The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Civilized

First, for you Weye followers, you may find the version 2 beta here. Please note that this is liable to be updated as bugs are found, and if you do find anything busted, please do let me know about it.

On an entirely different note, if you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know that I'm a pretty big fan of S.M. Stirling's body of fiction, but especially the trilogies that start with Island In the Sea of Time and Dies the Fire, and his new one that starts with The Sunrise Lands.

Now, lately I've been doing a reread of those in a sort of bizzare order where I read Sunrise Lands, then went back and did the Dies the Fire stuff, then went back and re-read ISOT for the first time in a few years. And I had a few thoughts on that experience that I'll probably want to come back to later, so let's just blather on that for a bit, shall we.

As a native Oregonian, and, being from Monroe, I've lived most of my life pretty close to the main thrust of the action, I'm pretty well obligated to love Dies the Fire and its successors, because hey, it's set in Oregon, and how cool is that. Furthermore, if the prologue thank-yous are to be believed, Stirling himself relied on other people for the setting stuff, rather than actually going there, though I could be wrong. In either case, he got a lot of our local quirks right, including:

- Portland as the Evil Empire. Being a not-Portlander, that's hilarious.
- Every depiction of the Corvallis city-state ever. Especially the beaver flag. I'm an OSU alumnus, and I find that side-splittingly funny. About the only way to make that particular bit of nationalism more hilarious would have been to use UO and that whole "The Ducks are our civic religion" thing, but you know what? he leveled Eugene. As a Corvallan, I can't do anything but applaud that.
- The whole Eugene coven thing was pretty cool, although I have to alternate between thinking they're enormously annoying and kind of cute, which I guess is fair because I do it with their real life counterparts too.
- Since I pretty much have an inate superiority complex about my native state in any case, the fact that Oregon turns out to be one of the bastions of civilization in the Changed world is pretty awesome. Another is England, which as we know is another of my favorite places. It's hard to argue with that.

I also find it pretty cool that over the course of the books, I've learned quite a bit more about my native state's geography than I knew before, which is cool.

Also the books are flat out awesome, as I've said before. If sometimes we get a little too regional stereotyped, and maybe we're a little too fast on the decay of society thing, well, that doesn't make it any less neat. As I've said before, the whole guys with longbows and chainmail cruising around Oregon thing is great.

As to Island in the Sea of Time, I'm once again remembering how interesting this world would be for some kind of RPG. I'm also reminded that there are plenty of hooks left in the third book to support a bunch of sequels in various ways, and if he doesn't get to it in the current set of books, I sure would like to go back and see if Althea turns out to be awesomely evil like I want her to.

I had also forgotten how great the Babylon parts of the second two books are, and how they made the parts of the book that were NOT Babylon sort of drag a bit. Also, I really, really wish we could have seen more of Egypt, but again with that whole needs-a-second-trilogy thing.

I also forgot how...utterly tacked on the airship crew stuff felt, and how I couldn't care less about them. I realize why they're there, and other minor character couples in the same vein, like the Marine privates, work just fine, and I like them. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Cofflin and Stoddard are generally in the same scenes as other, way cooler characters like the Hollards and Kashtiliash. Along the same lines, the Ranger subplot bored me to tears this time, which I can't figure out because I liked it before.

Now, on a more thematic observation. Somebody, who I suspect is a random Wikipedia editor, said something interesting, to the effect of Stirling's having a strong belief in the inherent goodness of Western civilization or some such. Now, keeping the acknowledgement in the front of Conquistador firmly in mind (and I'm pretty sure I was there for the discussions that provoked that), I find that observation to be pretty true, and you have only to read ISOT through Conquistador to figure that out. There's, for the most part, a sort of attitude to the characters therein that wouldn't be out of place in a late 19th century Englishman. More enlightened, of course, but not out of place.

The interesting thing, though, is that Dies the Fire onwards is, if not precisely the exact opposite of this view, then pretty damn close. You get the sense that everyone doesn't exactly miss the 20th century like they might, and indeed lots of them are actually pretty happy about it. Certainly they aren't going out of their way to keep bits of it alive, like Nantucket does - the Mackenzies are a moderately representative democracy, but pretty much nobody else is, for example. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but it'll be interesting to see how, if that whole vision thing turns out like people think, he resolves that dichotomy, or if he does.

And it's midnight and I'm incoherent, so enough of that.

Posted by Dwip at April 15, 2008 8:05 PM