The "sleeping in a ship" and "being woken" and "land prepared" are an old, old trope, where you think you're reading about planet earth (as in the use of Earth metaphors, myths, so on, which TBwtPB does), and then find out it's actually some distant far-flung planet and these are the descendants who've forgotten where they came from. Add in the birth defects and a few other signs, and you've got the Dr Moreau trope of creating a perfect being (or just mucking around for the hell of it).
Surprisingly, the world wasn't being run by a computer, which was my other expectation, since that's the most common path of this trope. It's going with the "any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" schtick, where the god (or equivalent) turns out to be a ship in orbit or an AI or some similar highly-advanced tech, compared to the medieval or (at most) early renaissance planet-dwellers. The highly advanced Dr Moreau is basically a descendent of the Wizard of Oz trope, where an outsider with advanced tech rules over people thoroughly ignorant of the truth.
Which isn't to say that plenty of good writers couldn't take that and make something new. I just don't think Den is quite at that level of skill yet, so there were footprints all over the thing.
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Date: 7 Apr 2014 10:57 pm (UTC)Surprisingly, the world wasn't being run by a computer, which was my other expectation, since that's the most common path of this trope. It's going with the "any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" schtick, where the god (or equivalent) turns out to be a ship in orbit or an AI or some similar highly-advanced tech, compared to the medieval or (at most) early renaissance planet-dwellers. The highly advanced Dr Moreau is basically a descendent of the Wizard of Oz trope, where an outsider with advanced tech rules over people thoroughly ignorant of the truth.
Which isn't to say that plenty of good writers couldn't take that and make something new. I just don't think Den is quite at that level of skill yet, so there were footprints all over the thing.