This one came out more or less the way I wanted it to. It was going to be the last Vlad novel, at least for a while, but then Athyra came up and bit me. The drummer is based on Robin Anders, my drum teacher, and he really is like that. Honest. You can always tell a drummer, but, uh…what was the question?
In Phoenix, chapter (“lesson”) 18 (right towards the end of the book), Vladimir is having thoughts in the narrative that go:
“There are fools who pretend that one can get through life without hating, or that the emotion itself is somehow wrong, but I’ve never had that problem.”
I’m one of those fools, I suppose. It’s my empathy with Buddhism and monkish things I suppose. Of course I’ve hated things passionately, including myself at times (which truly seems to be the worst thing to hate), but I think that one can “evolve” to a point where someone no longer hates. I think the Dalai Lama is an example of this. (The book “The Art of Happiness” has highly influenced my opinion on this.)
It makes sense that Vladimir would feel this way about hate, but I’m just wondering how much you empathize with your character. Do you feel that one can’t go through life without hating?
I believe Vlad also says earlier in the book that one can not love without hate. That I disagree with even more strongly. I think the two are actually quite unrelated and that the times in my life where I’ve been hateful, fearful, etc, have been times when I was the least loving.
So again, it makes sense that Vladimir feels this way. It just makes me wonder how much you have to have been able to empathize with this train of thought in order to write it.
If I may be so bold, it seems that you must be too wise to actually feel this way about these things. And that said, if you do feel that way, then you must have a good reason that I’ve completely overlooked in my own experiences.
In a way, it seems like hate is one of the “themes” in Phoenix (as they’d say if we were discussing this book in a high-school English class). I’d be interested to hear you expound upon this.
(Can you tell I’m spending all my spare time reading the Vladimir series right now? Thoroughly enjoying it too.)
I think it is possible for people to cut themselves off from their emotions; I just don’t think it’s possible to be that selective about it: “I will feel love, but not hate; I will feel comfort, but not fear” &c. To be sure, there are some emotions that some individuals are exempt from, by nature, as it were (I seem to have trouble managing to find jealousy, for example; although his little sister envy shows up from time to time). But if I were to work on not feeling hate, I’d be working on not feeling love as well, and that’s a choice I’m not willing to make.
Secondarily, I think hate is healthy. I think seeing what terrible things a person can do, and internalizing it to the point where it becomes passionate dislike with elements of disgust and contempt, is good way of staying discontented; and discontent is one of the things that can do the most to drive us to committing acts of beauty and kindness. Hate is one of the emotions that lights fires under us, to drive us to act; and sometimes even to understand. What we do with that hate can be healthy or unhealthy (spending a lot of time wallowing in it, for example, strikes me as silly), but I’m certainly in favor of experiencing the full range of emotions, and all of them to the hilt.
I can no longer remember exactly how much of that was in Phoenix, but that’s my position, more or less, as it feels this morning. Thanks for asking.
And thank you for telling me you enjoy the books: this pleases me by inspiring feelings of pride and happiness–two more emotions that I wouldn’t care to lose, even if it meant no longer feeling shame or sorrow.
In the story, Vlad decides to accept plain hard cash for his job for Vera. That got me to wondering about the economic model for the gods, and specifically where she got that cash in the first place.
Do the gods have tax collectors? I supposed they would call them tithe collectors to make it sound better.
I would think that they perhaps get a cut of what is donated to their temples. Does then Vera have one of the priests regularly pray to her so that she can manifest and get her earnings? More likely she would have an assistant do the pick-up, but it not a god then how do they get to and from the Halls? I know that Devera can do it, but she is a special case (unless there is a whole bunch of demi-gods running about that we have not heard of).
Do the gods even need cash, outside of a petty cash fund for various mortal exchanges as per this novel? I keep thinking of the meme that kings are often cash poor, and wonder if that applies to gods.
Also, would the system of indulgences be in place, given that there is a corporal entity with which to make the exchange, as opposed to our earthly model where it is just a one-sided middleman ‘promise’.
I’ve reread Phoenix this week, and it really is an amazing book. Between it and Teckla, I love how you wrote the realistic collapse of a marriage and the ill feelings that come with it – in far too much of literature, the point at which two people get together is viewed as some sort of a happy end and dot, and what might happen after isn’t really explored.
The sheer… well-supported absurdity of a goddess going “well, fuck” when her attempt at nudging society where she wanted – an attempt that hasn’t been the first such to fail in our history – has completely flopped. And of course, being from Slovakia, I can’t but smile at the descriptions of so many all-too-familiar foods, though I’ve mentioned it a few years back already. For that matter, I also appreciate how none of the politics in either book devolves into preachiness and the political arguments between characters are genuine, with no party being made look artificially terrible.
I though, if you might indulge, do have a question, which, for everyone else reading might be slightly spoilerific, and which you might not even want to answer.
