On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Erik Dahl wrote: >KG (>>) and Casey Rousseau (>) wrote: > >>> I like the way you speculate; have you given any thought >>> to where Kiera was when Stony died? That one's been >>> bugging me for years, becuase you can't blame it on >>> unreliable narrators or even typoes. >> >> Hmm. I was just rereading _Orca_ a week or so ago and did >> not notice any continuity blips. > >I'll come out of hiding and contribute on this topic. > >KG is right; there's a subtle inconsistency in /Orca/, which is hard >to spot because it takes place over two long and involved chapters. >You can read a description I wrote of the problem at: > >http://google.com/groups?selm=allegro-1108991304310001%40209-142-59-140.stk.jps.net Yeah, after re-reading those parts, I can definitely see the problem. It wouldn't take much to have covered it, too - just a single vague sentence, right after she left Stony's, and before she "hurried" back to Northport, saying "Then something came up that called me away for another entire day." And on re-reading ti, we could realize that _Sethra_ got called and needed to go take care of something. >I also wrote to skzb about it a few years ago, and I can't find his >reply to quote him (I did search both computers for it), but I >remember feeling like a heel afterwards for pointing this out. His >reply was something like, "The only satisfaction I can give you is >that I checked everything very carefully, and I was very happy with >the way the book turned out." I asked Steve about Kiera showing up in Taltos if Sethra couldn't leave Dzur Mountain, and this is his reply: SKZB> Sethra didn't leave Dzur Mountain. Ask anyone. Did anyone see SKZB> Sethra outside of Dzur Mountain during that entire period? [snippage] >I wonder if we'll discover in a later story that Kiera was covering >some other complicated plot she was involved with at the time? I think that Steve might be hiding something about *how* Kiera is Sethra. The more obvious notion is that Sethra changes her shape, or is using a sorcerous disguise, but I wonder. A notion from Pratchett: People think Granny Weatherwax can shapechange because they'll see or interact with animals, and later, Granny shows up knowing what the animal saw, or (at least in one case) injured where an animal was injured. But Granny is only Borrowing the animals' body (and leaving out food after she leaves the animal). So Kiera might be a body that Sethra literally uses to go out and about in... Another Kiera/Sethra thought: Vlad thought that Sethra was something of a cold killer, while Kiera seemed to argue against that. The thing is, Vlad's first experience with Sethra was over Quion (I think that's the name; the guy who stole >from Vlad and fled to Dzur Mountain). I think Vlad's thinking in this is due to the fact that he, Vlad, had a right to be murderously angry at the guy for stealing from him, but Sethra (and/or Morrolan) had no such excuse. From Vlad's POV, Sethra and Morrolan manipulated the poor schmuck and then killed him, boom. Very cold. Of course, we don't know what that whole thing looked like from Sethra's POV.