Assassins of Thasalon spoiler discussion space
Here, as has become my custom, is a space for persons who have already read to book to freely discuss it with each other in the comments. Enjoy!
Ta, L.
(Didn't think I'd need to set this post up so soon, it being a novel this outing -- it takes me 3 or 4 days to get through, though I'm slower these days -- but, speed readers.)
Ta, L.
(Didn't think I'd need to set this post up so soon, it being a novel this outing -- it takes me 3 or 4 days to get through, though I'm slower these days -- but, speed readers.)
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Richard wrote: "Tricia wrote: If you think this book has typos (some readers have spotted a few), you should try some older books..."That was actually my comment you were replying to (#128), not Tricia's. I can't help you with Harrison's Deathworld series: I have them on paper, but the last time I read them I decided that I'm not sufficiently keen to look for them on Kindle. I do have Harrison's Transatlantic Tunnel book for Kindle, which is the one I mentioned before with two pages missing.
This was an off-topic reply to your off-topic comment…
To go back to the almost-exhausted question of involuntary sundering, I happened to do a re-read of Orphans of Raspay recently and there is theological precedent noted there near the beginning after the pirate attack. Pen is helping two new ghosts find their gods, and we get a quick recap of the theology:"The dead could be sundered from the gods in two -- no, three ways. A soul might refuse the union, through fear or hate or despair. Rarely, a soul might be so rank and spoiled from the sins of its life that even the Bastard wouldn't take it. Or a soul might become mazed in that brief liminal space between life and..."
Kim wrote: (I'm also curious about the significant diminishment of sorcery and knowledge thereof in the time of Curse of Chalion. Did Penric's two-volume treatise not survive the centuries? "LMB answered in #35, yet I have a few thoughts myself (FYI, my fanship dates back to Samizdat Barrayar, but I've avoided online discussion groups because for me they prove chronophages).
In Penric's Demon, the Bastard Chapterhouse's librarian keeps advanced Fifth-God theology works locked up. Why should it be any different in Ibran a century later? Young disciple dy Cabon's "need to know" is nowhere near Penric's until the end of Paladin of Souls. Who knows, if Penric finishes the Ibranic translations and dy Cabon relates his experiences with Saint Ista to a White God seminary librarian, she might unbend and grant him access.
Although LBM holds there's no need to revise the Chalion duplex, I will share my own wicked notion: They take place in a slightly AU version of WOTFG. In it, young Lord Penric of kin Jurald, after dawdling a wee bit too long en route to his betrothal to Preita of kin Cheesemonger, comes across some Daughter’s Order Temple Guards watching two women laid out by the side of the road: one elderly, on a cape, her robes a muddle of colors and apparently dead; the other, clasping the corpse’s hand, dressed in a superior sort of servant’s garb. Penric asks if he can help, but the Guards assure him he can do nothing useful except direct them to the nearest town. Puzzled, Penric does so and rides on. Elsewhere, the Bastard mutters, “So much for that notion. On to Plan B…” Kin Jurald is betrothed to and marries pretty Preita, and after several costly life experiences—one engineered by his father-in-law as an object-lesson—develops a certain knack for cheese-mongering that restores a measure of the Jurald family’s wealth and reputation. Maybe two-third of the credit for this should go to Preita, but doesn’t—outside their modest dwelling’s walls. Other than that, kin Jurald’s life is unexceptional.
Many decades later, quite unaware of this non-event in the distant Cantons, a disgraced minor noble, dy Cazaril, lately a Jokona galley-ship slave, hides from a Chalion cavalry patrol in a windmill…
Off-topic, but I cannot find one single online version of Harry Harrison's "Deathworld II" AKA "The Ethical Engineer" that comes from the book version. Every blessed online version is copied from the Analog Magazine serial, in which editor John Campbell toned down sex scenes, and cut out the third installment (except the last two pages), apparently to make room for a different serial in the following issue.