There are crab rangoons and shrimp fried rice and beef with broccoli and sweet-and-sour chicken and eggdrop soup. "I don't know how fast you read, did you get through much of Pride and Prejudice?"

"Embarrassingly not far, still, I stopped to search a few things and fell into graphtraps.  I am... hopefully not to the good parts yet."

"I mean, it's okay if you don't like it, not everyone's an Austen fan, I don't expect you to finish it if it's not - useful or whatever. Graphtraps?"

"Ideas connected to other ideas in a pattern that you can't escape until somebody else gets you out of it or you need to go to the bathroom.  You know the concept even if you don't have a word for it, I've seen Wikipedia."  It somehow had not occurred to Thellim that there would be Austen fans, or that this must be a much-beloved book if you recommend it to a stranger from another dimension trying to understand Earth.

Maybe the characters/characterization gets much much less disturbing in later chapters.

"Oh, you went on a Wiki-walk. Had a tabsplosion." Om nom Chinese. "Anything I should be clearing up?"

"I... feel reluctant to burden you with it.  I've done too much of that already.  I'm mostly hopeful that what I'm reacting to is just a literary convention, on the order of an alien seeing some images from what your people call 'anime' and concluding that Earthlings can't draw and have distorted ideas about physics.  Is there fiction meant to depict - real people rather than stylized ones?"

"...there's, uh, historical fiction with some characters who were or are real? What do you mean stylized?"

"I'd have to look it up to remember the exact phrasing but 'She was a submissive who understood little and knew little and had poor impulse control' is not how any dath ilani would ever describe a character, and anybody who had problems resembling that in real life would not be completely oblivious to the fact, and presumably submissives in reality have inner lives that do not entirely revolve around judging doms for suitability - if this book is not in some sense literary anime I will be very disturbed."

"...wow, the implications for dath ilani fiction are sure something. Uh, there are books that spend more time on characters' inner lives, though usually not very many characters per book, some character is nearly always going to be casually drawn and characters in general are not going to, uh... act... dath ilani... about their reasoning habits and self-assessments."

"How reasoning habits and self-assessments look on Earth instead of home is some of the info I need.  The parts I'm reading don't have enough detail drawn in to see reasoning habits and self-assessments - does it not seem to you like the characters don't think or act the way real people would?  I'm asking from a painter's viewpoint rather than an interpretive viewpoint, one that would look at a stick figure and say 'Those arms are much too thin!' instead of 'Ah, somebody used a straight line to indicate this arm.'"

"The characters don't seem particularly unrealistic to me, I was deliberately avoiding anything with fantasy or sci-fi stuff or weird artistic conventions that might be distracting, but it's possible there are literary behaviors that I'm so used to that they don't stick out to me that you can't interpret at all, which suggests maybe I should be recommending you stuff for kids, which has to be accessible to readers with less experience with our tropes?"

No.  She's not giving up hope that fast.  You cannot build an industrial civilization out of stick figures like these.  "So one of my theories is that this is meant to be something like - humor?  Social commentary?  Satire?  English has words for all of those things so you should know what they are?  But I don't understand the baseline and am seeing everything literally so I don't know which parts are meant to satirize?"

"Austen was sure doing some social commentary. Unfortunately people mostly don't write extremely pedestrian literary fiction in which nothing at all is being said about the contents. ...or if they do it's not something I read and therefore not something I can recommend, and/or it has sex scenes which might send you into conniptions. I guess I could tell you which pages to skip to avoid sex scenes in an otherwise very straightforward romance novel."

"Just the fact that it is social commentary at all is much more hopeful than if it was meant to be an adventure that obeys all the generalizations of reality while being somewhat low-probability inside it, like a novel about a successful world-changing startup, say.  I ask this in a spirit where you're supposed to be very careful not to let my question influence your answer: would you say that this novel is socially commenting on people with overly narrow goals and who don't reflect on themselves enough?"

"Uh, it's commentary on a social class that existed in that place and time and the constraints it placed on the members' lifestyles and ambitions, which I guess you could put that way if you wanted."

"Right, and the people in that social class did not literally actually really talk and think like that.  Austen is exaggerating it so that people can see it more clearly, and I was disturbed by this in much the same way I was initially disturbed by the size of anime eyes relative to anime mouths because no corresponding stylistic convention exists in dath ilan.  Not permitting question influence on answer, does that sound right?"  Right??  Right???

"I... think you are looking for a degree or kind of unreality that is not supposed to be there."

"- I mean, I'm not going to tell you 'ah, actually Jane Austen was a mindreading psion and based all these characters on real people and her main contribution to the book was her charming prose', she was making stuff up, she was making it legible and interesting to her audience, but I think comparing it to Sailor Moon having eyes the size of dinner plates it's relatively mild, but I may be incorrectly estimating how realistic your cartoons are if you are even allowed to have cartoons, or how, uh, I don't even know what adjective I want, I may have an incorrect model of your novels."

She is not giving up that easily.  Not on an entire planet full of people.

Thellim goes back to the computer.  Back to Chapter 1.  "Sentence one.  'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single dominant in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a submissive.'  Remember your concerns about dath ilani monoculture?  If this is actually a universal belief your people would seem like they had to be much, much more unified than ours would be around any social opinion in this class."

"- okay, no, yeah, that's just a blatantly obvious exaggeration to an Earth reader, it means something like 'it is a common stereotype in these environs'. I should be thinking of kids' literature for you, it'll telegraph that sort of thing a touch more clearly."

"I'm an alien.  I guessed that it was an exaggeration but I have no way of knowing how much exaggeration, which means that instead of getting the intended reader experience of a funny distance between the description and a known reality, my reading experience is of a description of a universe even worse than this one and which I desperately would not want to live inside.  Sentence two.  'However little known the feelings or views of such a dominant may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.'  I can't easily describe everything that would have to go wrong inside somebody's mind simultaneously to produce that mental behavior in real life, but I'm guessing that real Earthlings do not - taking things exactly as literally as an alien might take the first paragraph - have an attractive stranger walk into their neighborhood and immediately transport themselves into the alternate mental universe where their daughter has a socially acknowledged entitlement to the stranger which everybody else will respect.  There are tendencies like this in minds and in dath ilan we learn at around age eight or so to start fighting them, and I can guess that in Earth there is no training like that until you are twenty-five and frontal cortex has fully matured, because that is around the ability gap implied by some cognitive testing stuff I happened to look at.  Which means that Austen is humorously exaggerating tendencies that I would expect to be in fact louder in Earth than in dath ilan.  If you take the gap between dath ilani mental life and Earthling mental life and then add Austen's exaggeration on top of that, what you get is a compounded gap that I cannot decode as satire and which just reads as an incredibly, incredibly scary universe to be portaled into, full of entities who are probably not sentient."

"We, uh, don't expressly train that, at least not in general, I guess some disciplines might wind up with a class you'd recognize. Okay, yeah, I don't think fiction is going to work unless I'm sitting with you the whole time. I should have my brother over this weekend just so we can get some division of labor on things like watching movies with you."

"There should exist a category of written fiction containing people with realistic mental lives!  Part of the whole point of written fiction is that it gives you a peek into mental lives which movies can't give you!  What kind of monoculture do you have if nobody is allowed to write fiction like that?"