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"... hating them in general and loving them in particular."
So here's the post pulling together my Thoughts On Dragaerans from my emails with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija while reading the Taltos books. Spoilers up through the latest, Vallista. (In fact, spoilers mainly for that one.)
Title of this post, of course, is Vlad when he says goodbye to his friends at the end of Phoenix: "I'll probably find some place with people around. Probably Dragaerans, so I can go back to hating them in general and loving them in particular." (This is still probably my favorite quote from any of the books.)
Vallista was a fascinating book for all the things we learned about Dragaerans. Most of this has been generally implied and occasionally stated (we've known since Jhereg that the Dragaerans and Easterners were experimented on, and I think we found out in Issola or thereabouts about the "stagnant society" thing) but I think this is the first time it's been clearly laid out in this much detail).
From Vlad's conversation with Verra:
DRAGAERANS CAN'T INVENT THINGS. It's built in. They are essentially stuck in a trap where they spend all their intellectual energy and the focus of their long lives on an obsession with whatever their House is obsessed with: Dragons expend their energy on endless, pointless war games; Iorich obsess on the minutiae of the law, Dzur go looking for things to fight with, etc.
Rachel and I speculated on what, exactly, it was that caused Verra's epiphany in Vallista about "the end of an era ... it ended more than two hundred years ago. I just wasn't sure until today." It took awhile for us to see it, but -- it's the magic house. The Vallista invented something new, something that didn't exist before; they figured out the technological innovation of looping time.
Dragaerans aren't supposed to be able to innovate. But these Vallista did -- they invented something new. Which means (most likely) that Adron's Disaster broke whatever was stopping them from being able to invent and create. There was a magic barrier in place, and now it's not holding them back anymore.
They must be able to innovate a little bit, they have to, because their writing system has changed over time (there's a mention in one of the books that Vlad has trouble reading older Dragaeran books because the writing system is different). And they are capable of creating music and poetry and literature. They are still people and individuals with personalities and desires.
But let's go back to this quote from Taltos:
It's filtered through his general dislike of Dragaerans at that point, which makes it seem like "oh, just another thing Vlad doesn't like about Dragaerans" as opposed to being significant.
But think about all the many things Vlad says Dragaerans don't do, throughout the series. They're not good at cooking, not that they're physically bad at it, but they just don't have very many recipes; Eastern food is much more diverse. They only have one word for "wine". In fact, they only have one word for a whole lot of things. Remember that bit a few books back where Vlad says that the Dragaeran word for "hawk" refers to all kinds of raptors where Easterners have different words for all of them?
At the time, I found that a cool worldbuilding detail, assuming it just meant that their language goes more for top-level categories than having a bunch of words for different things (kind of like some languages have fewer color words than English, so blue and green are both covered under one color word, for example).
But I think that's not what it means, I think all of that is tied together with the Dragaerans, in general, just not being especially interested in, or curious about, anything outside their House's area of expertise. They only have one word for "wine" and one word for "bird of prey" and like 5 recipes they know how to make, because THEY JUST DON'T CARE. Of course they're still people, they're individuals, they have tastes and hobbies and distinct personalities and so forth, but they also are driven by whatever their House is driven by, and don't have much time and interest for anything else. Even the Jhereg, the "outsider" house that collects the misfits, has an overall culture that is obsessed with making money and controlling crime in the Empire, thus neatly removing them from the likelihood of innovating or messing with the established order.
Which is also making me think about the first book in the series and how thematically important it is that:
a) The book starts after Vlad's friend group has already been drawn together, so the introduction we get to their world and these characters is a bunch of people from different Houses and areas of society being friends and fighting to protect each other, and
b) The entire plot of the first book is driven by the nature of Castle Black, that it's a haven for people of any House where they can interact and talk and be around each other - which is something that just doesn't really exist anywhere else in their world. Even the palace is segregated by House.
