Next week I will post my review of Hope Christine's book "Arcadia". Before doing that, I wanted to give every a look into the world of Arcadia. What it is and how it can to be. Arcadian Culture
Arcadia is a junkyard planet but it collects more than just
broken ships. Before it was a recognized planet, it had been a place of refuge
for lost voyagers. Eventually it began to collect people like it collected
trashed technology. Some were refugees, others were stranded after running out
of money for their journey, and some were simply shunned from their own worlds.
With so many different people there’s a lot of borrowed
pieces of culture that has been meshed together to form the Arcadian way of
life. For example: they love to refurbish or repurpose technology but it is the
highest crime of their court systems to help create or aide in the creation of
cyborgs: part human, part technology. Don’t
improve what man did not make.
The law developed from their belief that a soul cannot find
the World Beyond unless the body is whole. It makes navigating the Field of
Stars, a type of purgatory, difficult because a partial soul would have to wait
for a whole soul to help guide them. This belief was stolen from the Monks on
the planet Maldeen who had a very different lifestyle, rarely traveling into
space.
Paelae is the outsider on Arcadia, she comes from a more
crisp and clean way of traveling space. It’s like taking Captain Picard and
putting him on the Serenity. She has
a hard time adjusting to their way of life but as you read it from her
perspective you begin to pick up on where all those bits and pieces of Arcadian
society came from.
Lemise, who is born on Arcadia and has had little contact
with other races (since most just fire at them for scavenging the graves of the
dead) sees Paelae’s past life on the Imladian ships as very excessive and
wasteful. In this way, as well as others, they tend to clash.
As the story progresses you can really see how Paelae’s and
Lemise’s culture begin to shape who they become from a young age,
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