[Dragaera] Verra's knowledge, Vlad's trip East

[Scott]

>  I have to disagree that Brokedown Palace is unrelated to the Vladiad.  
>It contains both Verra and Devera, and mentions the distincitve pall over 
>the Elf lands.  How exactly the lands are connected is YTD, of course. But 
>the connection is definitely there.

You can't really count Devera, unless you want to connect Vlad to most
everything that Steve has written. *heh*

Ah, well, "connected" to me means directly connected; that you can trace a
thread of history between the books. The fact that BP is set in the same
world as the Vladiad doesn't automatically make the stories connected.
Really, until _Issola_, there wasn't actually any evidence that _Brokedown
Palace_ was even what you could consider "canon" material in regards to the
Vladiad. BP was published after _Teckla_ if I'm remembering correctly, and
I'd imagine that Steve was more playing with the form of the Hungarian folk
tale and thought it would be "cool" if it was set in the East. The
connections between it and the Vlad stories are mainly oblique ones, like
the connections between Vlad and Paarfi. BP appears, and that's reflected in
Vlad now mentioning his ancestral connections to Fenario and how great
Fenarian brandy is and such. _The Phoenix Guards_ is published and Khaavren
makes an appearance in _Phoenix_ and gets mentioned a couple of times in
other Vlad books.

In other words, the different "cycles" (hard to call a BP a one-book cycle)
stand apart and can be enjoyed without missing anything if you've never read
the others. The Vladiad is the hub to the extent that it draws some
background material from the others. The fact that they're NOT connected
(except through contrivances like the variations on the story of Fenarr and
the setting of Dragaera)

>  It's true, he uses a very different narrative style in BD that gives 
>it a wonderfully ethnic flavor.
   
  
Yes, I don't often describe a book as "charming" but _Brokedown Palace_
"charmed" me. It's a book that can stand alone, if you know nothing about
Dragaera going in, and if you do know about Dragaera then it offers some new
insights such as the view of the Easterners regarding the Empire as
"Faerie", the land of the Elfs, and what becoming a citizen by joining House
Teckla is like. Conversely, the narrative style of BP in comparison to the
"no-nonsense" style of the Vladiad is a reflection of the Empire's view of
the East as a land of weird magics and strange, impossible events. The irony
is that each land views the  other as something weird,exotic, strange and
frightening or at least intriguing. Faerie, the land of Sorcerors, and the
East, the land of Witches.

So, yeah, there's a shared setting and all of the books contribute to the
enrichment of the common setting. From a story standpoint, though, the
Vladiad, the Paarfiad, and BP all stand independent of each other and only
"connect" through their different viewpoints on the common history shared by
all of them.

To my mind, it would be like writing three books - One about an American
general during the cuban missile crisis and his viewpoint on it. One about a
Soviet politician during the same crisis and his workings with Krushev's
administration to handle the same events. One about a Cuban farmer growing
cigar tobacco and the drama of his family's struggle to survive, as the
missile crisis plays on the news as part of the background. Each of those
stories would be something completely different from the others and
unrelated to it, despite the fact that they shared a common background.
Taken to an extreme, saying they were connected would be like saying that
any story set in 1963 would be "connected" to those three stories.