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Agents of Change and Stories About Everypeople
Obligatory Notice: The below is a Babble; it is not a scholarly treatise and ought not to be treated as such.
So, yesterday, Steve and I went out to breakfast -- accidentally, out to breakfast, the house power having knuckled under to the force of the wind on the overnight. And one of the things we talked about, over our coffee and other tasty things, was the vigilante hero in SF. Very often in genre, the motivator for the hero is A Death -- of a spouse, of a beloved sibling, a parent... Very often, it seems as if A Death is the only motivator. Looked at in the light of those folks who say (but do they really?) that they want stories about "Mrs. Brown" -- i.e., the "normal" (whatever that means) middle aged lady who lives downstairs, the problem of genre heroism becomes even trickier. What would motivate Mrs. Brown to cease her comfortable existence, leave her cozy apartment, her cats and her grandkids, and embrace heroism? Heroism is messy; it hurts; very often people -- at least, the person you were before -- fail to survive it. In fact, heroism is not ordinary, therefore a story about heroism is extraordinary.
Steve thought that maybe Getting Fed Up, or Witnessing an Injustice might impel someone into heroism. There's something there, though I wonder if such change-points would compel most genre readers. In the Liaden Universe(R), there is a character I think of as a hero because they refused the annihilation of worlds as their solution and took the longer, slower, non-violent course. Readers think this character is a wimp at best, and lost to honor at worst, because they're not doing anything. Kinda funny, that.
But, back to Mrs. Brown... 'way down the years, when I was a tall enough, if not exactly old enough, to read from the adult section of the public library, I fell into a series of books by an author whose name I no longer recall. Edited to Add: Mary Lasswell. The stories concerned three "normal" women -- Mrs. Feeney whose husband had died, leaving her the proprietor of a bar; Mrs. Rasmussen, also a widow, forced by penury to live with her slovenly daughter and abusive son-in-law; and Miss Tinkham, an unemployed piano teacher. All three ladies are long in the tooth and they form an alliance.
Mrs. Feeney sees Miss Tinkham going from door to door in the neighborhood, has pity on her and offers her the spare room in trade for playing piano at the bar. Mrs. Rasmussen, a long-time friend of Mrs. Feeney's gets fed up with her circumstances and also moves in with Mrs. Feeney. Mrs. Feeney recalls that she had always wanted to travel, so the three of them load up Mrs. Feeney's ancient station wagon and take off to have adventures. Wherever they land, they become Agents of Change, righting everyday wrongs, smoothing the path of Young Love, helping a Mexican woman in the country illegally to avoid the Border Patrol, gain a job and her green card...
Clearly, these were stories about Mrs. Brown and I enjoyed them thoroughly when I was thirteen, but they were written as comedies; nobody could take the antics of the three ladies seriously, after all. One wonders how they might play, written "seriously" -- or if they could even be written seriously; or if reader expectation insists that such stories must be comedy.
...and now, back to work
So, yesterday, Steve and I went out to breakfast -- accidentally, out to breakfast, the house power having knuckled under to the force of the wind on the overnight. And one of the things we talked about, over our coffee and other tasty things, was the vigilante hero in SF. Very often in genre, the motivator for the hero is A Death -- of a spouse, of a beloved sibling, a parent... Very often, it seems as if A Death is the only motivator. Looked at in the light of those folks who say (but do they really?) that they want stories about "Mrs. Brown" -- i.e., the "normal" (whatever that means) middle aged lady who lives downstairs, the problem of genre heroism becomes even trickier. What would motivate Mrs. Brown to cease her comfortable existence, leave her cozy apartment, her cats and her grandkids, and embrace heroism? Heroism is messy; it hurts; very often people -- at least, the person you were before -- fail to survive it. In fact, heroism is not ordinary, therefore a story about heroism is extraordinary.
Steve thought that maybe Getting Fed Up, or Witnessing an Injustice might impel someone into heroism. There's something there, though I wonder if such change-points would compel most genre readers. In the Liaden Universe(R), there is a character I think of as a hero because they refused the annihilation of worlds as their solution and took the longer, slower, non-violent course. Readers think this character is a wimp at best, and lost to honor at worst, because they're not doing anything. Kinda funny, that.
But, back to Mrs. Brown... 'way down the years, when I was a tall enough, if not exactly old enough, to read from the adult section of the public library, I fell into a series of books by an author whose name I no longer recall. Edited to Add: Mary Lasswell. The stories concerned three "normal" women -- Mrs. Feeney whose husband had died, leaving her the proprietor of a bar; Mrs. Rasmussen, also a widow, forced by penury to live with her slovenly daughter and abusive son-in-law; and Miss Tinkham, an unemployed piano teacher. All three ladies are long in the tooth and they form an alliance.
Mrs. Feeney sees Miss Tinkham going from door to door in the neighborhood, has pity on her and offers her the spare room in trade for playing piano at the bar. Mrs. Rasmussen, a long-time friend of Mrs. Feeney's gets fed up with her circumstances and also moves in with Mrs. Feeney. Mrs. Feeney recalls that she had always wanted to travel, so the three of them load up Mrs. Feeney's ancient station wagon and take off to have adventures. Wherever they land, they become Agents of Change, righting everyday wrongs, smoothing the path of Young Love, helping a Mexican woman in the country illegally to avoid the Border Patrol, gain a job and her green card...
Clearly, these were stories about Mrs. Brown and I enjoyed them thoroughly when I was thirteen, but they were written as comedies; nobody could take the antics of the three ladies seriously, after all. One wonders how they might play, written "seriously" -- or if they could even be written seriously; or if reader expectation insists that such stories must be comedy.
