"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?"

"Thellim, that's not actually a clever dig because you don't know what you're talking about. People can write whatever they want. Write one yourself and post it on the internet if you feel like it, nobody will stop you. Maybe people will even like it. It happens that I have not read anything that I can, given this tightened set of constraints, suggest to you as a completely nonmisleading demonstration of what Earthlings are like which isn't trying to be clever or funny or sexy or speculative or satirical or anything. Maybe it's a thriving genre I haven't been exposed to because it's written principally in Chinese! Maybe it's trendy this year and I haven't seen any because I mostly like older works! Millions of novels are published every year, and even if I read them all somehow it could be a thing in magazine short stories or some website I've never seen!"

"I'm sorry.  It's understandable if you can't show me any books like that because they contain - realistic submission.  There's some kind of weird irony here, this used to be exactly what I did for a living and even though you have a word 'matchmaker' you apparently don't have somebody who reads lots of books and who you can pay a small fee to answer this question."

"The word is used for a historical profession of setting people up with other people to marry. There might be modern ones still but not in common use around here."

"Ha, I wanted to be a mate matchmaker when I was younger - any matchmaking between people and other people is an inherently centralized profession, since it generates value proportional to the three-halves power of the number of people you know in sufficient detail assuming standard variance in match qualities, so it's inherently centralized, so a few leading practitioners can capture most of the trade's gains instead of it being distributed evenly among competitors, so half the matchmakers dream of becoming a wealthy mate matchmaker.  And the other half dream of matching... huh, you don't have a word that means 'employer or employee but just cooperating without a control asymmetry' which I guess makes sense for Earth.  But of course only one percent can be in the top one percent, and I didn't have much luck proving myself by setting up romances among the customers I knew from matching people with books, even though that's relatively personality-revealing knowledge as matchmaking goes."

"We have dating sites. Which I think appeal to about the same sort of person who'd want a professional matchmaker even if I'm not one of the type myself."

"Dating... sites?  English thinks you mean something Networked?  You would need very advanced computing technology to automatically process the kind of information that a mate matchmaker works with, or so I imagine."

"They might use different information. I could start the account-making process on OK Cupid if you want to see, I don't know much about it myself."

"That's... I am 80% sure I'm misunderstanding something here, and the 20% case where I'm not seems potentially very important if computer science here is that advanced.  Sure, let's take a quick look at OKCupid."

Isabella navigates to OKCupid and tells it she is a Dom seeking a Sub and lives in New York City and starts answering its profile questions.

"Okay, if this is broadly typical of the information collected then I see where I was confused.  Dating sites don't do the same thing as mate matchmakers.  A dating site seems to collect standard question-answer information about you that you're willing to reveal to anybody who reads it, and relies on people going around reading it themselves.  Mate matchmaking efficiently centralizes and professionalizes the work of learning info about people, at some cost in the matchmaker's imperfect proxying of customers' reactions to that info, but it also means there can be more info per person.  Much more importantly, it allows collection of the type of information that people wouldn't want to put on the Network, or reveal to somebody else before they'd gone on a first date or possibly ever."

"...information like what?" she says, discarding her OKC account.

Um.  "Level-three... no, those grades aren't going to translate across worlds.  Promise of secrecy that you'll defend against other people asking but not that you have to be really paranoid about?"

"I'm not asking for information specific to you, or anybody you know, just examples of the category."

It takes her several seconds to come up with something that doesn't give too much away about herself.  "Suppose a woman likes a man to dress up in a particular erotic style in the bedroom.  She may not want that information revealed to the world, and she may also not want it revealed to a man who definitely doesn't like to dress up that particular way."