I actually came back to this discussion to thank both of you for bringing it up, since I'm re-reading Engine Summer now and it's neat to have other perspectives on it.
It's possible that I'm only-literate-in-SF, or just mostly-literate-in-SF-with-a-smattering-of-other-stuff, but the way I took a lot of the not-presently-existant elements of Engine Summer was to some extent, as you say "just...technology".
I didn't really read the Four Pots as alien, though. They, and all the stuff that gets called "Medicine's Daughters" struck me as kind of like truthful speaking: something that was like what we have now (medicine, intentional open communication) "turned up to 11". Its narrative function would then be to highlight the differences in the way these different groups had adopted or not adopted the elements of the gone-away world of the angels, and what that made them, and through that, to say something about people, and different ways of being people.
It would be possible to write a story without them, but when the gradiations in what seperates Dr. Boots' List from Little Belaire are less steep than the difference between growing into truthful speaking and receiving a letter from Dr. Boots, it becomes less plausible that they would be two different groups who largely keep apart from each other. The difference wouldn't be big enough. Someone who smokes a little pot and doesn't lie much can still have a lot in common with someone who drops acid and watches their cat a lot. Someone who has St. Bea's Bread as half their diet and doesn't know how to hide anything is a very different creature from someone who needs a calendar to remember that time exists because they run "cat code" on their brain every spring.
That, also, is a point where I think I differ with RushThatSpeaks (the one in this thread, not the one in the book) on what the letter from Dr. Boots is. When it's activated, I don't think the person experiences being one of the three dead men or the cat. I got the impression that it shuts the I-that-experiences off and runs the I-that-got-recorded-in-the-bubble on their brain. So when someone gets their letter, their brain does cat things for a while, and when they come out of it, they can no more talk about it than I can usefully talk to a cat now.
I do get the impression that they don't really know how it works, which is a little cargo-cultish, but it does work, and they do know that it works, which isn't cultish at all. In fact, it strikes me as a lot like how people use computers, cars, etc. now.
I also, for some reason, see the fly as not being in amber, but in plastic. It's a joke item, a plastic ice cube with a fly in it, which you can stick in someone's drink to gross them out. Of course, I would see that: I had one of those ice cubes as a kid. That might change the interpretation of it as a metaphor, though.
Truthful Speaking struck me as a lot like the prana-bindu training of the Bene Gesseret in Dune, which I'd be inclined to call a practice rather than a technology, largely on account of it being a thing that a person learns to do, using themselves, rather than an object or external process that a person learns to use. Karate, meditation, that sort of thing are practices, swords are a technology. So truthful speaking would be a combination of the precise observation of expression and body language, self-awareness and awareness of ones own body language, and so on. I'm actually quite interested in what one would have to learn now to develop something like this. It seems useful.
That reading of it makes me less than convinced that Once A Day remained a Truthful Speaker. She may have been further into learning it than Rush That Speaks when she left, but it seems to me that the constant-present way that Dr. Boots' List thinks would interfere with it. Once A Day's seeming mystification that Rush That Speaks was capable of thinking of her in her absence makes it seem like members of Dr. Boots List have at best a lack of desire, and at worst an inability, to structure thoughts about anything other than the continuious present, and so they don't hold to any state of mind long enough for it to be a thing to communicate.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-16 06:44 pm (UTC)It's possible that I'm only-literate-in-SF, or just mostly-literate-in-SF-with-a-smattering-of-other-stuff, but the way I took a lot of the not-presently-existant elements of Engine Summer was to some extent, as you say "just...technology".
I didn't really read the Four Pots as alien, though. They, and all the stuff that gets called "Medicine's Daughters" struck me as kind of like truthful speaking: something that was like what we have now (medicine, intentional open communication) "turned up to 11". Its narrative function would then be to highlight the differences in the way these different groups had adopted or not adopted the elements of the gone-away world of the angels, and what that made them, and through that, to say something about people, and different ways of being people.
It would be possible to write a story without them, but when the gradiations in what seperates Dr. Boots' List from Little Belaire are less steep than the difference between growing into truthful speaking and receiving a letter from Dr. Boots, it becomes less plausible that they would be two different groups who largely keep apart from each other. The difference wouldn't be big enough. Someone who smokes a little pot and doesn't lie much can still have a lot in common with someone who drops acid and watches their cat a lot. Someone who has St. Bea's Bread as half their diet and doesn't know how to hide anything is a very different creature from someone who needs a calendar to remember that time exists because they run "cat code" on their brain every spring.
That, also, is a point where I think I differ with RushThatSpeaks (the one in this thread, not the one in the book) on what the letter from Dr. Boots is. When it's activated, I don't think the person experiences being one of the three dead men or the cat. I got the impression that it shuts the I-that-experiences off and runs the I-that-got-recorded-in-the-bubble on their brain. So when someone gets their letter, their brain does cat things for a while, and when they come out of it, they can no more talk about it than I can usefully talk to a cat now.
I do get the impression that they don't really know how it works, which is a little cargo-cultish, but it does work, and they do know that it works, which isn't cultish at all. In fact, it strikes me as a lot like how people use computers, cars, etc. now.
I also, for some reason, see the fly as not being in amber, but in plastic. It's a joke item, a plastic ice cube with a fly in it, which you can stick in someone's drink to gross them out. Of course, I would see that: I had one of those ice cubes as a kid. That might change the interpretation of it as a metaphor, though.
Truthful Speaking struck me as a lot like the prana-bindu training of the Bene Gesseret in Dune, which I'd be inclined to call a practice rather than a technology, largely on account of it being a thing that a person learns to do, using themselves, rather than an object or external process that a person learns to use. Karate, meditation, that sort of thing are practices, swords are a technology. So truthful speaking would be a combination of the precise observation of expression and body language, self-awareness and awareness of ones own body language, and so on. I'm actually quite interested in what one would have to learn now to develop something like this. It seems useful.
That reading of it makes me less than convinced that Once A Day remained a Truthful Speaker. She may have been further into learning it than Rush That Speaks when she left, but it seems to me that the constant-present way that Dr. Boots' List thinks would interfere with it. Once A Day's seeming mystification that Rush That Speaks was capable of thinking of her in her absence makes it seem like members of Dr. Boots List have at best a lack of desire, and at worst an inability, to structure thoughts about anything other than the continuious present, and so they don't hold to any state of mind long enough for it to be a thing to communicate.