Can there be a third season after these last two books?

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We continue with more Saiunkoku.

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BTW, according to some Japanese bloggers, “kohaku” can take on the meaning of “ripe/matured plum,” therefore an obvious allusion. Anyway, onto the summary.
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Keep in mind that I CANNOT personally confirm any of this information, as I do not have the book yet. ALL information below in this post (which will be continually updated, until I can get the novel myself and write my own summary) is at your own risk, and the blogger assumes no responsibility for any liability which might occur.
EDIT: I now have the book, and am reading it. So far all of the spoilers seem to be generally correct. I will try to write a summary soon.
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Part 2

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EDIT: Title of the new Saiunkoku book is Reimei ni Kohaku wa Kirameku (Rough translation: In the Dawn Amber Sparkles）.

(supposed) Title in Japanese: 黎明に琥珀はきらめく

The rei part of remei is the same rei which is in Reishin. So we can make some guesses there. (黎=dark, black) The second kanji in kohaku is the haku in Hakumei. So maybe Hakumei will finally do something important in the storyline (hopes)? Pure speculation. Anyway, Seiga is trying to get Kouyuu fired. (No idea how he’s doing this). Shuurei wants to save Kouyuu and speak for him.

Further speculation: So perhaps we shall see the judicial department? So far they’ve been entirely absent from the story.

Just finished A Canticle for Leibowitz, for the Bibliophages comm. Truly a powerful work. Shall have more to say when discussion week comes. I kind of feel like I should read another book, especially because this time there are so few participants.

Am also reading more Kindaichi Shounen Jikenbo (The Case Files of the Young Kindaichi), which is a mystery manga. I’ve read the first ten or so volumes in English, but the translations started to get really slow. Anyhow, it’s fairly simple to read in Japanese, except for the discussions of the mechanics of the case (to be honest, I like mysteries more for the psychology than for the puzzles. So I read for characterization and suspense, and sometimes I kind of uh… (don’t tell anyone) skim over the details, especially if a timetable is involved, or a cipher), where I sometimes have to look up vocab. Kindaichi is especially good if you like super angst and melodrama, because in every crime, it’s an elaborate plot conceived to take REVENGE for an even earlier crime by the now-victims. And so therefore the villains always have a semi-sympathetic sob story, and like most of the time, they commit suicide or die dramatically. Well, except for the recurring villain, who is an unrepentant psychopath. Anyhow, reading Kindaichi, although because of the nature of the plot (Kindaichi goes somewhere, and then there is KILLING, or Kindaichi is called in to investigate some mysterious case, or Kindaichi goes to a fun mystery event and then it suddenly turns into KILLING) is kind of repetitive, is pretty fun.

Cordwainer Smith was a Golden Age sci fi writer with a fascinating biography. Smith’s works are not warm and fuzzy, by any means. They sort of remind me of the modernist inspired futuristic landscapes and interiors of spaceships from fifties; I imagine metallic things, instrument panels, pure, sterile white interiors. The first story, “Scanners Live in Vain,” Smith’s first and perhaps one of his most famous, concerns a guild of scanners, men (I say men because they really are all men. These are uh, stories with the attitude towards women typical of the era, although women can also become rulers in the Instrumentality, and there are many important female characters and protagonists) who have voluntarily become “habermen,” who are threatened by a scientific discovery which may put an end to their monopoly. Smith’s short stories tend to start in media res worldbuilding-wise, in which we come across a scene in which we have no idea what the background of the setting is, the specialized vocabulary, or the political/social context. The reader must construct this later.

The author’s prose tends to be fairly transparent, his made-up words seemingly familiar, yet enigmatic. The stories mainly take place within one universe, over a vast scale in time, with characters rarely repeating, and the story being about an incident of significance in galactic history. In this, they remind me slightly of Iain Banks’s Culture series (which you really should read); vast time scale, about a culture and ethos in total, rather than the saga of an individual (although both Banks and Smith are fairly good at creating interesting characters). Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind rules in an ultra-technocratic, secretive way over a populace largely living in a boring happiness (until the Rediscovery of Mankind, in which disease and danger are introduced because without them people are less human). The sinister side of the Instrumentality is far more pronounced than the Culture’s, however (the attitude towards the Culture is far more positive, I think, within the books), and not only does the Instrumentality act totally without mercy towards their enemies, but treats the underpeople (animals given the shape and minds of humans, a la Island of Dr. Moreau) like trash (forming the theme of one Smith’s best known stories, the Dead Lady of Clown Town, in which a dog-girl named D’Joan is martyred trying to give her message of universal love.) The theme of spiritual ennui within a utopia without scarcity and extended life (made possible by stroon, a substance produced by the planet of Nostralia) also reminds me of some of Michael Moorcock’s novels about a utopia (dystopia?) at the end of time. This makes me want to try some of Smith’s longer works, to see how he develops these themes on a larger and less fragmentary scale.

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a deeply metafictional work. [See first few pages here or the wikipedia entry here] At first, the narrator seems to be addressing “you” personally, as “you” begin to read the titular work, which seems to be some spy novel. However, the novel is less told, rather than the process of reading the novel is. In other words, throughout the this opening (and the many later openings of abortive, unfinished novels throughout the text), the narration is heavily reflective upon itself. (We hear such things as “the sentences suggest” etc) However, unfortunately for the Reader (who is not exactly us, especially given that I am personally female, and the Reader is male, although later there is a chapter where the second Reader, Ludmilla, is addressed), there is a problem with the book and the rest of the pages are blank, so the Reader goes back to the bookstore to find another book, where he is unfortunately interrupted again, and is unable to complete his reading. A strange tale, interrupted by various beginnings of books, ensues, in which Ludmilla (the ideal reader?), whom the Reader falls in love with, her ideologue sister Lotaria, the blocked writer Silas Flannery, who may or may not be collaborating with Ermes Marana, the spurned ex of Ludmilla, who attempts to make the enterprise of fiction reading a sham by orchestrating various conspiracies to create apocryphal, misattributed, or forged novels, weave in and out of the book. In any case, unlike many experimental novels, which are alienating, and much worse, unentertaining, this book succeeds at holding one’s attention through the interrupted narrative(s).

[Yes, this is the first extended work in which the author has used the second person present throughout the work. It works here because there's a clear justification, in addressing a reader, in a conversation between the construct of the Reader, to differentiate it from the narrated world of the books, which are generally narrated fairly conventionally. Too often I see people trying narrative tricks in works that are simply too conventional for such things to be grounded well. ]

Quotes which I liked:

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This is the second story in the third Gaiden.

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From vol 12

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Context: Shuuei comes home and meets Gyokuka.

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Context: Conversation between Shuurei and Ryuuki at the end of book 12.

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From the third story. Just the very beginning.

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Context: nearer to the end of book 12

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