Dazai Osamu (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thesettingsun) wrote2016-11-11 12:18 pm
thesettingsun) wrote2016-11-11 12:18 pm
NOVEL DESCRIPTION
Shuji has titled the thing 'A Relative Weight', and it features a beautiful cover drawn by Chiyo (admiringly) with some alien landscape.
The opening passage:
It took about five years for a standard Earth ship to reach the next closest star, so equipping ships with hibernation pods designed to wake the crew on arrival or in case of an emergency was standard procedure. The destruction of Earth was not designated as an emergency, so I only found out about it two years after it actually happened.
The Layt - we used to call them Proximans, just as we used to call their planet Proxima Centauri b, but they never called themselves that and nowadays it’s considered rude - were very gracious about catching me up to speed when I woke up unable to contact my superiors. They explained that the pirates that had been troubling the Layt for some time had moved on to our solar system. Their ships are faster than light: in the time it took a single-person vessel to travel from Earth to Layte, Earth had been stripped clean of its resources and made uninhabitable for human beings. Even our outposts on Mars and Luna hadn’t been spared.
Aside from my planet having been destroyed, my job went pretty smoothly. The personal weapons we had sent the Layt were transferred and I explained how to use them with no communication problems.
That’s why it was me on this mission, of course - I’ve studied how to speak Laytean since college, and I’ve worked as an English-Laytean interpreter before. I could pilot a simple craft if something went wrong out in space. Those were the two reasons I was still alive: I could speak Laytean and I could fly a ship.
“We have sent messages to the Pluto satellite, but have received no response,” the captain - Fula was their name - told me after the weapon transfer was over. “Do you have the means to contact other satellites that may have human survivors?”
I nodded, before remembering that the gesture didn’t translate well for a species without much of a neck. “I have numbers for most of the satellites between here and Earth, let me get you the numbers.”
ISS: nothing, but I expected that. Jupiter observation satellite: nothing. Uranus observation satellite: a screeching noise that had me covering my ears, but no human response. Neptune resource gathering station: nothing. Nothing from the satellites around Saturn, Venus, or Mercury. Even calling the Europa terraforming station got no response.
Fula looked grave, to the best that I understood Laytean facial expressions. “I must ask my superiors first, but I expect we will send out search ships when we are able. For now: Antony West, will you return to Layte with us?”
‘Anthony’ has always been really difficult for Layt to say. I thought about that and not what it meant when I said, “I’ll come with you.”
As he's told many people, the book is a space drama centering around the theme of moral relativism. Anthony has difficulty adjusting to Layte, not just because their bodies are differently-shaped but because their values are different.
-Almost all drugs are legal and regulated by the government, which Anthony immediately protests is wrong and then has difficulty explaining why when he'd gladly purchased alcohol before.
-Reproduction is much like jury duty: you're called to do it as a service to your culture and it happens completely independently of romantic relationships. There are three sexes, male, female, and one without sexual characteristics that Anthony notes is really hard to translate and eventually settles on 'eunuch' for. Sex seems to have no bearing on anything apart from reproduction - Anthony balks at a Layt friend helping him find something he can wear suggesting a dress, and ends up wearing it because there's basically nothing else that will fit his body shape.
-The most respected position is historian, and fiction is basically contraband, being considered 'lies'.
-The title of the book comes from a scene where Anthony weighs himself for the first time and is convinced his conversions are wrong, because there's no way he lost that much weight, before he remembers that Layte has different gravity than Earth. He hasn't drastically changed, but his weight is still different here.
-At some point the Krithikkans - the Layt have a real problem with 'th' and 'k' which is why they pretty much always call them pirates instead of their species name - attack a ship that Anthony is on and grab him. It turns out that they can't speak with the Layt, and the Layt can't speak with them, but they do have one Krithikkan who speaks broken English, so they kidnap Anthony in hopes that he can speak to the Layt for them.
-The Krithikkans have extremely short lives - a handful of months at most - and their culture espouses living those lives to the fullest, which involves them having huge feasts and consuming vast amounts of resources. To maintain this lifestyle, they take resources from other planets. They don't see anything wrong with this, since it's what they need to do to continue living full and happy lives, and cutting back goes against their way of being.
-The Layt don't see it that way. The climax of the novel involves Anthony standing between two armed forces who both think they're completely in the right and trying to figure out how to negotiate something that a) will not get him shot and b) will satisfy both parties.
-Anthony remembers something he heard while talking to Layt historians about abandoned planets and asks if there are any planets that have resources that aren't being used, to which the Layt are like 'of course there are anyone who knows history knows that'. Surprise, the Krithikkans are really bad at history and have no idea where these planets might be? So they work something out where the Krithikkans can pillage planets who haven't had people on them for millennia and the Layt can not get pillaged.
