[Fic] "and wish her joy in the knowledge that her child will live" - Children of the Star
Today is Yuletide reveal day! Here is the story I wrote this year:
and wish her joy in the knowledge that her child will live (1745 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Children of the Star - Sylvia Louise Engdahl
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Noren/Talyra
Characters: Noren (Children of the Star), Beris (Children of the Star), Brek (Children of the Star)
Additional Tags: Childbirth, Medical Trauma, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fictional Religion & Theology, Physical Disability (discussed)
Summary: Talyra and the baby live. This changes nothing and everything.
(Written for
primeideal)
-----
So, first of all this story will make approximately -5% sense if you don't know the canon, since it's a canon-divergence AU of the opening scene of book 3 in a trilogy. And the canon is pretty obscure, so, you know, not a big audience here. *wry* But that is what Yuletide is about!
I am a little annoyed at myself for not being able to run the AU further forward to show how the changes snowball, and also to get Talyra interacting with Lianne -- both because that would have let me hit more of
primeideal's prompt seeds and because it would have been more accessible to the general fannish public -- but that would have required a minimum of 15,000 more words once I got the plot rolling so I left off at the proof-of-concept stage.
Anyway, I have extensive Thoughts and Feelings about Engdahl's trilogy (This Star Shall Abide, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, and The Doors of the Universe) but they really belong in a different post. Suffice it to say that this series was meaningful to me when I was in middle school and high school. (Though not as much as her semi-related duology of Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil, but I am biased toward female protagonists and also Noren is a self-absorbed and frequently self-righteous numbskull, much though I love him. Additionally, I got frustrated by the lack of actual nuclear physics and genetics in the text, because I have always been the kind of person who wants you to show me the science if you're going to write a book focused on the scientific process. Yes, even if I don't actually understand the science myself. I want it to be there so I have the option of trying to work through it.)
Um. Where was I? So
primeideal clearly likes this series for most of the same reasons I do (the themes and stuff) and provided a whole bunch of really interesting story seeds. I was struck immediately by the one about a canon-divergence AU in which Talyra doesn't die in the opening of book 3. Engdahl thinks that was necessary to make the plot work -- actually, look, let me quote her exact words to you, from her own website:
Why did you write Talyra out of the third book? A lot of readers were shocked by her death, especially so soon after she and Noren were married.
Isn't the reason obvious? Since Talyra was not a Scholar and could never be told the secret that made genetic engineering necessary, Noren couldn't possibly have asked her to participate in experimentation, even if it hadn't been a firm policy that only Scholars should take risks. And he certainly wouldn't have had a child by anyone else while married to Talyra.
With the deepest respect, that is bullshit. Engdahl makes the specific point IN THIS SAME BOOK that Norren needs to look beyond the viewpoint restrictions of his own culture in order to save his people, and yet she couldn't look beyond those same restrictions in order to save Talyra. And while a narrative of finding love again after loss is very nice and all, I think a narrative of two people finding common ground in their marriage despite very different perspectives on faith, and a man finding a true friend and intellectual partner in a woman without having to fall in love with her or lose/fall out of love with his wife to do so, and possibly even the wife and intellectual partner becoming friends because FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IS STILL A THING, would be much more important and meaningful and brave.
You know. Just saying.
So I knew right off that I wanted to save Talyra. There did still need to be some push to get Norren interested in genetics, but seriously, no death required. And then as long I was saving Talyra, I figured I might as well save the child too.
Which neatly led into another area where I have some quibbles with Engdahl: namely, the way she completely overlooks the existence of physical disabilities, and also the way her culture probably deals with people who suffer from mental illnesses, given their paranoia about the mutants in the mountains/wilderness. I wasn't able to touch as much on that as I'd have liked -- that is another thing that needed several thousand more words and an actual plot, which I didn't have time to write -- but at least I gestured in that direction.
...
Someday I want to come back and write the novella I couldn't get to this year. It will have an audience of about three people on the planet, but I don't care. I think it's something that needs saying, and I want to say it.