...and now, back to work
no subject
As for Theo's situation, her upbringing was dictated by her mother's decisions according to the culture in which Theo was born. He knew that when he accepted becoming Theo's genefather. He would hardly cross certain lines, although he would certainly do his best to see as much information and training be given as possible. How could he possibly raise the child to be Korval if she were never to leave Delgado? It would not only break the agreement made with her mother but it would hurt Theo even more than what she already suffered from that which she picked up.
no subject
However, he also severed all his ties with his foster brother, his foster brother's wife and offspring, his son, his sister, his nephew, his father, and left no forwarding address or infordmation, ever. He set the ship to monitor comm traffic, but made no attempt otherwise to monitor anything about Korval or Liad.
He was ignorant of Anne Davis' death and Er Thom's subsequent death. Aelliana's by assassin, and given that his mother and a cousin died in a trap set for the ship, and his aunt was crippled and debilitated in the disaster that took her sister and her elder nephew, and the anger against Anne Davis' research results, Daav should have known that he wasn't leaving Liad and Korval in a nice peaceful calm situation. That is, his wife died in an attack against Korval, his foster brother's wife had been the victim of attack, his mother and cousin had been murdered in an attack and his aunt permanent disabled by it... and he left behind a young son.
By Liaden custom, he had walked, and stayed away for a far longer than considered de facto grounds for declaring someone legally dead. It was only the actions of Er Thom, Nova, Shan, and Val Con in failing to formalize his absence for so long, that prevented him from being declared dead.
As regards Theo--Jen Sar Kiladi gave her few real pointers before she went on the trip with her mother. Kamele moved into the academic quarters for the purpose of her work, and then took Theo along on the trip with the consultation and advice of Jen Sar. Jen Sar could have said things about pilot and space travel without breaking cover--he had had to have gotten from Liaden space to Delgado somehow and not being a wizard much less one of the caliber of Ren Zel or Anthora and not having a spacetime for springers cat leading him through a warp to a lifemate, he couldn't have walked there... he had to have come via spacecraft somehow. And Theo being Theo and sprung from dozens of generations of pilot ancestors of "Jen Sar"'s lineage, and being someoen that exciting times had a habit of landing on, to expect that she wouldn't be bumping into pilots, would be to expect way too much... ship-hunger's in her genes, going back all the way to both founders of Korval and to Jela.
A youngster of Korval lineage, going on a spaceship--other than Kareen and her emotionally abused son, the chances of ship-hunger not hitting, were almost nil.
And once Theo returned to Korval and let Jen Sar know she was aware he was a pilot, and informed Jen Sar that her ambition was to become a pilot, Jen Sar should have provided her with certain information about Liadens and their contracts and Code and Dealing the Liadens for Dummies critical information--recall the guidebooks ports had for visitors in Balance of Trade, for example
There's objective nformation, subjective information, and information that's a mix of both. That Liadens have a Code of Conduct as a guide to their lifestyles, is objective information. Jen Sar didn't mention that to Theo, even though he knew she was going to a mixed Terran and Liaden planet. Jen Sar didn't mention anything about hierarchies of trading ship families and the Liaden scouts and Terran whatever, even though "Korval is ships" and on the Terran side there were leading companies with lots of ships--Theo's roommate's family was apparently rather well-known, and Hugglelans has an interstellar multisystem basing presence and a number of ships--Jen Sar provided Theo with no apparently information about Trade and about, again, that rankings of whom was who in Liaden and Terran space. He was regularly visiting the yard that he'd left Aelliana's ship at, so he was in a position to hear the gossip of current status of the key issues.
Daav's choice to leave Liad and seek Balance by teaching was one thing. His incommunicado status and his silence to his daughter about information that anyone aspiring to be a pilot who was going to be on a mixed jurisdication planet needed to know, and his lack of telling her about who the powers that be were in ships, were other things, and ones that he flunked.
no subject
As for not telling Theo she's genetically Korval, i think about it this way: An onagrata relationship on Delgado is more like a contract marriage (if that), and certainly not a lifemating. And the relationship - whether to initiate it, how involved it is, how long it lasts, whether there are children - is totally up to the female.
In a contract marriage, it would be spelled out in the contract which parent's clan the child went to and became a part of, and the other parent would most likely not have any role in the child's life, perhaps not even be known to the child. Or there might be some relationship, but that's not expected or really common, it seems. The other parent, having done their marital duty, is outside the child's clan and has no say. Maybe the healers even blur their memory so they don't miss their child so much.
With this as Daav's cultural background for parenting in a contract rather than lifemating situation, and with Kamele clearly the parent who, legally and socioculturally on Delgado, has the child in her care (i'm trying not to talk about possession or ownership, though it does seem to arise) - wouldn't he naturally and appropriately see Theo as _belonging_ to Kamele and her 'clan' (her world/culture/identity), and not to him and his?
Another case in point - remember Er Thom and Anne's major cultural confusions about Shan's legal status. Literally, who did he belong to, Anne or Clan Korval? Because Anne named him yos'Galan, he belonged to Korval. To Er Thom and Daav, that was blatantly obvious and unchangeable once done, while to Anne it made no sense, had no context - and she a scholar of the Liaden language besides. If she'd named him Davis, despite the genes Er Thom wouldn't have felt he had the same kind of claim, if any.
So it's not surprising that Daav was so hands-off in these regards - Theo is Kamele's child and not, legally, of his clan. Even though genetically she's all that.