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The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q4: The Scale of the Tale
The novel starts at quite a small scale, zoomed in on particular people in a particular place who are focussed on a particular thing. It stays close to this scale for a time, but like a parabolic curve the scale begins to zoom out, slowly at first, the quite quickly. What did you think of this approach? Was it effective?
Comments
Yes, this worked for me - I wondered with the tiny initial steps just where we were going, but as you say the speed of enlarging the perspective cranked up enormously.
I think the change of scale worked. We started off seeing these people as individuals and later saw how they were so insignificant in the wider scale at the end of the story. The people we see as individuals end up being ignored and invisible when decisions are taken, and it's those individuals that have to bear the costs of those decisions, out of sight of the powerful.
Loved it and thought it was particularly well done, and a great piece of insight into our own society, if only scaled up to 11. The consequences of policies, wars, and fueds on regular people can certainly be pushed into the background in our own world, so why not on a galactic scale like this where the scope is even larger.
I felt rather disturbed that with the right petty tyrant in place this could happen to us (obviously not on the same scale, but in simialr fashion). I don't think I need to add much more than that!
I found the scaling quite interesting because it reminded me of how RPG campaigns in new setting are often run, something that was alluded to elsewhere by one or two of you. I'll speak more to this in the other thread.
But from a literary perspective, it was kind of jarring - in a good way I think - how it went from one to infinity so quickly, then came back down again.