You raise a lot of good points which I still disagree with but don't want to debate in detail because I should be looking for a car (or working) - but some general comments: There are plenty of sharp Easterners around in Dragaera (Khaavren's librarian, the Marxist in Teckla/Phoenix) but relatively speaking I don't recall many Dragaerans acting intelligently - Khaavren, perhaps Pel, certainly Sethra in Orca. Vlad's success often depends on a combination of luck and dumb opponents. This is presumably a result of necessity in making the plot exciting and fast. I love writers like John M. Ford whose characters seem smarter than my PhD'd colleagues - but Ford's or say Wolfe's books are not thrilling in a Brustian manner. Ok, so Vlad has to remind Aliera that Pathfinder is good for looking for things, or teach Morrolan basic witchcraft (use your own blood) - mostly what I don't feel in these books is the sense that the characters have 1k years of development behind them (well, Sethra is as always an exception). We've seen the Orb as an information storage device, a truth-of-statement inspector, and as theoretically able to be programmed (if I understand Sethra's check for Orb-tampering in FHYA). Sounds computery to me, but who cares. Of more interest to me, the algorithms of Orb construction/ programming have likely been floating around since Zerika I (Morrolan and Aliera both have the necessary knowledge) which to my mind means that the Dragaerans have been in the shall we say late Enlightenment for 200k years. (Ok, maybe M and A know because S told them and nobody else except the occasional court wizard [see FHYA again I believe].) I don't see the generation # as setting the time-scale. Humans have until recently spent more of their time getting educated and struggling to become economically stable and being decrepit than being productive. Imagine what a clever tinkerer or engineer could do with a steady job and 2k years to play with magnets or teakettles. And I expect the Greenaerians (or however that's spelled) have felt a tremendous pressure to develop technology from their I'd assert Enlightenment (see above) level. I suspect the Empire's stability also makes it more likely that progress would be faster than human-normal but here we get into Guns, Germs, and Steel territory. The East being undeveloped as a consequence of regular invasions seems sensible to me - and maybe the Gods help out. Re the "physics is different here", I just want to point out that Vlad is human and functions like a human here which implies the same physics. We know Aliera knows what a nerve is - presumably she's interested in how they work, and would find it hard not to know about basic E&M; surely some Dragon was interested in projectiles and found out about gravity, coriolis forces, etc.; Morrolan knows plenty about air pressure. I don't see how engineering/physics/chemistry aren't more advanced. Re magic vs technology, one gets into "Is Wonder Woman faster than the Bionic Woman" questions (to misquote a recent car commercial) and maybe it was just dumb of me to make the comparison in the first place, so I'll keep my "what Aliera is doing when she scans your finger and why that's not indicative of 1960s genetics knowledge to say nothing of microarrays and introns and what-have-yous" speculations to myself. - Philip On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Andrew Lias wrote: > >From: Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> > > > Near-human? Ha! I'd love to see Sethra's reply to that! > > > >She might admit that the only Easterner she knows (ever knew?) is clearly > >smarter than her (v. Orca) and her friends (v. Issola etc). > > Well, I *certainly* think she's intelligent enough to know that you can't > generalize from a sample of one. ;-) > > Seriously, compare the technological sophistication of Dragaerans and > Easterners. The Dragaeran culture is clearly more sophisticated than the > Easterner culture. Does this mean that Dragaerans are *more* intelligent? > I think not. But, by the same token, I don't see any good evidence that > they are, on the average, less intelligent than your average human (and Vlad > is decidedly NOT an average person). > > > > Actually, I would contend that the Dragaerans not only have technology, > >but > > > a rather high technology, it's just that their technology is based for > >more > > > on Sorcery than on mechanical devices. Certainly their science (e.g., > >their > > > knowledge of genetics) is comparably advanced to our own. > > > >I don't see Aliera being that much beyond Mendel in genetics - e.g., > >Dragaerans aren't anywhere near being able to change their bodies from > >one house to another or we would have heard all about it in Jhereg and > >elsewhere. > > I don't see our current level of genetics allowing us to do anything > comparable either. Right now we have very rudimentary genetic engineering > and the ability to sequence genes (although sequencing large numbers of > genes remains challenging, which is why DNA fingerprinting only looks at a > relatively small sub-set of one's genes). Certainly the Dragaeran's can > sequence genes, which puts them quite far ahead of Mendel, whose knowledge > was primarily theoretical. > > > > by the same token, we don't have > > > anything like their teleportation technology or the ability to > put > >large permanent structures in the air (e.g., Castle Black). > > > >The Orb of course is a computer/router/... > > I don't agree with that. From my reading, there isn't any indication that > the orb is able to perform anything beyond fairly basic computations (e.g., > it acts as a clock). Brust has made no mention of Dragaeran accountants > using the Orb to do their calculations. > > I don't think that the Orb is obviously analogous to anything in our world, > although one could certainly try to hammer it into one pidgeon hole or > another. > > >Zerika I managed to create > >such a complex object from scratch but her empire was relying on exploding > >sticks millennia later - this puzzles me. > > We have hints that the gods helped her out (just as we have hints that they > upgraded it to Orb 2.0 when it was in the PotD). Also, Dragaeran culture > follows a much slower pace than human culture. 200,000 years of Dragaeran > civilization is roughly equivilent to 2,000 years of human civ. Considering > that they went from nothing to what I would call a 20th century level of > relative sophistication (plus certain things, minus others), I would say > that they've done very well. > > Now, the real question, in my mind, is why the Easterners have been stuck at > a fairly primitive level for that amount of time. What's been keeping > *them* in stasis? > > >Plane travel is pretty close to teleportation - consider its effect on > >human digestion... > > I think that's a stretch. Teleportation is instantaneous, far more flexible > than air travel (you don't need a landing strip or any sort of service > infrastructure) and it doesn't, in point of fact, cause digestive issues to > the species that designed it... only to wimpy Easterners. > > >If I was an architect I'd argue that > >steel/elevators/skyscraper design technology is equivalent (in effect if > >not quite in aesthetics) to the magic behind (below) Castle Black - > >including its unfortunate vulnerabilities. > > Again, I think that's a stretch. By the same token, however, Dragaeran's > don't have skyscrapers, which may indicate certain limits to their own > technologies (or may simply indicate aesthetic preferences). Be that as it > may, the ability to float exceedingly large masses through the air is a case > where Dragaeran technology outstrips our own. I have no doubt that > suspending castles in the air is only one point of use for the technology. > > >Anyway, it's hard for me to understand the lack of guns, electricity, > >what have you in the pre-modern era - esp. given that the empire trades > >with an island where sorcery doesn't work. > > Dragaeran technology is sorcery focused. Given that trade *does* take > place, I don't see any reason why they would want to sink an enormous > investment into reinventing the wheel by developing an entirely different > technology from scratch. > > Now, we might well wonder why the islanders (AFB and can't remember the > proper spelling of the damned place) haven't developed their own mundane > technologies. I can only assume that, lacking the big advantage of > something equivilent to the Orb, their technologies have been developing at > an ordinary rate, proportionate to their lifespans, which would put them > somewhere about 3,000 BCE, by my estimates. > > Again, I think that the real mystery is the situation with the Easterners. > They are basically unmodified human stock. In 50,000 years we went from > paleolithic hunter/gatherers to the Space Age. In more than four times that > duration, the Easterners are still living in castles and fighting with > swords. This suggests to me that the hypothesis that the universe is > fundamentally different is plausible. Perhaps our sort of technology > *can't* exist on Dragaera, which means that the Easterner's have had to make > due with their own magical development which, lacking the Orb, doesn't have > nearly the pragmatic utility that Dragaeran sorcery has. However, this > leads to another question: why haven't any humans developed skill in the > practice of Elder Sorcery? Is there a genetic limitation in play? > > >- Philip > > > _________________________________________________________________ > MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*. > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail > >