (and if not, will you do one? — we need more catch phrases besides “baji-naji”)
Lol! We’ve got to think on this!
I’ve checked pretty thoroughly through Destroyer where the children are intoduced. I remember Irene being introduced as dark (like Captain Ogun) in my mind but didn’t come up with anything doing a search on Irene, Bjorn, Artur, and Gene other than the following…
Four close human “aishid” close in age to Cajeiri. (p6) Total of 5 children allowed to associate with him. Artur’s 12th birthday party sparked Cajeiri’s demand for an 8th b’day.
p.12 Irene, Cajeiri said, wasn’t a girl, she was Artur’s sister. Translation: she was clan, she was family, she was part of his aishid.
p.10 …and Artur’s mother had even called the to-do over the attachment between the children that very dangerous word, silly. (Note it does not say Artur and Irene’s mother)
p.35 There was hope for the Reunioners’ future in the likes of Bjorn and Artur.
p.35 There was hope in those Reunioner kids and in their forgiving parents…
p.100 “But I could absolutely rely on Artur and Gene, mani-ma. They are very clever.”
Also note spelling of Kadigidi rather than Kadagidi… for example p.53. I’ll see if any later volumes contain the clues….
My recommendation is that you leave it as is and add a note to later versions that there has been a little “drift” in character descriptions and names/Ragi vocabulary between books due to difficulties in transliterations from multiple non-Ragi dialects. What do readers expect after 14 books with the 15th in the bag?
I move that Artur have been adopted by an older sibling of he and Irene’s mother, who does not seem to have a stable spousal unit. If Irene seems paler than she was, perhaps her mother doesn’t allow her to eat things grown in dirt, and Bjorn, Gene, and Artur are sneaking her things when they can, but cannot do so often enough to keep her robust.
FOUND IT in Deliverer… page 141-142 (Kindle 2116)
…he had seen Gene’s face, with his pale skin, not unpleasingly brown-speckled across the nose, his eyes, a remarkable muddle of grey, green, and blue — his hair, which was brown and dark, and curled generally out of control…
…Artur’s face, narrow-nosed and with a chipped front tooth — Irene’s, dark as an ateva, but brown, and eyes darker than her face, scarily dark, full of thoughts —
I haven’t found a description of Bjorn yet. In Deliverer Cajeiri states that he is beginning to forget Bjorn and concentrating on his three special associates, Gene, Artur, and Irene.
I’m inclining to make Bjorn dark. That would solve everything. Problem is, in our basement, I don’t have real good access to prior volumes.
That’s what the database http://trackmysoftware.com/cj at the Ongoing Projects page will be for, once we’ve finished putting in all 14 volumes. I’ll start reading another volume for the names and details in a week or so when things calm down a bit around here.
Ready4more, have you put in the details you’ve looked up?
And does anyone know if and how one can turn an ordinary word in these comments into a hyperlink, e.g. to the Ongoing Projects page linked at the top of this blog, without pasting the entire URL into the visible text?
http://new.wavewithoutashore.cwgservices.org/?page_id=4562 is such an unwieldy bit of text!
Hanneke, if you’re asking about comments or replies within WordPress, use HTML syntax, such as:
text description
The URL should be absolute rather than relative, and may include # anchors, etc.
Nuts. It ate the syntax example, my apologies.
[a href=”URL”]text description[/a]
And substitute angle brackets, less-than and greater-than signs, for the square brackets. Typically, American English then distinguishes curly braces { } too, the begin/end pair in C-derived languages, but you’ll also see/hear curly brackets instead of braces.
@BCS: thanks, that’s exactly what I meant.
We need to do a good link to it now so people can find it. I’m exhausted today—we found some nice basalt rock, we parked in a mudpuddle, and to save shoes I ended up crawling over the center console to get to the driver’s seat, and now am—sore—to say the least. All those calcium deposits I was working at the gym to remove gently, are now, I think, removed.
I thought you all might like this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/stephen-hawking-space-exploration-humanity_n_3061329.html?ncid=webmail2
I still don’t see anything about dark hair. In sixth grade I knew a girl who’s skin was dark copper and eyes were golden as the top of a dinner roll. She was a natural redhead, and I was mercilessly teased for telling her that I thought her beautiful…
Irene’s hair and skin, and Bjorn’s, an opinion only.
An easy out for Irene’s hair color change would be she’s old enough to try hair dye or bleaching. Kids today do tht more routinely. I could see, aboard ship, where there’s not a great chance for color and variety, that ship folk, kids especially, might go through fads or whims for the heck of it.
