Removed:
- Space Jews: Just as the avout are very similar to Christian monks in appearace and habits, the Ita seem to parallel medieval Catholic attitudes towards Jews. They do tasks that the Avout are sworn not to, and thus must be segregated from the Avout, just as Jews were forced to live in ghettos and often restricted to trades that Christians were forbidden to do. It's possibly lampshaded by their skullcap hats.
Space Jews is about non-human characters. This is some other trope.
- The Ishmael: Erasmas. The very first thing he does is act as an amanuensis (read: scribe) for Orolo. In the end, he is the amanuensis (read: observer enabling proper quantum physical/parallel universe control) for, basically, the world.
The Ismael has been renamed to First-Person Peripheral Narrator, which is defined as a narrator that is not the protaganist, but who instead tells the story of the protagaist. The Other Wiki says that Erasmas is the protaganist. Is this the case?
Two tropes apply here that I don't know the name for.
• Out of all the people on the face of the earth, Alia (a teenager) is THE BEST administrator, and is pulled out to run logistics for the big-smart-guy-meeting-to-save-the-world. And out of all the people on the face of the earth, some random dudes she grew up with are THE BEST qualified to go up and prevent the world from ending (as opposed to, say, another set of ringing vale types). To a certain degree this kind of coincidence is justified by the sci-fi conceit, true. But I feel like there's a trope at work here... aren't there other stories (the Tripods Trilogy, for instance) where a bunch of boyhood friends join some huge global movement, and all wind up playing really improbably crucial roles that really should have been way beyond their pay grade?
• Similar but distinct from the Space Whale Aesop, a logical fallacy I'd like to call Argumentam Ad Space Whale. The author wants to settle some nagging but unsettled debate, so he invents in-world empirical evidence to prove one side right beyond a shadow of a doubt. Here it's the debate between the Procians, who think that all knowledge is just an elaborate set of symbols (for which read real world postmodernists) and the Hallikarnians, who think that things like mathematical proofs "really exist" somewhere outside of our own minds. Stephenson, who quite clearly sides with the Hallikarnians, proceeds to demonstrate that mathematical proofs MUST "really exist," because they allow travel between dimensions. Other examples would include Avatar (exploitative mining is wrong because the planet is a giant sentient organism) and the Left Behind books (God does exist because the rapture just freaking happened).
When Erasmus first meets Cord in her shop, he compares the light of the electric discharge milling machine to the color of a blue dwarf, a type of star that won't show up in our universe for another trillion years. The definitively pegs the setting not Earth. Is this a trope? If so what?