Robin Hood

[Labster]

It had been her favorite book, once. Howard Pyle. The Adventures of Robin Hood. The definitive Japanese translation, first published in 2018.

You know that thing where you pick a distant date in the future, and then you end up living through that time?  I think most of the characters of BGC would be in school by now.  Incidentally, no Robin Hood translation released this year, afaict.

I'm doing a reread now, again, because I was flying to a conference, only had a phone in my pocket, and  I wanted something to read on the plane.  It's odd how you notice different things each time you read.

It strikes me as unlikely that a selling a diamond at a pawn shop would net so much money in a place with nanofacs -- then again, DeBeers sounds like a corporate culture that would get along really great in a merger with GENOM.

"Nice nail polish, Lisa!"

Yeah, it's permanent. Probably not inheritable, though. Probably.

So why would Lisa get blue nails?  Oh, right.  Seemed pretty random at the time, but now it seems like foreshadowing.

"There what?" Nene crinkled her nose in confusion as she read the line under Priss's fingertip. "'Beverly's Dandelion Wine', the Beatles, 1974? What about it?" ...
"The Beatles broke up in 1971, right after the Revolver Tour. They didn't get back together again until just before Sir Paul McCartney's death in 1983." The singer stabbed her finger at the screen again. "And they never recorded any song by that title, least of all in 1974!"

The JSDF is disbanded, and the Nationalists re-establish the Japanese military

Arrrgh, are these facts supposed to be related?  I guess we found out who really split up the band after all!

Moreover, I think what I said recently about reporters in the DW S step seems to apply here too.  Maybe they're somehow author surrogates -- a way of asking questions to explore the setting.  Bob seems to have one in each setting: Lisa, Yoshi, and Hermione (and to some extent Luna).  Each a person who keeps asking questions at the plot until things start making sense.  I think it contributes a lot to the realism of the stories, and it shows how much time Bob has thought about how it would be to live in each world.

Like, Hermione lends a lot of strength to the canon of Harry Potter, because she was always there to ask how something really worked, which forced JKR to build a deep consistent world.  Although, that seemed to be her thing anyway.  Which is what I mean by an author surrogate.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, the blue nails was actually a twofer -- foreshadowing for "Sailor Loon" and her blue-themed seifuku, and a direct reference to Sailor Mercury, who shares her original seiyuu with Lisa.

DeBeers sounds like a corporate culture that would get along really great in a merger with GENOM.

Exactly. DeBeers (still) exists in the DW2!BGC world, and still maintains its stranglehold on the diamond supply, as mentioned in the last chapter. As for nanofacs, well, I didn't think this out way back then, but I suspect that DeBeers did something distastefully Microsoft-like and under threat of legal action forced the manufacturers of nanofacs to put in some kind of mechanism (possibly something akin to the microdot codes added to documents by printers) to keep their owners from making salable jewelry-grade diamonds. (And of course Sylia has circumvented those restrictions on her facs.)

As for reporters, well, it's not really intentional, but yeah, I have my questions that I want answered, and the best way to do that is to have someone ask those questions in-universe. And it always bothers me when supposedly smart canon characters don't ask the questions I think are obvious.

[ckosacranoid]

that cool to bring something up about 2018 in a story when we are in that year and the story was written in the late 90's i think? I forgot when I seen the dates for when step 2 came out?

[Bob Schroeck]

Prologue/Chapter 1 came out in 1998. I finished it in 2004.