Skin tones — Irene might be someone whose skin tans and fades very easily, depending on amount of light and diet, and perhaps temperature, if that can affect tanning. Maybe there’s a sort of solarium or greenhouse aboard ship, with close to natural sunlight for growing fruits and vegetables? If Irene and others went there for play or exercise, or to work in the garden, might that account for an earlier, deeper tan? Then if, say, her mother’s work changed, or Irene’s preferences or opportunities changed, she might then lose her tan and get much paler. By atevi standards, even a lighter-skinned, not very tanned human of whatever descent would look very pale to an ateva. To Bren and other humans, they’d know the subtleties, but perhaps over the centuries, with Mospheiran and Phoenix populations marrying within their isolated, localized groups, there could easily be variations in skin color, how quick someone tans, natural skin tones before tanning, and so on.
(And I’m just throwing that on the table. As a fan, I don’t see how I could claim ownership, since it’s not mine to begin with. Or, so it’s clear, I don’t hold any claim to that. If it makes sense, use it. She’s your character. I’d be a jerk and idiot to say otherwise, when I’m offering a fan suggestion for an explanation to retcon it.)
Hmm…. Or what if, hundreds of years from now, it’s possible to change or dye skin color as easily as hair color? People use dyes and makeups now. Surely by the time we’re in FTL starships, that would be easy. Or what if one could take a pill or injection that somehow boosts or lowers tanning, beyond what’s already within the body’s genetics? — So perhaps it’s as much a fashion or “look” choice as we’d view hair color or colored contact lenses now?
And yes, human skin can vary all through golds, coppers, browns, olives, blacks, pale pink, ruddy, freckled in reds or browns, and ability to tan varies among all those.
In a few hundred years, we might develop something new by very natural mutations, or something could pop up in our genetics that was rare and caught on. Or, with genetics, we might find combinations that are ordinarily hidden by other things, that might strike people’s fancy. Humans have done that for centuries with pets and livestock, and humans are very apt to try new fashions and fads, just for the novelty of it, or to distinguish a group somehow.
Heheh, so who knows, maybe Irene’s been affected by her mom’s job, her own growing preferences, or she’s getting old enough to try what’s popular, to fit in?
But I suppose I lean toward, yes, people have a natural skin tone when they’re not out in the sun to get a tan, and then they can become more pale or, if they are out enough, they can become slightly or very tanned. This applies, regardless of ethnic heritage or intermarriage or movement across the (Earth, Terra) globe. Put a group of only a few hundred or thousand on a ship, even with DNA storage somehow, and you get, over time, a tendency both for blending and for something to pop up out of the ancestral genetics along any ancestral line. That, and, presumably, we’ll be primarily on Earth, and then out in the solar system in fairly small groups, for another several decades at least, or a few hundred years, before FTL travel can happen. (Unless that new take on the Alcubierre warp drive works, but even then, that’s a long leap to a starship culture and infrastructure.)
Uh, I’m just yammering on with whatever ideas seem to fit. If any of that makes good story sense to explain Irene, use it. If not, well, then I’m just spouting ideas for the heck of it. 😀
Then again, a footnote or addendum that over 15 books, over 20 years, and with hundreds of characters, Irene’s description changed by a slip of the keyboard (or brain) — should not be viewed as any shocking or unforgivable occurrence by readers. That’s a simple way to do it. 🙂
Spelling changes also. When I was in college, I once counted the misspellings I’d seen in my last name. I stopped counted at about twenty, and nearly all those were recent. My last name differs by only one or two letters from two very common English surnames, yet most people have real trouble spelling and pronouncing it.
So transliteration changes make sense, between dialects, or as different schools of linguistic thought take hold, either atevi or human.
(That said, the next time I read through the Chanur books, there’s a typo once or twice in one of the first two books that has Aia Jin instead of Aja Jin, and since there *can* be separate names like that, I was not originally certain, until I’d read through the first time. I will remember to note it next time I read them, and pass it along.)
>blush< Any thing I throw out is, of course, for general use or disuse! So let it be written; so let it be done!
Since T. Lockwood’s artwork doesn’t show Bjorn but does show Irene as Caucasian – different from Deliverer, I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to fix it to everyone’s taste. Leave Bjorn alone and make Irene as dark as Ogun with dark hair and eyes (It seems to creep Cajeiri out….) I remember Artur being mentioned as a red-head but I can’t find the quote other than in Protector.
@Hanneke -No I didn’t change the character tables.
CJ I apologize, I don’t know what I’m thinking – your suggestion of changing BJORN in Deliverer will work as long as you retain some mention of Irene as part of Cajeiri’s aishid.
Hey, no problem. I think I can fix this if putting Bjorn in to the Deliverer expression won’t run into yet another corner. 🙂 Welcome to the Continuity Department of Desperate End Runs.
In re: Irene’s skin color — a really bad case of vitiligo?
