Headscratchers / The Death Gate Cycle

• In the duel between Haplo and Samah in Serpent Mage, how does Samah drag Haplo into the water? Any summons would have fallen apart instantly, and even a natural creature would have been immune to control. Were the dragon-snakes somehow allowing Samah to use runes despite the water?
  • Having just reread the scene in question, the spell Samah uses is explicitly a summon of some tentacled, presumably natural and pre-existing sea creature, not direct manipulation of the water. It's possible that he had devised a spell that allowed him to call out to the sea life and compel it to action without using any runes that actually touched the seawater, or that, as you suggested, the dragon-snakes (whose magic seems to be Reality Warper-level) figured out how to override the Anti-Magic effect for Samah's benefit.
• How exactly do people on the world of air survive? Water is shipped up once a month by a single dragonship, and yet this is supposed to be enough for the entire elven and human populations?
  • They don't ship the water on the ship. They launch a massive geyser of water into the air, to rain over the elven lands, if my memory doesn't completely betray me. In the final book they finally get Kicksey-Winsey to work properly, aligning all the floating islands and making the geyser permanent, ensuring continuous, stable source of water for all the lands of Arianus.
  • The geyser is built at the end of the series. Before that point, they make use of a giant pipe shaped like a long arm with an open palm. The ships then come to meet it, and "pay" the gegs by dumping elven trash on them.
    • A major plot point in the Geg storyline is that the treasure is only delivered once a month, and there is no mention of additional dragonships arriving at the same time.
• At the end of the series, the characters speculate that the mensch would eventually manage to travel between the sundered worlds even without Death's Gate, by using space travel, thanks to the rocketry project developed by an elf on Pryan. But how would that work exactly, seeing as Pryan is a hollow-sphere, life-on-the-inside type of planet that has no actual access to outer space? Rockets launched anywhere on Pryan would just reach another part of Pryan - one probably also covered in dense jungles which would preclude access even to that world's "ground" (the planet's inner crust), let alone outer space. Those mensch would have to do some massive drilling to get out.
  • Furthermore at one point in the books it is stated that all the worlds inhabit the same physical space where the original Earth was located but in slightly different universes/realities which is why it's supposed to be impossible for there to be any stars visible on any of them. Even the ones not inside a shell.
  • The way it is imagined gives a feeling of the SpellJammer setting.