[LMB] TSK: Beguilement Re-read -- Questions for Chapter 3

[Thad Coons]

Victoria wrote:

>... Until I can read ahead, you're stuck with generic questions.

>I also encourage you to start asking your own questions, too. They don't
>even have to be in chapter order, either.

That being the case, and seeing that I have a hard time coming up with
interesting questions myself, there was very little excuse for my
irritation,
and none for having expressed it in public.

>Just because a 14 year old could get married didn't automatically mean they
>did, either. I know people in the 20th century who were only allowed to get
>an 8th grade diploma before entering the work force as an adult at the age
>of 13. Those people didn't get married unti their 20's.

Certainly not automatically. 14 was still youngish, but it wasn't considered

pedophilia the way some people think it is now.

>If you go back further in history, to Europe, before the Americas were
>settled, a person could only get married when they had either earned enough
>to support a wife or had sufficient household goods and/or monitary
>resources to stock and manage a house. That meant people waited until their
>mid-20's to get married.

 I don't think it was quite that late in the WGW. I think your conclusions
about
Fawn's parents age at marriage, and about Fletch's age are reasonable, but I

couldn't say how typical they are. Fawn evidently thought claiming to be a
20-year old widow  would be credible, and if she knew of girls younger than
herself at 18 who were getting married, there  might be some cause for her
to object to still being treated as a child.

>I don't consider TSK's world to be analgous to the 19th century. The tech
is
>nowhere near what was available during the industrial revolution.

  The WGW feels to me a bit like late 18th century, early 19th
century America,
before industrialization really took hold.  One noticeable difference is the
apparent
absence of gunpowder, (bows, not muskets or rifles)  and I don't see any
signs of
a Europe as a source of industrial ideas, population, and so forth.
  I didn't notice the use of rock wax (paraffin?) in sealing glass jars and
rock oil
(kerosene?) in lamps the first few times I read through it, but there is
rock oil country
out in eastern Oleana, north of Tripoint (by the map). There are
also (expensive)
iron pans, needles, scisssors, and thimbles, glass, and brick.
  If that malice was looking for a coal seam or iron ore for a forge, the
potential for
some sort of industrialization seems to exist, although It would probably be
a lot
slower and take some very different tums from our own.

Thad