A thought about coloration, Pilot’s Guild folks were out in space in a system known to have terrible radiation. Even the ones who didn’t get a fatal dose of exposure might well have some of the aftereffects of a sublethal dose be manifested in their children. (Them cosmic rays. They just get everywhere.) Also, you take numerically limited gene pool that is diverse in terms of physical characteristics and shake it enough times, weird combinations are bound to come out. And judging just on the surnames, the Phoenix’s crew is a pretty divers sampling of human population variations, she says politically correctly. Even if a ship has as many as 3000 crew, as the Phoenix may have had before Reunion, that’s still a really small gene pool.
There’s hardly any description of Irene as light-skinned, light-eyed and/or blond in the text of the new book. So maybe it’s easier to remove that one word in the upcoming editions of Protector?
They will have to correct “… a fifteen-year-old spoiled brat of a girl, who had once expected to marry Tatiseigi’s nephew.” to “Geigi’s nephew.” in the next ebook-edition anyway, and there’s an extra word ‘to’ that I stumbled over in my first fast readthrough – I’ll check for that in the slow reread, and when I find it mail the sentence it’s in for the publisher to correct. I don’t expect it’ll make any difference whether they’re correcting one, two or three words in the ebook, and they can be put right in the paperback right from the first edition as well.
I’ve just checked the new book digitally for every mention of Irene, and found only one mention of Irene’s colour, “Irene had been scared of the mecheiti, but now she said she wanted to ride again, even if she was limping tonight – poor Irene was the skinniest of them, all bones and pale skin, and she looked even skinnier when she was wearing her stretchy clothes.”
The other physical descriptions I’ve found were only a few things about their clothes (red, blue and green, stretchy stuff), and that Gene is oldest, tallest, shoulder-high to Bren, dark-haired and stocky; “Irene, smallest, …” ; they all three have short hair (“no queues nor ribbons to fuss with”, “the short hair was very conspicuous”), “Arthur’s red hair was conspicuous on its own.”; their good dinner coats (2 each, beiges and browns and a shade of green and one of blue that just was not in any house) and shirts with lace are mentioned; then the one sentence mentioned above that says she has pale skin.
If you remove the word ‘pale’ from that sentence, it doesn’t really make a difference, and you keep the strong impact of her dark eyes and ‘almost atevi, but brown’ dark colouring on Cajeiri in Deliverer. This might be easier than “retro-conning” (?) the older book, which has already been printed in multiple editions on paper, and read by lots of people.
Then, if it’s only the cover image where her colouring is wrong, isn’t it simpler to just leave it as an error and/or artistic decision by the cover artist?
On his site he talks about wanting the kids to be light against a darker background, so they really catch the eye. This artistic view would be messed up by a darker-skinned Irene against a white-armoured guard, who is supposed to be part of the less-important darker background: he specifically added a shadow to that figure to achieve his aim of focusing all the attention on the kids.
Combine that artistic point with very little visual description of the kids and you get this cover.
As a lack of exact correspondence between the cover image and the description in a book is nothing new, that means you don’t have to change your text to match the image.
The word “retcon” (noun and verb) is a fan term, a contraction of retroactive continuity. 🙂 It is, however, used more by SF&F fans than by book/video fans in general, so some (native English-speaking) people may not be familiar with the word. I’m not sure it’s in any official dictionary; it should be, though it’s slang. 🙂
“Retcon” is also a library term and has been for decades … short for “retrospective conversion” (changing over a library’s catalogue from paperbased to electronic). Seeing it used in fandom always makes me laugh because I knew it as professional terminology first. 😉
I have to agree that Cajeiri remembering Irene as “dark as an ateva, but brown” was a really nice scene, and it’d be a shame to lose it. (Though of course I can understand why losing one nice line is better than having to rewrite lots of the next book!)
It’s a great thought, but there’s whole scenes in the new book that would have to be rewritten…
Publishers nowadays frankly don’t really plan to do reprints as they once did, so fixes will appear in the e-edition=–changing times. In point of fact, readers are going to have to start looking at e-editions for the ‘true’ or ‘updated’ version, I fear. I could see this one coming…
In the best of all possible worlds your entire catalog would be available as ebooks, and I could afford to replace all the paper I’ve got with digital, which takes up a lot less space and is a whole lot easier to move. This may actually be a good thing, though. If ebooks are going to be the definitive versions, fans would want the ebooks, which cost the publishers less up front, no?. Instead of the handwriting being on the wall, it’s on the screen.
What’s this about correcting the e-editions of books. Shades of 1984.
While the lack of consistency may be due to the author’s gradual decent into senility, unless it is of such importance as to kill the story entirely, please don’t start making changes.
Besides, finding such inconsistencies is half the fun of reading.
It’s like Watson’s wandering bullet.
Y’know, she would be kinda pale, compared to an ateva…