On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 10:06:45PM -0800, Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 04:51:07AM -0600, Matthew Hunter wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > There's an interesting word-of-mouth chain. Aliera -> Sethra -> > > someone -> Paarfi. Hrm. > I thought Paarfi was responding to someone else's claims. Aliera -> Sethra -> > someone -> some historian; Paarfi says this isn't even hearsay. > I had a feeling 'someone' is Vlad and 'some historian' is Brust, but who > knows. Makes sense, except that it violates the promise "Brust" made to "Vlad" that no one on Dragaera would find out anything about what he was narrating. > > Straves?. Who are they? They are, of course, significant, > > because Paarfi said they weren't. > You're saying Brust is that predictable? No, but again, if you assume they aren't you don't have any chance of finding anything interesting. > > Morrolan means Dark Star? Interesting. > I thought we knew that. Maybe, but it wasn't in my consciousness when I was reading through. > > actually cousins? Sounds like Paarfi is admitting to a mistake, > > and we could discover their prior references somewhere. > The point of creating a big world is that you can refer to things which didn't > happen in your own books. Like the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Not everything > Paarfi hints at has to be in another Paarfi or Vlad book. True, and yet, if we don't look we'll never know. If we look, and don't find anything, then we can claim it's in another (unpublished) Paarfi work. > > The Sorceress Orlann. 'nuff said. There are some very > > interesting questions raised here. Either Vlad is even more of > > an idiot than he admits to, or perhaps more of a liar than he > > pretends, or something very interesting is yet to occur. > I wondered what you were talking about, but I see others thought of Loraan. I > also see Brust apparently say it is a coincidence. Nothing stops the staff > from passing hands before reaching Loraan. > Checking in Taltos, they talk about Loraan finding the staff shortly after the > end of the Interregnum. The similarity of the names and Brust's tendency to explore authorial error makes me doubt that the connection is mere coincidence. > > Zerika. Did anyone NOT know who she was from the first moment > > she appeared (in disguise)? And for that matter, "no one is > I didn't. I was as surprised as Piro. I thought Zivra was a > Yendi. I'm surprised that anyone (who had read the prior books) didn't catch that. The similarity of the names made me blink; then at the end of the scene I checked the cast of characters, and it read "House unknown".. and that was enough to make the intuitive leap. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp