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writerkitI love The Roads of Heaven. It is one of my favorite trilogies, having been passed to me after I complained about wanting more stories where the solution to the love triangle is polyamory. Not that there's ever a love triangle-- Silence, our main character, winds up in a citizenship plural marriage within the first couple of chapters. (Starship captain who is a citizen of the planet Delos wants his male engineer to become a citizen of Delos. Same-sex marriages on Delos don't confer citizenship, but plural marriages do--if Silence marries both the captain and the engineer the citizenship spreads from the captain to get conferred on both of them. Much of the first book has "this is very quickly ceasing to be a pretense" as background noise.)
Mostly it's science fantasy. The starships run on alchemy, psychic powers, and magic music-- a starship engine is called a harmonium and part of being an engineer is tuning it with a pitchpipe-- and it's explicitly stated that technology interferes with magic and has therefore been banned, although even after reading the whole trilogy I'm not 100% sure that's true and not somebody's war propaganda. After all, the mages forced the abandonment of large-scale technology and the already-existing large-scale technology clearly did not stop them from manifesting enough power to do that.
But early on, Silence visits a technology museum which has one of the last data banks built before the wars that resulted in the abandonment of technology happened. In a society that had advanced enough technology to settle other planets, the grand fancy largest databank on the planet is made up of terminals attached to a mainframe, each of which has a small screen and keyboard (no mice) and a little slot in the wall where information is instantly copied for each user. (Which is to say, it was generally expected that you were going to want to print whatever you found in the data banks.)
Mostly it's science fantasy. The starships run on alchemy, psychic powers, and magic music-- a starship engine is called a harmonium and part of being an engineer is tuning it with a pitchpipe-- and it's explicitly stated that technology interferes with magic and has therefore been banned, although even after reading the whole trilogy I'm not 100% sure that's true and not somebody's war propaganda. After all, the mages forced the abandonment of large-scale technology and the already-existing large-scale technology clearly did not stop them from manifesting enough power to do that.
But early on, Silence visits a technology museum which has one of the last data banks built before the wars that resulted in the abandonment of technology happened. In a society that had advanced enough technology to settle other planets, the grand fancy largest databank on the planet is made up of terminals attached to a mainframe, each of which has a small screen and keyboard (no mice) and a little slot in the wall where information is instantly copied for each user. (Which is to say, it was generally expected that you were going to want to print whatever you found in the data banks.)
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Date: 2021-04-12 07:53 pm (UTC)