Talk:Engineer (rate)

Huragok

It's apparent that the Engineer rate is synonymous with the Huragok and that the plasma jockeys are a group of Miners, regardless of the pre-release Cryptum glossary.

First, the only time "Engineers" are mentioned as a distinct rate is the Council scene near the end of Cryptum:

"Thus were all the rates represented, except for the Engineers, of course." (Cryptum, p. 298)

This particular reference, most obviously the "of course", would come completely out of the blue if it were talking about an actual rate of Forerunners and not the Huragok, which were mentioned earlier (p. 144) as being treated as nonpeople never allowed in public.

The two other references to (stellar) engineers aren't capitalized and given the context (referenced by a Miner explaining Miner practices), they evidently refer to a subgroup of Miners:

"I (...) found myself on a stripped-down personnel transport and research vessel shared by both Miners and Builders. My journey thereafter was swift, quiet, mostly uneventful. I was not treated differently from other passengers, mostly stellar engineers." (Cryptum, p. 220)

"We send in stellar-class engineers equipped with third-class ancillas — plasma jockeys, we call them." (Cryptum, p. 221)

Besides, the Engineers being a class of actual Forerunners never made much sense. Their duties would overlap with the Builders almost completely and thus their lowly status wouldn't have any basis in the Forerunners' technocratic society. And given the Forerunners' widespread AI automation (and the Huragok), having a separate Engineer class would be pointlessly redundant anyway. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 00:25, 4 November 2013 (EST)

I'm not sure. While it's easily possible for an author to have made the simple mistake of calling them their human nickname "Engineers" (like when Mo Ye claimed the Covenant calls them Engineers), Greg Bear made sure to refer to them solely as Huragok when Bornstellar discusses them specifically. He never once refers to them as Engineers during that passage. So it seems he'd be careful enough to avoid that mistake. Tuckerscreator^(stalk) 01:29, 4 November 2013 (EST)

Yeah, but then again the Huragok are named exactly twice in the novel, within a single paragraph, which doesn't leave much room for varied terminology. I again refer to my point about context: if the "Engineers" mentioned here are not synonymous with the Huragok, then Bornstellar's offhand "except for the Engineers, of course" is a borderline absurd remark given that this elusive rate is never mentioned as a distinct thing anywhere else (as explained above, the plasma jockeys are Miner engineers, ones with a small "e", so those bits aren't discussing either Huragok or a hypothetical Engineer rate). If that line was introducing a previously-unmentioned rate, you'd think Bear would've dedicated a couple of sentences to explaining why exactly are they excluded from Council proceedings and why is this obvious enough to warrant the "of course". If used in reference to the Huragok, the mention makes logical sense, because it was established earlier on that they were not allowed in "polite society". I don't even see calling them "Engineers" as a mistake - while Huragok is the name of their species, maybe "Engineer" is just a direct translation of the Forerunner term for their rate - just like the other rate names which are exclusively descriptive, translated terms. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 11:38, 4 November 2013 (EST)