I am home and bored and "Secrets" is being frustrating, so... meme time!
Via
askerian: Comment with a story I've written, and I will tell you one thing I knew, learned, or wondered about while writing the story that didn't make it onto the page.
Via
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 08:45 am (UTC)While the University attempts to be undogmatic and flexible, and is a great vehicle for cross-cultural fertilization, it's also a powerful agent of stability and a brake on fast social, technological, or political changes. The University controls the education of a significant portion of the world's population. Granted, that education does contain the idea that people should seek knowledge and that change is possible (perhaps even desirable in some cases), but it does tend to instill the belief that people with ideas should develop them within the University. This allows the University to slow and divert unwelcome changes.
Furthermore, because that basic education is very similar worldwide -- allowing for local cultural and linguistic variations -- the University is slowly imposing a monoculture on Firsthome. It's a limited sort of monoculture, restricted to some basic values and technological systems, but it's there, and those values and technologies have been percolating through various cultures and causing interesting ripples and tensions.
Ekanu happens to live during a period when a new technological system -- the steam engine and its related metalworking and mining systems -- is beginning to make its impact felt widely. Here, finally, is a technology that can truly displace a lot of traditional patterns, especially when joined with various mechanical inventions from Yanomy (like water-driven looms) and the factory system pioneered in Kerabada. Naturally this is going to cause a lot of stress.
Saturday, 3/31/07
I don't like the term 'half-house' and 'way-house' is too confusing -- far too easily mistaken for an inn or tavern of sorts -- so I have coined the term 'paginarium' instead. On the rational side, this sounds Latin and scholarly, but the real reason behind the coinage is to let me work around the silliness of saying "Well, if there are chapter-houses, why not page-houses as well? Or even sentence-houses?" while retaining that inspiration in a cockeyed fashion. (The proper plural of paginarium is probably paginaria, but I may use paginariums instead, to avoid the really blatant Latin feel. Estara is not Rome, after all, nor is Vinaeo Venice, though I admit those are significant sources of inspiration!)