We'll see if I can make good on that. :)
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
and wish her joy in the knowledge that her child will live (1745 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Children of the Star - Sylvia Louise Engdahl
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Noren/Talyra
Characters: Noren (Children of the Star), Beris (Children of the Star), Brek (Children of the Star)
Additional Tags: Childbirth, Medical Trauma, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fictional Religion & Theology, Physical Disability (discussed)
Summary: Talyra and the baby live. This changes nothing and everything.
(Written for
primeideal)
-----
So, first of all this story will make approximately -5% sense if you don't know the canon, since it's a canon-divergence AU of the opening scene of book 3 in a trilogy. And the canon is pretty obscure, so, you know, not a big audience here. *wry* But that is what Yuletide is about!
I am a little annoyed at myself for not being able to run the AU further forward to show how the changes snowball, and also to get Talyra interacting with Lianne -- both because that would have let me hit more of
primeideal's prompt seeds and because it would have been more accessible to the general fannish public -- but that would have required a minimum of 15,000 more words once I got the plot rolling so I left off at the proof-of-concept stage.
Anyway, I have extensive Thoughts and Feelings about Engdahl's trilogy (This Star Shall Abide, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, and The Doors of the Universe) but they really belong in a different post. Suffice it to say that this series was meaningful to me when I was in middle school and high school. (Though not as much as her semi-related duology of Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil, but I am biased toward female protagonists and also Noren is a self-absorbed and frequently self-righteous numbskull, much though I love him. Additionally, I got frustrated by the lack of actual nuclear physics and genetics in the text, because I have always been the kind of person who wants you to show me the science if you're going to write a book focused on the scientific process. Yes, even if I don't actually understand the science myself. I want it to be there so I have the option of trying to work through it.)
Um. Where was I? So
primeideal clearly likes this series for most of the same reasons I do (the themes and stuff) and provided a whole bunch of really interesting story seeds. I was struck immediately by the one about a canon-divergence AU in which Talyra doesn't die in the opening of book 3. Engdahl thinks that was necessary to make the plot work -- actually, look, let me quote her exact words to you, from her own website:
Why did you write Talyra out of the third book? A lot of readers were shocked by her death, especially so soon after she and Noren were married.
Isn't the reason obvious? Since Talyra was not a Scholar and could never be told the secret that made genetic engineering necessary, Noren couldn't possibly have asked her to participate in experimentation, even if it hadn't been a firm policy that only Scholars should take risks. And he certainly wouldn't have had a child by anyone else while married to Talyra.
With the deepest respect, that is bullshit. Engdahl makes the specific point IN THIS SAME BOOK that Norren needs to look beyond the viewpoint restrictions of his own culture in order to save his people, and yet she couldn't look beyond those same restrictions in order to save Talyra. And while a narrative of finding love again after loss is very nice and all, I think a narrative of two people finding common ground in their marriage despite very different perspectives on faith, and a man finding a true friend and intellectual partner in a woman without having to fall in love with her or lose/fall out of love with his wife to do so, and possibly even the wife and intellectual partner becoming friends because FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IS STILL A THING, would be much more important and meaningful and brave.
You know. Just saying.
So I knew right off that I wanted to save Talyra. There did still need to be some push to get Norren interested in genetics, but seriously, no death required. And then as long I was saving Talyra, I figured I might as well save the child too.
Which neatly led into another area where I have some quibbles with Engdahl: namely, the way she completely overlooks the existence of physical disabilities, and also the way her culture probably deals with people who suffer from mental illnesses, given their paranoia about the mutants in the mountains/wilderness. I wasn't able to touch as much on that as I'd have liked -- that is another thing that needed several thousand more words and an actual plot, which I didn't have time to write -- but at least I gestured in that direction.
...
Someday I want to come back and write the novella I couldn't get to this year. It will have an audience of about three people on the planet, but I don't care. I think it's something that needs saying, and I want to say it.
We'll see if I can make good on that. :)
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)