On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > >On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Andrew Lias wrote: > > >> Be that as it may, I'd guess that there's little that Sethra > >> couldn't be the best at, if she put her mind to it (and none of > >> your snarky Sethra-sure-is-dull comments, you! ;-). > > >In case this is directed at me, I assert I have never sneered at > >Sethra - I think I just said Vlad is smarter than her. > > One of the things that I think Steve is trying to portray in his > stories is that Dragaerans, with their exceedingly long lives, > sometimes have a more leisurely and conservative attitude towards > cogitation. I am not sure if this equates to Easterners being > smarter, but rather that if an Easterner and a Dragaeran of similar > intelligence are working on a problem, the Easterner will come to the > conclusion first. And of course, there's different *kinds* of > intelligence. Fair enough, but I don't think I'd call Khaavren a "leisurely" thinker. And (for dramatic reasons?) we don't see such thinking in Vlad's adventures or Paarfi's, or I didn't notice it. I think you would like to argue that there are problems which an Easterner wouldn't arrive at a solution to while a Dragaeran would. As an aside, the protagonist of Zelazny's Isle of the Dead is a man who interacts with some long-lived aliens - I remember getting a sense of what you're describing from that novel. Sort of a Zen Jhereg feel I think. - Philip