They mix together in cities, by necessity, but even there we're told they mostly keep to themselves. Vlad is surprised in Iorich, I think it was, to encounter an inn in which Dragaerans from different Houses are freely mingling. Looking back on it now, it's thematically fascinating that the plot of the entire first book is driven by trying to preserve Castle Black as a place specifically designed for different Houses (and even Dragaerans and Easterners) to mingle, and get to know each other, and share ideas. The entire sharing-of-ideas thing is something that Sethra and Morrolan and Aliera (and Vlad) are all really into - their friendship consists in large part of hanging out together and debating/arguing about things. (Often in the library, which is another thing Vlad makes a point of telling us in several books that Morrolan is really into - collecting books, and just generally gathering knowledge from everywhere and accumulating it at Castle Black.)
All of which is such standard fantasy fodder that, like the background worldbuilding of an Empire that's lasted for tens of thousands of years, you wouldn't really think anything about it. The way that they hang out and talk is the way that most people reading the books probably are with their friends too. But Dragaerans aren't. Especially not Dragaerans of the Dragon and Dzur houses, which are explicitly not about that, they're all about fighting, not learning things. Or at least they're supposed to be. But Morrolan and Sethra, in particular, are not like that.
Rachel also points out that Dragaerans ALWAYS wear their house colors. Like the entire thing with the Empire having a 10,000+ year history with nothing ever changing, this kind of color-coding is also pretty typical in fantasy and does not seem like a big deal, until you find out about this thing where Dragaerans are hard-coded to do certain things and not others, and then suddenly it becomes significant.
When we first meet Vlad, possibly one reason why he hates Dragaerans so much is not just because of being fundamentally an outsider (though that's a big part of it) but also because he's spent his entire life bouncing off this brick wall of incuriosity and resistance to change that is more fundamentally alien to him than anything else about them.
Which is probably why, when he does start making friends with Dragaerans, it's with the misfits and weirdos and outsiders, the curious and the different -- Sethra and Morrolan, Aliera and Kragar.
... It also occurs to me that even if the Easterners weren't messed with in quite the same way as Dragaerans, the fact that the Dragaerans are constantly attacking them (in a way that is basically built into Dragaeran DNA) is probably also dragging them down and preventing them from having achieved, say, spaceflight and other forms of high tech by now.
It's just such absolutely wonderful worldbuilding, a really brilliant subversion of a bunch of standard fantasy-world tropes that are turned on their ear and put through a science fiction blender.
ETA:rachelmanija has additional thoughts building off my post; you can read them here. (Also very spoilery.)
rachelmanija while reading the Taltos books. Spoilers up through the latest, Vallista. (In fact, spoilers mainly for that one.)Title of this post, of course, is Vlad when he says goodbye to his friends at the end of Phoenix: "I'll probably find some place with people around. Probably Dragaerans, so I can go back to hating them in general and loving them in particular." (This is still probably my favorite quote from any of the books.)
Vallista was a fascinating book for all the things we learned about Dragaerans. Most of this has been generally implied and occasionally stated (we've known since Jhereg that the Dragaerans and Easterners were experimented on, and I think we found out in Issola or thereabouts about the "stagnant society" thing) but I think this is the first time it's been clearly laid out in this much detail).
From Vlad's conversation with Verra:
"It was the result of their whole effort. No, not effort. Experiment."
"Experiment?"
"They live a long time, Vlad. Long by Sethra's standards, long by mine. And they're observers, and they are absolutely heartless, at least where other species are concerned. This world is an experiment to see if a society can be made to stagnate."
"I am lost."
"Societies develop and change, Vlad. There are inventions, and inventions have repercussions throughout society; associations among people grow and become different."
"If you say so."
DRAGAERANS CAN'T INVENT THINGS. It's built in. They are essentially stuck in a trap where they spend all their intellectual energy and the focus of their long lives on an obsession with whatever their House is obsessed with: Dragons expend their energy on endless, pointless war games; Iorich obsess on the minutiae of the law, Dzur go looking for things to fight with, etc.
