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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
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Date: 2010-09-28 04:06 pm (UTC)Yes. From a worldbuilding perspective, I can't come up with a backstory that fits all of the details in the book. Not only is there colonialism and a China trade, but Fantasy Britain is relentlessly British: if there are East Asians in that society, either their ethnic origins are within Britain, or they brought nothing with them but their skin.
Which tweaks me very badly, actually: if those characters really are East Asian, that world has one of the worst cases of assimilate-or-die that I've ever seen.
:: I've been trained in how to read Fantasy Britain, you know? ::
Yes!
...I keep coming back to: can you do what she wanted to do? How do you pull off textual colorblind casting of fairy tales (for what is essentially the same reason that you do colorblind casting of Shakespeare productions) in such a way that you let people know that you did it? And can you even do it in such a way that it plays nicely with the in-story geographies? Writer-brain keeps poking at that, it does.