At one point, Verra mentions Kelly getting his hands on texts older than the Empire, from
different time and place, that describe the truth about how society works. Well. I can’t help but wonder if it’s the works I’m thinking of as themselves (and their two esteemed authors) or some sort of in-universe grown parallels (after all, there’s many falsities, but only one truth that someone will arrive to eventually, so they’re bound to be similar.) and for that matter, what was the origin of those records in the first place? Was there a society on the world before the Dragaeran tribes (or even Jenoine) that was at the point of industrialization where this sort of ideas would meaningfully arise, and where the Empire is just coming into? Or was it something else entirely?
Of course, if you choose to keep it for yourself, or plainly don’t have it thought out/plotted yet, that’s a perfectly fair stance. Best wishes to you from Slovakia , and keep up with the awesome work, either way!
First of all, thank you kindly; you’ve brightened my day.
About the texts in question, if you mean are they the works of Marx and Engels, well, I might be wrong, but I kinda think so. Your hypothesis is also reasonable.
Glad to be of service, and thank you for your kind reply! Also, sorry for late reply, I sort of kept not having time. Anyhow, this creates an interesting question – what other books from earth might have made their way into Lyorn archives?
Because when you think about it, it’s not just sound social science that could make an impact. I mean… think of all the magic described in fantastic novels. It’s quite possible someone manages something that sounds about right to the applications of the Orb, and some mage spending their time reading it might go “Hmm, maybe this can be done.” and ends up with a new sorcerous process.
Also the obvious jokes about how the likes of Friedman and Hayek might be given honorary titles in the House of Orca.
Was just listening to the audio book of this, and was struck by a detail I hadn’t noticed before. While Vlad is worrying about how his wife’s new class conciousness affects their marriage, he casually exercises some pretty significant economic privilege: He tosses a literal bag of money to some (presumably poor) street musicians, whom he notes frequently play at his window in hopes of such largesse. These musicians are playing completely on spec, hoping that Vlad (or *someone*) will pay them.
*grin* Nice catch.
I just re-listened to this with my wife, and it occurred to me: when they were trying to teleport to Greenaere, why didn’t they simply use Morrolan’s windows? They would have worked, wouldn’t they?
Unrelatedly, I’m of a mind with Raederle visa vie love and hate; but I agree with Noish-pa as a practical matter that what’s most important is not to let it rule you.
[In recognition of upcoming “Thornsday” (9 June), and as a shout-out to Mark Mandel, “owner and proprietor” of the long-lost Cracks and Shards website, here comes my trivia-sequel to Phoenix’s Nordic-themed “Saga of Haro Olithorvold.” I sent the main bit to Mark in 2013 as part of a ginormous trivia dump of items to consider for C&S. Back then, I figured brevity was crucial, ruthlessly cutting away indulgent side commentary (like why the “dead bodies and seaweed” connection made me dead certain that the translation of Oregigeret had to be Old Pledge, as opposed to Promise, or even Oath — but that’s Taltos, not Phoenix). This sucker far exceeded my limit for a concise “translation” anecdote, yet I felt I had to include it because Mark himself had posted about his frustrated attempts to fit Haro’s patronymic into an emerging system of Dragaeran naming conventions. In the end, after printing out a hard copy of the full text for my records, I axed the bulk of my saga-length entry, omitting material that veered off into related discussions.
Compiling Haro’s Saga called down a plague of Nordic non-standard alphabet symbols. In particular, believing the “th” letter to be obsolete, I never even looked for it in any of my standard symbol fonts, instead rendering it simply as “p.” Well. In the end, nothing from my trivia dump was ever posted before the entire C&S site was lost; however, Mark neatly skewered my scholarship — via his Bits of My Life blog, on a date he deemed fitting — by posting his first tongue-in-cheek salute to Thornsday. (Turns out the letter thorn is still used in…gnnnngh: Icelandic.)
This is a transcription of what DIDN’T get dumped into Mark’s Inbox. Here, too, we have a nonstandard letter, the Scandinavian “O” with a slash through it. If you see something that looks like garbage-keystrokes, it will probably be that letter. Also be aware, the following information digresses to Brokedown Palace before returning to Phoenix. Don’t blame me, I just go where the connections lead me.]
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Perhaps one of the more linguistically intriguing inhabitants of Greenaere is the humble Norska. These little critters (“norska” being both singular and plural in form) appear first — and most extensively — in Brokedown Palace. Which is why their name has always puzzled me.
Never mind that German-rooted Minnesotans significantly outnumber all Scandinavian groups put together; it was still pretty damn hard for anyone of my generation, growing up in Deutschland on the Über Mississippi, to avoid repeated exposure to Svensk/Svenska/Svenske and Norsk/Norska/Norske as assorted Scandinavian-language words meaning, respectively, Swedish and Norwegian. Plus, the city of Northpor — er, NorthFIELD, where Brust lived as a teenager — but which, despite its name, is located even farther toward the bottom of the Emp — uh, STATE than our already-south-of-center capital — does have a stronger Nordic representation than either Minnesota as a whole or the Twin Cities metro area of his childhood and adult years.
But why would Brust flaunt a Scandinavian term — naming a specific Scandinavian group — in a book so closely tied to his own Hungarian roots?
