Prescience

[dobrovolets]

"Fantasy. Lunacy."
"All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

The above is from Cloud Atlas, published in 2004. In 2011, weeks before the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, I said almost exactly the same thing in a meeting in New York about ongoing events in the Arab world, thinking I was being terribly witty. It

Comments

[dominika_kretek]

Somewhere in an interview David Mitchell says that Sonmi~451 is smarter than he is.

[dobrovolets]

It must take a certain kind of genius to be able to convincingly write a character who is more intelligent than oneself.
I actually have some strong reservations about the middle chapters, though more for reasons of sociolinguistics than of characterization or plot.

[dominika_kretek]

What are your sociolinguistic reservations?

[dobrovolets]

If I was intuiting the backstory to the formation of Nea So Copros correctly, it was East Asia unified under the hegemony of North Korea gone-consumerist, after a partial nuclear cataclysm. (Stop me here if I'm totally off-base.)
Given that, and also given the total unintelligibility of Sonmi's orison to the inhabitants of "Big-I", I was imagining the lingua franca of Nea So Kopros as either a Korean-derived language (perhaps with significant lexical borrowings from Chinese, Japanese and/or English), or as a Mandarin-derived language which, in its prestige variants, might have had significant elements of Korean phonology and grammar. In either case, even if it had adopted a Romanized orthography, some of the orthographic simplifications that seem so futuristic in English (e.g. xec, xultation) would be absurd, particularly as they appear in the novel (presumably, in translation from the Nea So Copros lingua franca).
My other quibbles are along those lines. (Similarly, the complete absence of Polynesian vocabulary from the Big-I argot,