On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Philip Hart wrote: >>>>>I think I recall in Taltos that Morrolan can see a lot better than >>>>>Vlad. > >>>> Do you always generalize from a sample of one? > >>>This is (one hopes intentionally) very funny. > >> It is also a very good example of a snarky rhetorical question. I >> would have been more courteous, but a response that paraphrased a line >> from _Issola_ was just too good an opportunity to miss, as well as >> being appropriate. > >That's what single quotation marks are for. Only if it's an exact quote, which this wasn't. Or is that a rule of style that I am unfamiliar with? >Must be getting old - I don't remember this line in _I_. Chapter 14, pg 211 (HB ed): "I'm generalizing from one example, here, but everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do." > Kudos to SKZB for this like-line and to you for slipping it >between my shoulder blades. <bows ironically> > >The scene in _Taltos_ I was referring to turns out to exist - Chapter >9. M. sees or hears the cat centaurs, V. has no clue, L. flys "for >most of a minute" before reporting back. > At that point, sorcery still works. It might have been a sorcerous detection spell at work; we don't know. > Why M. wants to walk to Deathgate Falls with V. when they could >presumably step through a window is beyond me. Morrolan may have been reluctant to show off that particular power to someone he didn't know too well yet. > >A related point - Dragaeran memory is impressive. Sethra has detailed >recollection of incidental conversations from (too lazy to check Alexx's >timeline) many hundreds of years ago (_Yendi_) which Vlad probably >misreports after a few years. The storage capacity, chemical stability, >filing heuristics, brain cell lifetime, ... involved are a triumph for >those lame guys (the Shaqs of the Dragaeran universe). > Besides the fact that Sethra is a special case, might I point out that Vlad is the only source we have on how accurate that recollection was?