Based on several passages in Brokedown, the long-eared, long-incisored, soft-furred, hopping, mostly-vegetarian norska are almost certainly rabbits, and that’s no help to us, either. The Hungarian word for rabbit is nothing like norska. Nor, more tellingly, is any other Hungarian word I was able to dig up. Could my four-months-older fellow Twin Cities native (and logophile) actually have grown to novel-writing adulthood without knowing what Norska means when it’s at home? Could there BE that big a coincidental naming in a Brust-inhabited universe? Or is his norska part of an inside joke of some kind?
Is that even a serious question?
In the main Taltos series, the animal gets glancing mention in Taltos, Issola, Dzur, and Iorich. Norska more prominently constitute a couple of jhereg-supplied meals in Athyra. Only in Phoenix, however, have I been able to ferret out a plausible reason for Brust’s choice of name: Greenaere native Aibynn of Lowporch wears a memorably-noted norska hat.
Yep, Greenaere, home of former King Haro Olithorvold and a veritable skipload of other Nordic-sourced elements. Norska fits right in with that lot, giving Aibynn a furry “Norwegian” hat as a Brustianly-inverted horned helm of popular Viking lore. Complete with (per p. 66) our little norska’s “fangs” visible, front and center, in lieu of those bogus horns sprouting to either side. A fashion statement Brust might well have intended as a key to the larger Greenaere joke.
Building on that conjecture, we might further spot a sly heads-up in Vilmos, the “Resolute Protector” of Brokedown’s soft-furred subjects. His name is a Hungarianization of the German Wilhelm (William), which is where I got my title for him, so don’t go looking for that phrase anywhere in Brokedown. Fits him, though, dunnit? At the same time, the -helm part of Wilhelm also translates more directly as…yep: helm.
Of the protective headgear variety.
Except, Phoenix didn’t deliver Aibynn and his hat until late 1990, almost a full five years after we first met Vilmos (hunh, a future king) and his counterintuitively dubbed norska.
Uff da.
But what of Aibynn himself? One sleepless night, on a whim, I decided to see if I could find him a proper Nordic name to match his headgear. A Nordic proper name is what I ended up with. Brustianly appropriate? Jury is still out. For starters, I haven’t dealt with Lowporch at all. Also, Cracks and Shards already offers a nowhere-near-Nordic shared name origin for Aibynn and all three of his Adrilankha bandmates. OTOH, it doesn’t preclude the existence of a separate joke tied solely to Aibynn — whose name, if I’m correctly remembering the C&S entry, was constructed with noticeable differences from the other three. Plus, there’s Brust’s notorious penchant for hiding one twist behind another.
That said, Aibynn’s is the final chapter in my Saga of Haro Olithervold (aka A Viking Tale), so I figure C&S might as well have access to the full Collector’s Set. I don’t expect to be revisiting the subject again myself. Just bear in mind, this was a purely frivolous time-waster for me, an investment of two or three hours, give or take.
My drop-of-a-norska-hat choice was Øvind, a name with Norse roots so deep that no one is entirely certain of its exact origin or meaning. Spoken aloud, it sounds like a decent Aibynn match, having much the same stress and vowel sounds as in Aidan. No direct linguistic connection, however; I checked, given Brust’s pairing of Haro and Corcor’n, and learned that Aidan is a modernized diminutive form of the Celtic Áed, translating as something along the lines of fire, fiery, or fire-bringer. There are several hemi-demi-sort-of half-assed Celtic and Nordic side links to be teased out by pressing on beyond that point, except — seriously, who wants to go there?
(And what about Corcor’n, you now ask. Or maybe not. His name is a lot easier to crack than Haro’s. Still, he’s in my notes, and perhaps you’ve had better things to do than run down the details of his lineage. So. In brief, working from an apostrophe-free Corcoran, his name traces back through several steps to the Gaelic word for purple, a color historically reserved for royalty. By sheer extravagance, if not always by edict: limited availability of the dye made it worth a king’s ransom. A closer-to-modern-day step in the name’s evolution brings in a suffix denoting a descendant. A Brustianly interpreted translation might thus be “son of royalty.” Or, alternatively — on account of, what color are those team jerseys? — “son of a [Minnesota] Viking.” Another horned helm score, right between the goalposts.)
Most experts agree that the -vind part of Øvind comes from a source word meaning something like victor or warrior. Doesn’t do anything for us in terms of Aibynn himself. At least, not as we know him to date; I do consider him a good bet to be eventually revealed as an agent of…somebody. On the other hand, the warrior variant ties in passably well with our Viking/horned-helm image.
Victors? Eh, depends on which Vikings we’re talking about.
Opinion is more divided on that funny-looking front-end Ø. Two main camps. The one that initially caught my reddened eye favors a source word meaning — “surfy” drum roll here — island. As in Greenaere. Or Greenland. Or Iceland. The other camp advocates a root that translates along the lines of luck-giver or lucky one. (Wait — Lucky Warriors? Again, depends on context.) Best Viking link on that side seems to be Icelandic-born Leif Eriksson, AKA Leif the Lucky. Who — hunh — had a brother named Thorvaldr.
As for linking back to Aibynn, well, hooking up with him HAS proved fortunate for Vlad on more than one occasion.
Hey, it was REALLY late at night.
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