> >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. This one is easy. "Steven Brust's Nth[1] Rule of Literature" says that what you do is write about things you think are cool, and then other people will think it's cool. He has, at some point, somewhere, said that Dragaera is frozen in time to be analogous to the time in human history before the development of plate armour. Thus, no guns. -Jot [1] Where N is a number between 0 and some other number -- Jot Powers <books at bofh.com> http://www.bofh.com/books/ "I'm upping my standards, so up yours!" -Pat Paulsen (1927-1997), Presidential Campaign Slogan