Rachel and I speculated on what, exactly, it was that caused Verra's epiphany in Vallista about "the end of an era ... it ended more than two hundred years ago. I just wasn't sure until today." It took awhile for us to see it, but -- it's the magic house. The Vallista invented something new, something that didn't exist before; they figured out the technological innovation of looping time.
Dragaerans aren't supposed to be able to innovate. But these Vallista did -- they invented something new. Which means (most likely) that Adron's Disaster broke whatever was stopping them from being able to invent and create. There was a magic barrier in place, and now it's not holding them back anymore.
They must be able to innovate a little bit, they have to, because their writing system has changed over time (there's a mention in one of the books that Vlad has trouble reading older Dragaeran books because the writing system is different). And they are capable of creating music and poetry and literature. They are still people and individuals with personalities and desires.
But let's go back to this quote from Taltos:
One thing that shed a great deal of light on how Dragaerans think was when I realized that they had no term for brandy, even though they had the drink. They called it wine, and, I guess, just had to know the bottler to decide how strong it was and what it tasted like. To me, brandy and wine aren't even close in taste, and maybe they aren't to Dragaerans, either. The thing is, Dragaerans don't care if they taste different, or that the process of making one has almost nothing to do with the process of making the other; the point is, they are alcoholic drinks made from fruit, so they must be the same thing. Interesting, no?
It's filtered through his general dislike of Dragaerans at that point, which makes it seem like "oh, just another thing Vlad doesn't like about Dragaerans" as opposed to being significant.
But think about all the many things Vlad says Dragaerans don't do, throughout the series. They're not good at cooking, not that they're physically bad at it, but they just don't have very many recipes; Eastern food is much more diverse. They only have one word for "wine". In fact, they only have one word for a whole lot of things. Remember that bit a few books back where Vlad says that the Dragaeran word for "hawk" refers to all kinds of raptors where Easterners have different words for all of them?
At the time, I found that a cool worldbuilding detail, assuming it just meant that their language goes more for top-level categories than having a bunch of words for different things (kind of like some languages have fewer color words than English, so blue and green are both covered under one color word, for example).
But I think that's not what it means, I think all of that is tied together with the Dragaerans, in general, just not being especially interested in, or curious about, anything outside their House's area of expertise. They only have one word for "wine" and one word for "bird of prey" and like 5 recipes they know how to make, because THEY JUST DON'T CARE. Of course they're still people, they're individuals, they have tastes and hobbies and distinct personalities and so forth, but they also are driven by whatever their House is driven by, and don't have much time and interest for anything else. Even the Jhereg, the "outsider" house that collects the misfits, has an overall culture that is obsessed with making money and controlling crime in the Empire, thus neatly removing them from the likelihood of innovating or messing with the established order.
Which is also making me think about the first book in the series and how thematically important it is that:
a) The book starts after Vlad's friend group has already been drawn together, so the introduction we get to their world and these characters is a bunch of people from different Houses and areas of society being friends and fighting to protect each other, and
b) The entire plot of the first book is driven by the nature of Castle Black, that it's a haven for people of any House where they can interact and talk and be around each other - which is something that just doesn't really exist anywhere else in their world. Even the palace is segregated by House.
They mix together in cities, by necessity, but even there we're told they mostly keep to themselves. Vlad is surprised in Iorich, I think it was, to encounter an inn in which Dragaerans from different Houses are freely mingling. Looking back on it now, it's thematically fascinating that the plot of the entire first book is driven by trying to preserve Castle Black as a place specifically designed for different Houses (and even Dragaerans and Easterners) to mingle, and get to know each other, and share ideas. The entire sharing-of-ideas thing is something that Sethra and Morrolan and Aliera (and Vlad) are all really into - their friendship consists in large part of hanging out together and debating/arguing about things. (Often in the library, which is another thing Vlad makes a point of telling us in several books that Morrolan is really into - collecting books, and just generally gathering knowledge from everywhere and accumulating it at Castle Black.)
