Emberverse/Headscratchers

• I accept the fact that Stirling locked himself into a Nantucket plot from the word go, and so I can let slide things like completely ignoring the Amish in order to keep the place good and isolated. (I'm only starting Scourge of God, too, so they might actually address that one.) But I draw the line at the horror elements: just how likely is it that the only survivors of the Dying Time anywhere east of Wisconsin were barely-verbal children?
  • I'm not sure what you mean by berely-verbal children (I'm in the middle of reading The Sunrise Lands ATM), but the Amish (at least around nantuket) aren't a factor for the simple reason that they died along with everyone else after the waves of starving people from the nearby cities overran their farms.
• So to begin with, folks would attempt to study what the hell happened in the first days. Elfey was born and raise and went to school at Oregon state around the time the event happened. There are dozens of ways to probe the event and figure out what the new laws are with basement technology besides the wonderful high tech. OSU just happens to have a history of science department and makes sure to never throw out a tool that's useful and cost alot to buy back in the day.
  • Continuing on, the plane crash near the start in Corvallis is all wrong, the planes do not fly that root, and even if they did use hydrologic controls to allow a soft crash. Also they are only blocks from the fire house, including a great hand pump water engine that's been there for years.
  • Throwing the cars into the river is damn stupid. Pop em into neutral and roll em. Hard to move them over cement barriers anyways into the water. Besides, too few bridges in Oregon to make it more than an occasional hazard. For example, between Eugene and Corvallis are no bridges (30 miles), then a few in Albany (10 miles), and so on. If the cars died where they were, only a few should of been on bridges at night anyways. It's not like the bridges are packed. Thus, why the heck are the rivers not used? Riverboats and barges used to use the Willamette and still use the Columbia. It's the only way to do a decent amount of grain transfer. Plus this way you get to use the Mennonites
  • Oh yeah the Mennonites. Way to miss the largest group around OSU, Mennonites who basically own all the land on one side of the river between Eugene and Corvallis. They are a higher tech branch, so they have tractors and cars and phones, along with keeping a large amount of horses and all their own food from their land. It would be tough, but they could survive the best of anyone, and be on a great stretch of trading.
  • and why do phosphoric processes stop? Sure I'll buy gunpowder and other stuff, but phosphorus is kinda needed for ATP and animal life. Plenty of stuff to abuse that, or at least probe the boundaries.
  • It is not phosphoric processes that stopped. Rather, as it was explained in The Protector's War, gunpowder does not work the way it used to because when gases are raised to a certain pressure, the molecules "glue" together, for lack of a better term, and acts more like a liquid or solid with respect to compression. As such, pressurized gases would leak or expans slowly if there was a breach or leak in a container, and explosions do not happen.
  • Oh, and yeah, Linn county is officially the least religious in the nation. But the fringe wicca groups have been decried as Californian outsiders coming up here to 'live in the trees' for 20+ years and heavily disliked by long term natives (multiple generation types) from the valleys. Especially since Southern Oregon, which is further from the region of Northern Oregon that would of been warring, with lot less population, but a still heck of a lot of land that grows food should be a much bigger player. Say Roseburg which has 20k in the town, 50k within another 10 miles of the town, has massive amounts of agriculture land for vegetables and grazing.
    • Southern Oregon, specifically the area around Ashland, had been mentioned.

• New laws? There aren't any new laws. The Mind is probably monitoring every chemical reaction on Earth and suppressing individual examples whenever someone tries to light gunpowder, boil water in an enclosed space, et cetera, while leaving the laws of physics in place otherwise. It's just that omnipotent.

• So is it Fantasy or Soft Science Fiction?
  • Fantasy. In even a soft sci-fi universe, the world as we know it would quite literally cease to exist if the laws of physics were raped the way they are in these novels. Life would cease in literally nanoseconds, nuclear fusion in stars would stop, effectively all chemical reactions would come to a grinding screeching halt. The books' universe is only possible with supernatural intervention. Thus, fantasy.
    • Well, given the true nature of The Change, it makes sense that it works the way it does because, well, you know what you're doing.

• What happened to the bit where Mike Hutton would be taking charge of the Bearkillers and then elections would be instituted? I know we don't see a lot of the Bearkillers in these later books, but Signe is definitely looking like a dowager queen from what we do see.
  • That's easy enough to explain: Signe never supported her husband's plan to give the Bearkillers an elected leadership. At his funeral, she rallied the entire Outfit behind supporting his children as his successors.
    • Okay. Yeah. You'd think I'd remember that scene immediately, but apparently not. I'll reread the series before I ask any more questions, I think.