Cinder Spires Setting discussion [TAW Sample Chapter SPOILERS]

[Brightbane]

i think the meat is grown. it is not from a creature at all.
"part of growing the great sides of meat in the vattery was harvesting the leather casing that grew around them as they matured." sounds like an artificial meat source to me. if the Spires were created to get away from the earth because of some contamination or something. eating from the surface creatures was bad as they could be contaminated. so they have no room on the Spires for herd animal so they create an artificial way to create meat.

Yeah, from what I picked up I'm assuming it's a big (like 150lb) piece of flesh that they grow in a nutrient bath and then harvest when it's big enough. It has skin on it, but I'm not sure if there are any bones inside. If there were it would help get the meat to the correct texture because they could stimulate it to flex against a core bone or something

[Second Aristh]

good catch with that quote.  I dont think Ive reached it yet. 

Yeah, based on that I'm starting to lean more towards grown meat.

[Phaeton Seraph]

The setting is interesting.  Jim's story telling is also interesting as he has managed to nearly avoid any form of exposition regarding this world leaving it all up to us to infer it from the narrative.

I think that "steam punk" is also a misnomer. Except for some ships having steam engines, and very few at all in this book having them, there was a distinct lack of steam. Except for the goggles, clothes and social setting, there's not much in common with most earth-based steam punk I've brushed up against.

It's not just meat that's grown in vats, but the crystals too, who knows what else is grown in vats?  As posted above, it seems like it's just big blobs of boneless meat with a leather casing.

The various levels of the spires are called "habbles" (sp?).  It seems that you have huge spires built to allow people to live off the surface of this planet.  I would conjecture that the habbles are the habitat tiers of the spires.


The warrior caste are genetically modified.  Possible the cats were too. (If someone wanted to give cat enhancements to humans, why not give cats human like intelligence too?  For proof of concept, or because they could, or because the mad geneticist in question was a crazy cat-person who wanted their conversations to be more meaningful...)

Probably this planet was colonised.  Genetically modified plants and modifying your live stock to not actually need to graze, or poop or move sounds good for a colony ship, and later on this world where the ground is not very hospitable.  For some reason, they've back slid, maybe they're not quite neo-barbs, but they're a shadow of what the original colonists were...

[Electric MacButters]

I agree with Seraph. Based on the text, my theory is that TAW takes place on a human colony world. One of the most interesting data points is the iron rot. Any oxidizing material exposed to the atmosphere degrades at an incredible rate. This would cause the vast majority of the equipment that arrived on the colony ship to become worthless. The original colonists could use their technology to create the habbles in space and then drop them to the surface. The vattery tech could be reverse engineered and rebuilt to remove all ferrous metals. That's why the builders did everything better, they could use n-th generation tools from the pinnacle of humanity. And since computers contain enough ferrous material to cause significant problems, the subsequent generations lost all the information no one thought to write down before the hard drives failed.

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thats what I think the Enemy was looking for in the index; a method of contacting the original colony ship 'God in Heaven' and either calling down the super tech to conquer the world  or destroying mankind's last defense against the native sapients. But I may have been reading too much David Weber.

[Langy]

The various levels of the spires are called "habbles" (sp?).  It seems that you have huge spires built to allow people to live off the surface of this planet.  I would conjecture that the habbles are the habitat tiers of the spires.

'Habble' seems to obviously be an amalgam of 'Habitat' and 'Level'.

The warrior caste are genetically modified.  Possible the cats were too. (If someone wanted to give cat enhancements to humans, why not give cats human like intelligence too?  For proof of concept, or because they could, or because the mad geneticist in question was a crazy cat-person who wanted their conversations to be more meaningful...)

Mention is made of the cats having thumbs of some sort, too, though they're obviously not as dexterous as human hands.

