From: Tavia Chalcraft tavia@btinternet.com

Mistral:

...

Well now, there's an interesting ingame/outgame debate. I mean, _are_they really British (descended) characters just because of the actors'accents? Is Blake Welsh, Jarriere Scottish? If so, then we may really have to account for the differences between the Travii.

As Blake and Avon both worked on the matter transmission project, they

must

both have inhabited the same Dome at one point (I assume Domes are large enough that people would live and work in the same one). Although there's no evidence that this is the same Dome as the one we later see Blake

living

in, it might be a reasonable assumption that they are close? Certainly the landscape we see in TWB looks British, though it's hard to tell in the dark.

And meaningless anyway, since half the galaxy looks like the bog end of Surrey.

We hear a Tawny Owl in TWB. That currently has a distribution ranging from the UK to western Siberia, and from Scandinavia down to NW Africa. 'Course, in a thousand years time they might be anywhere.

My own take on the nationality thing is that I don't see the characters as being in any way 'British'. No more quaint ideas of nation states under the enlightened umbrella of Federation rule. I don't even think they're really speaking English as such, what we hear is translated for our benefit (the same way Xena doesn't talk Greek).

This gets into quite interesting territory. If we don't hear what 'really' got said, then maybe we don't see what 'really' happened, and the aired series is some kind of interface between the 'real' events and our ability to make sense of them, a kind of consensually acknowledged construct to accomodate the limits of our comprehension. (Tolkien did this with LotR, in an appendix giving the real names of the hobbits and other such stuff.)

Does this, then, legitimise 'Americanization' of these 'Brits in space'?

(Oh, and the domes. For the purposes of my subcanon only, they are dome complexes, sprawling networks of domes loosely clustered across the planet.

There's no reason to suppose the other Earth natives came from the same region at all, though the fact that they all speak with similar accents suggests that they might.

Or that there is a standard Federation accent pervading across Earth and perhaps much of the Inner Worlds, which may well be possible with a mobile population with access to the same media. (Yes, I know Avon needed exit visas, but he needed them for non-legitimate travel. Legitimate travel might be commonplace, with people constantly on the move.)

The only place I can recall anyone mentioning on Earth offhand is the Himalayas (Vila). I don't think that they were his homeland...

Vila the Yeti? Yes, it was the only geographical feature on Earth to be named in the series. Britain and America were also mentioned in Killer, but these are political entities.

Neil