All of which is such standard fantasy fodder that, like the background worldbuilding of an Empire that's lasted for tens of thousands of years, you wouldn't really think anything about it. The way that they hang out and talk is the way that most people reading the books probably are with their friends too. But Dragaerans aren't. Especially not Dragaerans of the Dragon and Dzur houses, which are explicitly not about that, they're all about fighting, not learning things. Or at least they're supposed to be. But Morrolan and Sethra, in particular, are not like that.
Rachel also points out that Dragaerans ALWAYS wear their house colors. Like the entire thing with the Empire having a 10,000+ year history with nothing ever changing, this kind of color-coding is also pretty typical in fantasy and does not seem like a big deal, until you find out about this thing where Dragaerans are hard-coded to do certain things and not others, and then suddenly it becomes significant.
When we first meet Vlad, possibly one reason why he hates Dragaerans so much is not just because of being fundamentally an outsider (though that's a big part of it) but also because he's spent his entire life bouncing off this brick wall of incuriosity and resistance to change that is more fundamentally alien to him than anything else about them.
Which is probably why, when he does start making friends with Dragaerans, it's with the misfits and weirdos and outsiders, the curious and the different -- Sethra and Morrolan, Aliera and Kragar.
... It also occurs to me that even if the Easterners weren't messed with in quite the same way as Dragaerans, the fact that the Dragaerans are constantly attacking them (in a way that is basically built into Dragaeran DNA) is probably also dragging them down and preventing them from having achieved, say, spaceflight and other forms of high tech by now.
It's just such absolutely wonderful worldbuilding, a really brilliant subversion of a bunch of standard fantasy-world tropes that are turned on their ear and put through a science fiction blender.
ETA:
rachelmanija has additional thoughts building off my post; you can read them here. (Also very spoilery.)
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I mean, whether or not the second word is derived from the first, it's still a distinct enough concept to need a separate term for it (which apparently a lot of languages that don't have very many color words actually also do; instead of having words for "blue" and "green" you'd have "sky color" and "tree color" and so forth), eventually evolving into a completely different word over time.
(It IS a weirdly specific thing to pick out as important, since brandy really IS just basically a variety of wine, but ... Vlad. XD)
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Languages can be really particular about what they see as relevant difference to warrant a separate noun, and which can be lumped into one main category. Like in Russian it's really common to use the same word for brother and a male cousin (though you can specify the difference with an adjective before brother, which however isn't that common, or use the French loanword for cousin like English) same for sister and female cousin, but there is no joined word for "siblings" you have to say "brothers and sisters". Also no word for grandparents, just "grandfather and grandmother". But on the other hand they get really particular about their in-laws, with different words for whether it is the husband's or the wife's parents, and also for brothers and sisters in law. Which I find hard to remember because in German that is only one relationship category and of course English doesn't even bother with having any extra eord, just sticks "in-law" at the end.
Not sure whether that says anything deep about how families work or it's just random quirks. The groupings languages decide on often seem kind of arbitrary, like how different languages sort baked goods and draw the lines between what in English is say "bread" vs. "cake" vs. "pie". Even in closely related languages, where people make very similar kinds of baked goods there are different lines drawn when the categories settled. Like German instead has Brot (yeast breads and savory quick breads), Kuchen (sweet quick breads, sweet fruit pies, simple cakes without layers or cream fillings), Torte (elaborate cakes with layers, certain cream pies, both could possibly seem a subset of Kuchen as the more general term) and Pastete (savory pies).
I will never stop finding it weird that it is called "banana bread" in English, because nobody would call that "Brot" in German -- it is definitely "Kuchen" because sweet baked goods can only rarely be called bread in German, usually if they are sweet yeast breads (brioche or such). I just don't get why anyone would put banana bread as closer to rye bread than to chocolate cake, and why that filling distinction has such primacy that makes out chocolate pie closer to meat pie than to chocolate cake.
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Even in English, I think the "bread" thing (and what can be called that) is different between the UK and US. But yeah, where you draw the line between similar-ish objects in different languages or just in common usage is also interesting! I remember reading a thread awhile back, someplace like Metafilter or Tumblr, where the participants were trying to work out the exact definition of "soup" vs. "cereal" and it is really hard to figure out the exact line! (Some soups can be cold, some can have grains or milk in them, etc.) But we usually know exactly which one to call it when we see it.
