Miscellaneous trivia from
Elf Sternberg's
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales. Not much here yet, will be adding more.
- Ken has a dog-like "securor-droid", Voll, (referred to as a "Seeing Eye dog" in Goodbye, Kris, 000/0000), who can function as a communicator with the local AI. This may be a reference to K-9 from the BBC television series Doctor Who.
- "Nyano Handele" (from the Planetfall series) translates to "Rat's Intellect" in Quenya (and presumably Quen). The Neo-Rat captain's (who's name escapes me at the moment) previous ship was named "Rat's Asking".
- "P'nyssa Traken" is named after the character Nyssa of Traken, also from Doctor Who (see above).
- The odd script on the front page is Tengwar, which has several possible pronoucnciations. In the english mode this text is something along the lines of "chen-et r-eye-all zhar-dich". In the Sindarin mode it is more like "ken-et r-eye-all ghar-dik". The later matches as good as is possible in that mode (there is no sh sound available), but a more accurate match would be possible in the english mode by changing a few symbols.
- NEW! Elf has posted some more background information on his page at http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/ including inspiration and some explanation of some of the more obscure references.
- NEW! Two 1992 usetnet postings have been discovered and noded. They can be found at the Journal Entries FAQ and the Journal Entries: A Historical Reference.
- NEW! The earliest journal entry on record in google's new expanded usenet archive is "Journal Entries of Elf Shardik, Entry 136 / 0068" from Oct 1990. Yep, thats right, Elf Shardik. Iiiinteresting. Elf: if you ever read this: How does this relate to the 1992 posting?
- NEW! Based on the new Google archives, The First Journal Entry turns out to be an early version of The Kittenin'.