S.M. Stirling's new Emberverse novel "The Golden Princess" comes out 09/02/14

[Justin_Bailey]

@Justin_Bailey

Stirling does consider them separate series, but “The Quest” and “The War” are part of the same series that he calls “The Change.” And instead of seven books, the original plan (as outlined in a note either before or after The Sunrise Lands) was that the entire Quest and War would take up four books. How it bloated to seven I have no idea.

I just checked his website and it looks like Stirling has re-jiggered the series designations just a bit. He does consider the first nine books in the Emberverse series as three separate trilogies now and considers The Given Sacrifice a standalone book that is meant as a bridge between the third trilogy and the fourth.

Which is a terrible idea as The Given Sacrifice (which I just finished last night) is a mess of a book. He literally spends a dozen pages on two relatively minor characters in the third trilogy (who had been downgraded from being major characters in the first two trilogies) chatting about field reports and eating pastries. Meanwhile…

…the death of Rudi was covered in a single paragraph.

[Lok]

@Sean_Factotum

The entire Los Angeles metropolitan area was described as a charnel house within the books, post-Change. The area is naturally a desert, and without all of the irrigation that has been developed and built there in the 20th Century it would revert to back to the old desert. CI cn’t remember the specific book within the series, but it SMS definitely talks about a ‘dead zone’ around major cities that is proportional to population density pre-Change - meaning the more populous the city, the larger area around that city that can’t support life. That would leave Los Angeles as one of the two biggest dead zones in the post-Change United States.

That was kind of my point. A weird castle could easily be the Disney castle, since you would be crossing the mother of all valley of death to get to it.

[Little_Nemo]

Another possibility is the “castle” is some fanciful building in Las Vegas. You cross Death Valley to get to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. And Las Vegas is the kind of place where some improbable work of art like the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi would end up. It’s probably in Steve Wynn’s bedroom.

[BrainGlutton]

BTW, it is mentioned in passing that the new capital being built for Montival, Dun na Siochana, is Salem, the long-dead capital of Oregon. I had done some thinking about where Montival’s capital should be, and Salem seemed perfect to me: No state/culture has used it since the Change for anything but salvage; the street layout is pre-automotive and therefore good for a post-Change city; it’s a smaller city than Portland, therefore at least as easily retrofittable for post-Change conditions; it is centrally located on the Willamette River, equally accessible from Larsdalen, Portland, Mt. Angel, Dun Juniper, Stardell Hall, Corvallis, all the capitals of the kingdom’s core states – perfect location for an internal trade entrepot as well as a place for all to meet for political business; and it is full of government buildings that can be retrofitted and repurposed as government buildings. I look forward to seeing what they’ll do with it.

[BrainGlutton]

@Little_Nemo

Another possibility is the “castle” is some fanciful building in Las Vegas. You cross Death Valley to get to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. And Las Vegas is the kind of place where some improbable work of art like the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi would end up. It’s probably in Steve Wynn’s bedroom.

I could definitely see that.