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Incidentally German doesn't really have a word for "cereal". There's muesli of course, and you can say "Frühstücksflocken" (breakfast flakes) or "Getreideflocken" (grain flakes) if you don't want to be as specific as "cornflakes", "rolled oats" or brand names, but no "cereal" as in "having cereal for breakfast". (The only place I've ever seen "Cerealien" as a foreign word was in ads trying to sell some sugary concoction as healthy but it is not in everyday use.)
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Like in Russian it's really common to use the same word for brother and a male cousin (though you can specify the difference with an adjective before brother, which however isn't that common, or use the French loanword for cousin like English)
I'm really curious about the use of brat for cousin without a modifier, because I don't think I've ever run into that with my group of Russian speakers (from Ukraine), but now that you mention it I might've noticed it with some Moscow (I think?) folks I know, which struck me as very weird at the time.
I do use the French "cousin" a lot instead, because "dvoyurodnyj brat" is so unwieldy. But the other thing I find is, it's much easier to use "cousin" generically in English -- for your first cousin, or your fourth cousin, or your third cousin once removed -- but you can't do that in Russian because you have to specify the degree of relatedness in the actual term, or it's wrong, and also you can't really say "dvoyurodnyj brat" when what you mean is "dvoyurodnyj dyadya". So when talking about less straightforwardly related cousins/cousin-type relatives in Russian, I always end up either using the French word or just the English one.
So I think it's actually another case where Russian enforces more granular subdivisions in family relationships than, say, English does...
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Also, a Russian podcaster I listen to (iirc from near St. Petersburg), who does podcasts where he doesn't do grammar or such a lot but just casually talks relatively clearly and slowly with a lot of rephrasing to explain words, talked about a conversation he had with his mother about a "брат" he didn't know, the kid of some uncle or something, and then he did a brief aside explaining the usage. So that guy did it in fairly normal speech.
My RL teacher in my course (originally from St. Petersburg) just told us to use cousin (which you do in German as well as the older native German words are now really uncommon), and about the in-law situation he basically just mentioned it briefly, said sympathetically that it's a mess and that he also always has to think a moment which is which because he doesn't have any in-laws himself so it never comes up for him.
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*You are in the dark. You may be eaten by an indeterminate color.
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Brust's Vlad books are written in modern English, in which brandy and wine are currently different words and used to differentiate different liquors, regardless of etymology. I think he's clearly using the modern rather than older usage of "brandy."
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I hope you enjoy your reread!
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This comes up more explicitly in Teckla, when Verra is talking about Kelly: "Kelly has his hands on the truth about the way a society works, about where the power is, and the cause of the injustice he sees. But it is a truth for another time and another place. He has built an organization around those ideas, and because of their truth, his organization prospers. But the truth he has based his policies on, the fuel for this fire he is building, has no such strength in the Empire. Perhaps in ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, but not now. And by proceeding as he has, he is setting up his people to be massacred. Do you understand? He is building a world of ideas with no foundation beneath them."
(One of the interesting things to me about Brust's books is that there is often a character who shares his Marxist beliefs, but he very seldom makes this character a particularly sympathetic one--in an effort to avoid turning fiction into polemic, I assume.)
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I gotta say, if the entire above post is completely me reading things into the series that the author didn't intend, it all hangs together weirdly well!
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I guess I'm just trying to say that from the Marxist point of view, all the forms of stagnation you're discussing stem from that one central stagnation: the economic/political one. Beyond that I think we mostly agree? The end of the Interregnum broke that (and now I'm itching to reread the Viscount of Adrilanka books for more details, because of course that's what it covers--incidentally, the whole Dragaerans-only-wear-the-colors-of-their-house thing is a major plot point in one of the Paarfi books), and the House in Vallista represents part of the progress that's come since.
