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Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 28, 2019 2:21:19 GMT 10
There are so many different places our heroines get to explore in the Tortall books. I loved seeing Carthak in Emperor Mage and spending almost a whole book in Port Caynn during Bloodhound. I also enjoyed the desert setting in Woman Who Rides Like a Man and the Copper Isles in the Trickster's duology even if I think the white man's burden and imperialism or colonialism concerns are very valid.
That being said, I would love to have another story (even a short story like the ones in the Tortall and Other Lands anthology) set in the desert that focused on the Bazhir. I'd be especially excited if it was from the prospective of a Bazhir girl and looked at what it was like to live in Bazhir society after Jon was made the Voice. It would be amazing to get a Bazhir girl's view of what is changing among the Bazhir and what isn't, and also to just have more of a Bazhir insight into their own society since we only ever read about them from the perspective of those outside the Bazhir culture. I just find the Bazhir fascinating and would like to see more of their magic, spirituality, and tribal structure that is so different from what we see in the rest of Tortall.
I'd also love to spend more time in Sarain. The civil unrest is horrible but really compelling, and I feel like Sarain is pretty much abandoned after Thayet comes to Tortall since we don't hear much about it except that Onua fled from there because of an abusive husband. I'd be interested to see if the country could find more stability and if the lowlanders and K'miri could ever live in relative peace with one another. I also would just love to travel with the K'miri and learn more about their culture which gave us some really strong female characters like Buri, Onua, and Thayet.
Finally I'd also love to go to the Yamani Islands. Everything about their culture seems so sophisticated, beautiful, and graceful. I also think their court politics would be amazing to read about being just the right combination of polite and deadly. If we ever get to see the Yamani Islands, I will be such a happy reader.
How about you? Are there any places you'd like to see more of in the Tortallan universe? If so, which ones and why? Are they places we have been to but could have explored in more depth or places that we haven't been to at all?
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Post by Rosie on Jan 29, 2019 1:09:28 GMT 10
I'd personally like to see Tusaine and the pleasure gardens - is King Ain peaceful, simple, indolent, or manipulated by his brothers? I'd also be up for a bit of Jindhazen, which I believe is based on China, and has a piracy culture.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 29, 2019 5:12:40 GMT 10
I'd personally like to see Tusaine and the pleasure gardens - is King Ain peaceful, simple, indolent, or manipulated by his brothers? I'd also be up for a bit of Jindhazen, which I believe is based on China, and has a piracy culture. Ooh, Tusaine is an interesting place too. The references to the pleasure gardens and to King Ain having multiple wives makes me picture a culture that really loves beauty and perhaps is more sensual or romantic (manifested in an acceptance of polygamy at least among royalty) than Tortall. In my head, I tend to imagine Tusaine as being a bit of a center of high culture and poetry sort of akin to France in the medieval era. I could see Tusaine being the originator of a lot of courtly love songs and poetry like France of the Middle Ages. Most of that is headcanon I created based on the allusion to King Ain preferring to spend time in his pleasure gardens than make war. I don't have to much textual evidence for linking Tusaine with France in my mind as I do Scanra with Scandinavia though. Jindazhen does intrigue me too because China along with Rome is probably my favorite ancient civilization. Medieval Europeans who reached China were in awe of how advanced it was so it would be so cool if we got to see a Jindazhen that was more advanced than the Eastern Lands with inventions like the printing press. There are also so many different time periods and dynasties that could be chosen for inspiration in focusing on ancient China as a basis for Jindazhen. |
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Post by Tamari on Jan 30, 2019 3:31:42 GMT 10
I want to see Sarain too. We never really found out what happened after the disarray during Lioness Rampant. We get to know K'miri people in Tortall -- Onua, Buri, Thayet to an extent -- but we never see them living their lives as a community in Sarain.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 30, 2019 5:38:23 GMT 10
I want to see Sarain too. We never really found out what happened after the disarray during Lioness Rampant. We get to know K'miri people in Tortall -- Onua, Buri, Thayet to an extent -- but we never see them living their lives as a community in Sarain. Yeah, the K'miri we meet are all awesome, but we never get to see how they live as a community. The glimpses we get into their culture with the Horse Lords are cool, but I would love to get more windows into their culture. |
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Post by Lisa on Jan 31, 2019 3:28:45 GMT 10
I'm all about Sarain, personally. Maren & Tusaine as well.
