On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Howard Brazee wrote: #mary whalen wrote: # #> Actually, going to the Paths of the Dead and #> returning alive are unusual enough to be interesting #> to almost anyone. Maybe an interdimensional traveler #> interested in Dragaera found out what Vlad did and #> told him that he would only spread the story in his #> home dimension. If he got interested in Vlad's story #> or hooked on his style (easy enough to do) he might #> come back for more and get lucky. Then again... # #I kind of guess that he's someone from the future - someone with the ability #to make Vlad not talk about him & the box and possibly not think about him #(except when he's writing). Although having to make that journal simply #means that Vlad is living in interesting times - not that he will continue #to survive or be a major player. My theory is at http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/Cracks-and-Shards/cracks.html#Brusts Here is the relevant part: >>> Brusts, plural First of all, we have at least two Steven Brusts to deal with. One is the author whose books reviewers review and we buy, and to whom publishers pay royalties. He writes of Paarfi as his creation [TPG487]. Then there is the translator who interviews Paarfi [FHYA548-553], thus becoming a character in the world of the books written by Brust the author. There seems to be a third Brust as well: the interviewer, the "fool" who paid Vlad to tell him his life story and convinced him no one would hear about it [Ath9; also Orc16?]; or he may be the second in another guise. (Athyra, in which Vlad mentions this encounter to Savn, is the first book that he doesn't narrate in the first person.) When the reader first hears about the Houses, in Jhereg [Jrg3], Vlad explains in passing that "each Dragaeran House bears the name of one of our native creatures" "Our native creatures", in contrast to the creatures of your world, stranger. This is a slightly jarring note,[*] an implicit recognition that Vlad is addressing someone from a different place, where jhereg and teckla are unknown; but it is not so jarring on the third page of the first book as it would have been, say, five tales into Vlad's saga. How does it fit in with Dragaera, treated as a real place? Well, Dragaeran sorcery can contact other planes of reality, parallel universes [Yen206]. As we start to learn about Dragaera from Vlad, we assume that we are the stranger he is talking to. But really he is talking to Brust the interviewer, who (I assume) has come to visit Dragaera from another plane and/or another time: our world. And it must be at least partly by convincing Vlad of his alien origin that the interviewer can make him feel confident that Vlad's life story, as he is telling it, will never become known on Dragaera. The interviewer doesn't necessarily stick around in Vlad's life: "But here, I've left you, you odd, shiny contraption with presumed ears at both ends, confused about who and what I am, and generally what I'm on about. Okay. I'll let you confused a little while longer, and if you don't trust me to clear everything up, then you can go hang. I've been paid." [Drg15-16] Presumably this "odd metal box" [Drg286] is a machine that takes his words to Brust the interviewer: either a recorder or a transmitter, or both. <<< -- Mark A. Mandel http://cracksandshards.com a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website