Re: THE BORN QUEEN, was Re: SMALL FAVOR

On Mon, 5 May 2008 17:50:38 -0700, Kurt Busiek <kurt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nitpicking -- I did find a few things odd, notably that the book is set
in a world acknowledges a connection to Earth as part of its history,
but is full of cultural referents to Earth that wouldn't have ome from
that source. At least, if I'm reading correctly, the fact that it's
got Virginia Dare in its history and she came from elsewhere, someplace
men kept other men as slaves mans the "Mannish" were originally the
Roanoke Colony. Having a country named Hansa as a nod to the Hanseatic
League wouldn't bother me if the humans in it hadn't come from a world
with the actual Hanseatic League as part of its history. Did a human
culture from Roanoke show up in this world and spontaneously break off
into Germans and Brits and Spaniards -- Spaniards with a tradition of
swordplay, yet? Why are the nobility given faux-German ranks like
"archgreft" if the humans all came from Roanoke?

I think the idea is that the humans _didn't_ all come from Roanoke - the
Skasloi stole humans from a bunch of times in human history. The Roanoke
colony was merely the last group of human slaves they took before being
overthrown; but they also had some Germans from the Hanseatic League (who
became the Hansans), some Italians from the period of the Roman Republic
or earlier (who became the Vitellians), and other populations from various
points in Earth's history.

I was confused by this too for a little while, and it's not made very
clear in the books. However, the origins of the human populations are
entirely unimportant to the story, and it seems their only purpose is for
Greg Keyes to have fun making up Germanic, Italic, and Celtic languages
for them to speak; so I didn't worry about it too much.


-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
.

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