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I remember reading a blog post or an interview or something about that, actually, and it definitely seems to be an intentional thing he's doing: making the characters sharing his political views not very sympathetic, and including sympathetic characters who disagree with them.
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-- Paths of the Dead
-- Devera's existence
-- reincarnation
-- the significance of an inter-house marriage near the end of the 3rd Parthi book
-- the weird blend of monarchy and peaceful transfer of power as the cycle turns
-- Verra's meddling in the situation with regards to Aliera's existence
Clearly a re-read is in order! Hmm.
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(Random side note on mini-Vlad: I think this might be the only example in fiction that I can think of with a male baby being named after a female character - his middle name. Dragaeran names being mostly gender-neutral is helpful with this. But man, I love how this series handles gender.)
Anyway ... that's a really good point about Devera maybe not being born yet, even now. I guess that once we discovered what she really is, I thought she was born while Aliera was in the Halls of Judgment the first time and has been essentially around since before Aliera was rescued (having grown to the age that she currently is while being raised mostly by Verra and perhaps Keiron), but there's no reason at all why she has to be, especially since she's chronologically unmoored. Her conception/birth could easily be something that happens in the characters' future even though it's already happened for her. Maybe she's going to have a normal babyhood with future!Aliera in 10 or 20 years from now, book-time.
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(Incidentally, it took me forever to realize that she calls Vlad uncle not as a courtesy title because he's friends with her mother, but because he is literally her uncle twice over. He's the reincarnation of Dolivar, who was her father Kieron's brother. And Dolivar's sister reincarnated as Aliera. So he's her uncle on both sides through reincarnation.)
I think Devera's ability to not be bound by space and, especially, time has key to her purpose. So I'm guessing, given the sheer complexity of these books and their tendency to also jump around in time, that the Grand Scheme will likely involve Devera doing something simultaneously 1) at the time of the Jenoine's experiment, 2) Adron's Disaster, 3) the present.
And who was/is also present and important at the time of Adron's Disaster and the present? Aliera, Morrolan, and Sethra!
Do we know if Dolivar or one of his incarnations was also present? Vlad, like Devera, has been manipulated by Verra for ages, presumably to the same purpose, so he'd have to also be around then.
And then we have Cawti, who wants something that can only happen if the Cycle breaks, which is to have a successful revolution when it's not time for it.
So it seems like our main cast - Vlad, Cawti, Aliera, Morrolan, Sethra, plus Devera - are perfectly aligned to break the Cycle. That has to be where the series is going. And it was all set up from Book 1, in which Adron's Disaster and Vlad being Dolivar's reincarnation was key.
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OOOOH. That's a very plausible theory! I am also amused that due to the unified nature of space/time in the Dragaera 'verse and the known ability of gods to manifest in multiple places at once (presumably also, then in multiple times), the idea of someone doing something "simultaneously" in three different time periods actually makes sense! As opposed to an episode of Legends of Tomorrow which relied on the characters doing something "simultaneously" in multiple time periods, which just made me want to scream at the screen, "You have a fucking time machine! It doesn't matter how long it takes you to do this in any specific year regardless of whether it's taking your friends in a different year a longer time or a shorter time or they're not doing it at all, because YOU HAVE A TIME MACHINE!!!"
And that's also a really good point about Vlad and his friends being uniquely positioned to do something about this.
Re: Morrolan - I think he was either a small child or not born yet at the exact time of Adron's Disaster, though, wasn't he? I would have to look back at exactly what the books said about this, but I think it's mentioned that the reason why he grew up in the East was to avoid the strife and infighting that followed the Disaster, and he was young enough not to realize at first that he wasn't an Easterner. I mean, he was certainly around during the Interregnum, but he wasn't a major player in the way that Sethra and Aliera were.
... that being said, I think all the many points of contact between these characters, past and present, suggest major plans afoot.
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Re: the latter: lots of important Easterner/Dragaeran relationships. Apart from all of Vlad's (and I have to pull out one I just realized now, which is that he's an Easterner wielding a Great Weapon with a Dragaeran spirit), there's Zerika/Laszlo and Cawti & Norathar. Vlad Jr. even has a Dragaeran name and an Eastern name.