-The book closes on a Layt scouting ship bringing back a couple of human survivors from the Uranus satellite, who immediately express how weird some Layt things are that Anthony thought were weird at the start of the book and now has totally adjusted to.
admiringly) with some alien landscape.The opening passage:
It took about five years for a standard Earth ship to reach the next closest star, so equipping ships with hibernation pods designed to wake the crew on arrival or in case of an emergency was standard procedure. The destruction of Earth was not designated as an emergency, so I only found out about it two years after it actually happened.
The Layt - we used to call them Proximans, just as we used to call their planet Proxima Centauri b, but they never called themselves that and nowadays it’s considered rude - were very gracious about catching me up to speed when I woke up unable to contact my superiors. They explained that the pirates that had been troubling the Layt for some time had moved on to our solar system. Their ships are faster than light: in the time it took a single-person vessel to travel from Earth to Layte, Earth had been stripped clean of its resources and made uninhabitable for human beings. Even our outposts on Mars and Luna hadn’t been spared.
Aside from my planet having been destroyed, my job went pretty smoothly. The personal weapons we had sent the Layt were transferred and I explained how to use them with no communication problems.
That’s why it was me on this mission, of course - I’ve studied how to speak Laytean since college, and I’ve worked as an English-Laytean interpreter before. I could pilot a simple craft if something went wrong out in space. Those were the two reasons I was still alive: I could speak Laytean and I could fly a ship.
“We have sent messages to the Pluto satellite, but have received no response,” the captain - Fula was their name - told me after the weapon transfer was over. “Do you have the means to contact other satellites that may have human survivors?”
I nodded, before remembering that the gesture didn’t translate well for a species without much of a neck. “I have numbers for most of the satellites between here and Earth, let me get you the numbers.”
ISS: nothing, but I expected that. Jupiter observation satellite: nothing. Uranus observation satellite: a screeching noise that had me covering my ears, but no human response. Neptune resource gathering station: nothing. Nothing from the satellites around Saturn, Venus, or Mercury. Even calling the Europa terraforming station got no response.
Fula looked grave, to the best that I understood Laytean facial expressions. “I must ask my superiors first, but I expect we will send out search ships when we are able. For now: Antony West, will you return to Layte with us?”
‘Anthony’ has always been really difficult for Layt to say. I thought about that and not what it meant when I said, “I’ll come with you.”
As he's told many people, the book is a space drama centering around the theme of moral relativism. Anthony has difficulty adjusting to Layte, not just because their bodies are differently-shaped but because their values are different.
-Almost all drugs are legal and regulated by the government, which Anthony immediately protests is wrong and then has difficulty explaining why when he'd gladly purchased alcohol before.
-Reproduction is much like jury duty: you're called to do it as a service to your culture and it happens completely independently of romantic relationships. There are three sexes, male, female, and one without sexual characteristics that Anthony notes is really hard to translate and eventually settles on 'eunuch' for. Sex seems to have no bearing on anything apart from reproduction - Anthony balks at a Layt friend helping him find something he can wear suggesting a dress, and ends up wearing it because there's basically nothing else that will fit his body shape.
-The most respected position is historian, and fiction is basically contraband, being considered 'lies'.
-The title of the book comes from a scene where Anthony weighs himself for the first time and is convinced his conversions are wrong, because there's no way he lost that much weight, before he remembers that Layte has different gravity than Earth. He hasn't drastically changed, but his weight is still different here.
-At some point the Krithikkans - the Layt have a real problem with 'th' and 'k' which is why they pretty much always call them pirates instead of their species name - attack a ship that Anthony is on and grab him. It turns out that they can't speak with the Layt, and the Layt can't speak with them, but they do have one Krithikkan who speaks broken English, so they kidnap Anthony in hopes that he can speak to the Layt for them.
-The Krithikkans have extremely short lives - a handful of months at most - and their culture espouses living those lives to the fullest, which involves them having huge feasts and consuming vast amounts of resources. To maintain this lifestyle, they take resources from other planets. They don't see anything wrong with this, since it's what they need to do to continue living full and happy lives, and cutting back goes against their way of being.
-The Layt don't see it that way. The climax of the novel involves Anthony standing between two armed forces who both think they're completely in the right and trying to figure out how to negotiate something that a) will not get him shot and b) will satisfy both parties.
-Anthony remembers something he heard while talking to Layt historians about abandoned planets and asks if there are any planets that have resources that aren't being used, to which the Layt are like 'of course there are anyone who knows history knows that'. Surprise, the Krithikkans are really bad at history and have no idea where these planets might be? So they work something out where the Krithikkans can pillage planets who haven't had people on them for millennia and the Layt can not get pillaged.
-The book closes on a Layt scouting ship bringing back a couple of human survivors from the Uranus satellite, who immediately express how weird some Layt things are that Anthony thought were weird at the start of the book and now has totally adjusted to.