It's been months since the last IC entry. An
unexpected impetus, however, struck, and I'm back. No need to dwell on it; let's just jump back into it.
This chapter offers an obvious knee-jerk reminder--certainly and thankfully ridiculous--of a Spiderman villain, and perhaps less so, one from The Lord of the Rings. Maybe if I hadn't taken a four-month hiatus, I wouldn't have had to reread the exposition at the head of chapter 5 to get what's going on. We examined a little bit over the previous four chapters the subtle shifting--or, at least, the unlabeled shifting--of narrators. I'm not sure who's dream is Octavia, or, for that matter, that of the next two chapters (though I expect the entire chapter, whoever's dream it is, is the same), but clearly it's commentary on the unchecked expansion of the empire.
- Assuming that Octavia is analogous to all of the Kublai's expansive territories, what do you make of the closing sentence?
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| by John Howe; from here |