The Yamani Islands don't appeal to me quite as much, since Tammy pretty much replicated Japanese history and culture for them. I'd rather see what she had in mind back in the 80s when she was creating some less-completely analogous societies.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 31, 2019 5:24:48 GMT 10
I'm all about Sarain, personally. Maren & Tusaine as well. The Yamani Islands don't appeal to me quite as much, since Tammy pretty much replicated Japanese history and culture for them. I'd rather see what she had in mind back in the 80s when she was creating some less-completely analogous societies. Sarain seems to be a popular choice! I enjoyed the glimpse we got of Maren in Lioness Rampant. Some of the comments Tammy has made about it in interviews about the bright fashions of the ladies and the spicy cuisine make it sound like a vibrant place. I got the impression of a bit more of an absolutist monarchy possibly based on Raoul's comment in Squire about the king there basically revoking his nobles' land grants and forcing them to petition and pay for them. It definitely seems to be a very fertile, large country with agriculture plantations, so I could see that making them quite wealthy in a quasi-medieval world where land is still probably the most valuable commodity. It does interest me that their slaves seem to be mainly used as agricultural laborers but Winnamine alludes to them having some protections that slaves in the Copper Isles wouldn't. I'd be interested in learning more about slavery in Maren in terms of how those protections developed, what those protections are, and also why the preference was for slavery over just standard medieval peasant/serf since the main role of the medieval peasant/serf was to labor on their lord's land so that seems somewhat redundant. It's also interesting to me that these protections developed when the slaves seem to be principally used for agricultural rather than skilled labor because I would expect those protections to develop more in a society where the slaves performed skilled labor. As to the Yamani Islands, they are definitely an obvious analogue to Japan, but I think I just love it when Eastern and Asian cultures get represented in fantasy. It just feels refreshingly different compared to all the variations of medieval Europe that dominate so much of fantasy, but I could certainly see how borrowing so much from Japan might make the Yamani Islands not seem as exciting to visit as some of the other places that appear to blend more different cultures together or to have more author invention at work. |
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Post by Lisa on Feb 2, 2019 0:37:17 GMT 10
Definitely. Tammy made such a shift in the late 1990s (with the Circleverse and PotS) to intentionally focus on creating non-European worlds, and I think that's utterly fantastic. I think my problem is that I was studying Japanese literature and history when I read PotS, so it was a lot of redundant and I felt that it was a complete replica of our world rather than a unique allusion.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Feb 2, 2019 0:56:57 GMT 10
Yeah, one of my favorite things about Tammy's books is how willing she is to create and explore non-European cultures and countries since that is still relatively rare in the fantasy genre. Maybe she doesn't always capture those cultures or countries perfectly but I do believe that she makes a sincere attempt so I appreciate her efforts to try to diversify her fantasy universes that also make her worlds feel much more real and interesting to me.
I could definitely see how if you were reading a lot of Japanese literature and history at the same time you were reading POTS, though, it would seem redundant and probably not as interesting as the real history and culture from our world.
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Blue
Message Runner
Sailing all the ships
Posts: 25
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Post by Blue on Feb 28, 2019 17:10:02 GMT 10
I like everything that's already been brought up!
A part of me also wants to see the bits of Tortall that we don't cover - I'm really curious about their farms! Tammy goes to such wonderful detail about all the food they're all eating but where do they get it from? What foods grow in Tortall's climate? They have rice, is that a crop imported from the Isles? I want to see the flour mills! I love love flour mills. And in a world with gods and magic? It's so good thinking about food and where it comes from and its links with culture.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Feb 28, 2019 22:31:02 GMT 10
I like everything that's already been brought up! A part of me also wants to see the bits of Tortall that we don't cover - I'm really curious about their farms! Tammy goes to such wonderful detail about all the food they're all eating but where do they get it from? What foods grow in Tortall's climate? They have rice, is that a crop imported from the Isles? I want to see the flour mills! I love love flour mills. And in a world with gods and magic? It's so good thinking about food and where it comes from and its links with culture. You ask some good questions. I admit that I've always pretty much pictured Tortallan farms as being mainly devoted to wheat (for human sustenance) and hay (for animals) with some lords having apple or pear orchards like Olau does. I also imagine peasants being able to grow some vegetables in tiny plots of land allotted to them. However, the Tortallan diet Tammy describes definitely seems more varied across classes than what was really seen in medieval Europe. Nobles like Kel and Alanna have a lot more fruit and vegetables integrated into their diet than most medieval nobles in our world would have (the nobility tended to eat a crazy amount of meat during the Middle Ages). Even commoners like Beka in Port Caynn seem to have access to quite exotic food due to the references to places where people can buy Yamani food. I get that Port Caynn is as its name suggests a port city, but still can you imagine a Japanese restaurant in medieval London affordable to the masses or a Chinese place in medieval Paris again affordable to the masses? I can't so clearly the Tortallan diet is quite different than the medieval European one. I assume that they have to import some of this stuff but that can be expensive and difficult in a world that doesn't seem to have advanced food preservations, so you are right that Tortall probably has to grow some of the more exotic foods that we see in the Tortallan diet. The Tortallan climate is honestly quite hard for me to pin down. In northern Tortall, agriculture seems possible but difficult to the point where furring and logging seem to be more of the economic drivers. Then in the south you have the desert which doesn't scream fertility to me, and you have the hill lands that in both the Kel and Alanna books are described as experiencing famines and droughts, which again doesn't sound like ideal farmland to me. That's why there seem to me to be large places of Tortall that aren't that well suited to agriculture at all. I imagine Tortall as sort of having a "bread basket" region in its center that provides a bulk of the country's food but still I don't know if that region would be capable of producing so much diverse agriculture. Maybe some Tortallans mages can use magic to increase crop cultivation and whatnot. That actually could be a quite profitable field for a mage, ha ha. As to mills, I definitely picture Tortall as having them, and I imagine them being powered mainly by wind and water. It would be fun to see them, though. |
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Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!