FELLOWS OF THE SNAKE — notes and trivia, with spoilers
These notes contain spoilers. Read the
novel first.
- Almost all action happens in
Manhattan Beach, California,
at Mira Costa High School.
- When Barbara, in the brief discussion with Len after crash-the-party, said
that "some authors ignored even the horrors of their own time," she meant
L. Frank Baum — and
"ignore" was the wrong word to use. Probably Nina would know more.
- As a clean break after Takeover, the wizard-assigned names of the polities
differ from those of the dismissed political entities, but are usually close to them,
and taken from human history or culture. For example, Calida,
in Southern California.
Or Erewhon, for a polity
in New Zealand. Huzan is a historic Chuvash word for
Kazan. Other examples:
Suzdal and
Zichia.
- One of the competition teams is named Parsimus, a Finnish word for an item
to be darned — a bold ambition for a team aiming at not only diagnostics but
repair. Similar motivation must have been behind
Eir.
- Mike (in chapter 1) must have chosen the
Jacquard machine
for his essay because of its importance for computing.
- Mentioned in "The Origin" and relevant to Takeover:
the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.
A must-read.
- SAPIEN = Self-Amplifying Post-Intelligent Evolving Network.
MAGI = Meta-Amplified Generated Instance.
- The novel contains exactly one frown and no raised eyebrows
at all. The author hopes this does not disqualify it from the SFF genre.
Whether this becomes the first book in a series depends partly on how it is
received. If you enjoyed it, a
review
on Amazon or elsewhere can help other readers find it.
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