[Aesir]

Polydactyl cats with opposable "thumbs" on their front paws are not uncommon in the real world. The polydactyal gene is considered dominant, but its expression is variable such that the number of extra toes produced and whether or not they're opposable can vary. There are likely other still to be identified genes that effect its expression.

The hypothesis that this series takes place in a human colony world where technology has regressed, perhaps due to the "iron rot", at least in part, sounds like a good one to me. I must also admit to being curious how "the enemy" factors into this world's history and development.

[Phaeton Seraph]

Polydactyl cats with opposable "thumbs" on their front paws are not uncommon in the real world. The polydactyal gene is considered dominant, but its expression is variable such that the number of extra toes produced and whether or not they're opposable can vary. There are likely other still to be identified genes that effect its expression.

The hypothesis that this series takes place in a human colony world where technology has regressed, perhaps due to the "iron rot", at least in part, sounds like a good one to me. I must also admit to being curious how "the enemy" factors into this world's history and development.

Well, the enemy could be native to the world.

[wyltok]

'Habble' seems to obviously be an amalgam of 'Habitat' and 'Level'.

My thought as well.

[Quantus]

OK, New question on the Spires, specifically their dimensions. 

Spire Albion is "ten thousand feet high, two miles across. There are two-hundred and fifty habbles, of which two-hundred and thirty-six are occupied."  -Ch 20

Ill save you the conversion factors and say that it's 10,000 ft tall by 10,560 ft wide.  The word "spire" was evocative of, you know, pointy things; something tall and narrow and shrinking down to a point.  But Ablion is actually slightly wider than it is tall, making it as squat as any Egyptian pyramid, which in turn makes me wonder if it comes to a point at all, or if it's a more uniform cylinder. Otherwise the differences of available space per habble will be fairly extreme. 

Thoughts on this?

[Mith]

There are older structures on the planet that are more Spire-like, and Albion is one of the newer designs, so the name had already been in use when Spire Albion was built.

[Dina]

Ok, visiting this thread. A few comments
  a. Be careful with spoilers, as the title only mentions the Sample Chapters. So kudos to Electric McB for the spoiler tag
  b. In my mind, "vattery" translated as "factory" or "plant"
  c. I understood that meat was artificially produced but I don't care how.
  d

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. I think they are in our world, in the future

.
e. If habble means habitat level (which sounds logical) I am upset by the extra b.

[knnn]

OK, New question on the Spires, specifically their dimensions. 

Spire Albion is "ten thousand feet high, two miles across. There are two-hundred and fifty habbles, of which two-hundred and thirty-six are occupied."  -Ch 20

Ill save you the conversion factors and say that it's 10,000 ft tall by 10,560 ft wide.  The word "spire" was evocative of, you know, pointy things; something tall and narrow and shrinking down to a point.  But Ablion is actually slightly wider than it is tall, making it as squat as any Egyptian pyramid, which in turn makes me wonder if it comes to a point at all, or if it's a more uniform cylinder. Otherwise the differences of available space per habble will be fairly extreme. 

Thoughts on this?

Maybe all the spires were initially one giant space station that was cut into pieces and dropped on the planet?   Possibly also not all spires look alike and the name "spire" comes from the older ones? 

[knnn]

re: "Steampunk", remember that the term "punk" comes originally from Cyberpunk (Neuromancer), where "punk" referred to the dystopian, mercenary world in the setting.  This novel doesn't seem to have the steam or the punk in it.  Frankly it seems to be quite similar in content to some of Sanderson's stuff (e.g. Alloy of Law et al).  Those are categorized as "high fantasy".  I suggest that this falls nicely into that category.

[Mith]

If habble means habitat level (which sounds logical) I am upset by the extra b.

I think that is more or less English being a mess.  I know the word didn't exist before this book (that I know of), but I think the logic of the word is more akin to "rabbit" having two "b"s even though only one would do.

[Dina]

Probably, My Spanish speaker is slightly annoyed not only by English being the TAW world language (except for a Latin reference) but for the use of not-metric units.