So, barriers breaking down = breaking the Cycle. I think.
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But yeah, that's a really good point about all the cross-species relationships in the books (to the extent that they are different species), and generally what it implies about the increasing permeability of the barriers between the two groups.
I like your "bridge" theory with Morrolan (I hadn't realized 'til Issola just how much he and Vlad have in common with their child-of-two-cultures backgrounds). Morrolan also has god blood (I presume Verra's, though I guess we don't know for sure) and Sethra seems to have gone to great lengths to make that happen, which I expect means it's going to be important at some point.
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This is one of the things I really, really love about them and the dynamic between them, especially since they're of two cultures in different ways -- Vlad's Eastern heritage is really important to him, but also his relationship to it is so complicated! -- and (until Jhegaala) he has no idea what life in a place where Easterners/Fenarians are the dominant culture is like. While Morrolan has directly experience both in his youth, but also from a place of privilege mostly. The interplay between all that is super fascinating to me (as someone who grew up in two cultures myself).
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He was in utero at the time of Adron's Disaster :) (this comes up/is implied in Five Hundred Years After).
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Whoa, so I got the brother-of-Aliera's-past-life from the start, but the penny never dropped on the LESS convoluted explanation that he's her uncle via Kieron, too. That's beautiful XD
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They are essentially stuck in a trap where they spend all their intellectual energy and the focus of their long lives on an obsession with whatever their House is obsessed with
This is a really great point! And made me think of the discussion we get -- I don't remember if it's in Dragon or one of the Paarfi books -- about the nature of magical warfare in Dragaera: the way shielding and offensive spells evolve to counteract each other, and the net result is basically cyclical "technology". Just one example, driven by Dragonlords' priorities, no doubt, but it makes sense that other aspects of society would function the same way.
The Vallista invented something new, something that didn't exist before; they figured out the technological innovation of looping time.
Hm! That does make sense, but I do wonder why that specific thing, though, because I feel like there were other things invented after the interregnum. Or maybe I'm misremembering where in time the invention and/or conversation with Verra takes place, because when I was reading Vallista, I definitely had to let go of trying to keep track of time and just float along...
which is another thing Vlad makes a point of telling us in several books that Morrolan is really into - collecting books, and just generally gathering knowledge from everywhere and accumulating it at Castle Black.)
Although he does still have them shelved by House ;P -- still, it's a start!
All of which is such standard fantasy fodder that, like the background worldbuilding of an Empire that's lasted for tens of thousands of years, you wouldn't really think anything about it.
It's really amazing that it's turning out to be a twist 15 books in the making!
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Or before it, for that matter, because at some point I remember Vlad mentioning that he can't read Dragaeran books if they're old enough, because the writing system has changed. So clearly there was SOME amount of innovation going on. Although, along the lines of the point you made about cyclical defense/offense in the House of the Dragon - it's not precisely that they never come up with anything new, it's just that it never goes anywhere. Which does beg the question, what's different about the Vallista house? And ... I'm not sure! It has to be unique in some unprecedented way. Hopefully we'll find out more in the next book. :D
Although he does still have them shelved by House ;P
Hahaha. Good point. I love how all these details turn out to be so much more meaningful in retrospect!
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Yeah, I'm really curious about this, too, and hope we'll get an explanation!
Because, OK, cyclical military technology or writing systems that change but don't drive large-scale change elsewhere, I can believe that's not material change. But teleportation for sure, and I think also revivification, is something they come up with over the course of their history, and those seem like pretty major developments with far-reaching consequences!
I was going to say that it ought to be comparable to time-travel, but on the other hand, hm. Teleportation allows you to do FASTER something that's possible without violating physics, and maybe revivification is sufficiently comparable to reincarnation that it's not a qualitatively NEW thing, either. But time-travel allows for something that's not possible with normal physics at all and that could be the difference? Hm!
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