cthia wrote:You see? When even one of our favorite characters die, we complain.
When most of them survive, we still complain.
As readers, we just don't know what the fu——ss we want!
Poor RFC, he must be going "What do they want from me?!"
Last but not least. Emily's dead? That'll teach me about poking my nose around in classified threads.
:::::endless sobs:::::
I accepted a long time ago that there is no way to make everyone happy and that readers are going to focus on points where they are
positive they could have done it better. That's human nature.
I do think that criticizing the Solarian League for not responding faster to the Silver Bullets' "proof" of the Mesan Alignment's existence is . . . ill taken, shall we say? None of the task force flagships survived, the data they had from the handful of ships which had survived were fragmentary and far from conclusive, and Kingsford was in the midst of an effort to fully analyze what information he did have when he was interrupted by Brigadier Gaddis and
proof that the "Other Guys" existed, at which point he had bigger fish to fry than analyzing tactical data from a disastrous defeat. Until he and the
competent intelligence analysts had time to "fumigate" his staff and senior officers, he had no intention of pinning a big target to his chest and saying "oh, shoot me now!" to people who had amply demonstrated their willingness to shoot everyone in sight.
Was he prepared to say "Oh, I see the Manties were right! It must be those nasty Mesans (who the noble Manticorans recently finished nuking in an Eridani Edict violation all their own)!" No, he wasn't. He wouldn't have signed off on that as a given even after he was in a position to turn the honest Assistant Attorney General loose on them. That
someone was manipulating the situation clearly
was a given; he just wasn't
absolutely convinced it was the Mesans any more than Daud & Company were. And he had
no information at all on the bombs the Detweiler boys had planted aboard the Beowulfan orbital habitats, so that was a total nonfactor in his thinking.
He really didn't have a whole bunch of time between the return of the remnants of Capriotti's attack force and the arrival of the Salamander, either, so expecting him to sew everything up before she got there strikes me as more than a little unreasonable. And if
he was still in the process of figuring out what had happened in the battle, it's definitely unreasonable to blame the Mandarins for having figured out even less.
And as for the Detweilers' decision to kill the platforms, I never said (a) that it was a smart thing to do or (b) that Albrecht and Evelina's sons were reacting logically. I
will say that Benjamin and the boys figured that there was already ample evidence out there that a third-party was involved. The Alignment's master plan has always depended on the ability of public opinion to ignore anything that doesn't fit its own preconceptions.
At the same time, the Alignment has always known that they couldn't manipulate star nations of the scale their endgame contemplated without leaving fingerprints. What they counted on was pushing the war they had created to a conclusion before those fingerprints became sufficiently obvious for someone as self-serving as the Mandarins to acknowledge. The Detweilers always figured that post-breakup, the League's surviving core worlds' intelligence services would figure out that the Manties had been telling the truth at least about the existence of
a third-party's involvement. They'd even accepted that those intelligence services would probably agree with Manticore that the manipulation had come out of Mesa. They had, however, anticipated disappearing so utterly down Houdini's rabbit hole
that it wouldn't matter. You can't hunt a wisp of smoke on a windy day, and they planned to leave the galaxy with a
very "windy day" in the aftermath of the mutual destruction of the League and the Star Kingdom of Manticore. "If you can't find us, we
might as well not exist, because you'll go away and start focusing on the things you
can find. Especially if we are operating only through the façade/cutout of the Renaissance Factor."
It's easy for the reader, who's seen this entire situation playing out from the inside of all the participants, to overestimate how easy it is to overcome the sheer inertia of "everybody knows" sufficiently to consider evidence that radically upends
every intelligence and military strategic assumption of something the size of the Solarian League. The fact that al-Fanudahi, Irene Teague, and the other members of their team were prepared to do that is actually far more surprising than that the rest of the League's analysts weren't. For that matter, al-Fanudahi had the advantage that he'd had his eyes opened
years before and he was
still in the dark on several critical aspects because he didn't have the omniscient narrator perspective and he
did have an enormously vast ocean in which to seine for tadpoles.
As far as "cheesy" moments are concerned, I'm fine with it.
At Hypatia, I killed a lot more named characters than I spared, and in my admittedly somewhat prejudiced opinion the survival of the admiral and Captain Peterson's fiancé was adequately explained in that both
Cinqueda and
Phantom, although very badly damaged, survived the initial missile exchange long enough for their life pods to launch. Did I
choose to let them survive? Yes, in one sense. I rolled dice, and they made their saving throws. Literally. Admiral Koutic just barely made it, and I will admit that I padded the percentages slightly in their cases, but aside from points at which I have determined going in that the story
requires that what I classify as "a major character" has to die, I generally determine whether or not they survive by rolling dice. The fact that I don't
know whether or not a given character is going to survive actually makes it more challenging to write the story and I think it reflects the sheer randomness of war's carnage.
As far as Hamish and Jacques are concerned, sue me.
After twenty-five years of writing this series, I have earned the right to give Honor at least a little of a happy ending. I've killed her friends, her subordinates, most of the rest of her family, and — in my humble opinion — adequately emphasized the price she's paid and the horrors war can inflict. So I didn't roll dice for Hamish or Jacques because I'd determined that the story I intended to write required that they survive. And I didn't tell the reader that they had survived because I didn't want the reader to know before Honor did. In my opinion, as the storyteller, readers would have been unable to fully absorb and empathize the way in which she responds, the grief she feels, if they
already knew that Hamish and Jacques had actually survived. I may be wrong about that, and possibly at least some of you would have fully empathized with her even knowing they were actually still alive, but that was a judgment call which I made and by which I stand.
(And I
did signal the possibility that they had. If any of you failed to realize the reason I'd kept Hamish and Jacques isolated — very
widely isolated — from the rest of the Conference at that particular moment, you should all turn in your Perceptive Readers badges. Personally, I thought that should have been a significant tipoff to the reader that Hamish and Jacques were
probably still alive, so I didn't see any point in a separate chapter/scene that would have suggested the same thing more explicitly. Especially since I wanted you bleeding with Honor as she dealt with the pain.)
As for sending a dispatch boat after Honor instead of
Cromarty, that may be a reasonable criticism. The internal logic for using
Cromarty was that a dispatch boat could not have shaved any more time off the transit without running exactly the same risks. Arguably, the dispatch boat would have been much more expendable than
Cromarty, but it couldn't have gotten there
any sooner. When
Cromarty began her run from Beowulf to the Sol System, she was
not under orders to run any risks in the name of speed. That was a decision her captain made after fully internalizing why Hamish was in such a tearing hurry to get there. And Hamish was underway within — literally — an hour or so of being pulled out of the wreckage. It's not like there was a whole huge amount of time for people to consider the best and most efficient way to deal with the situation. Not saying that there wasn't enough time for them to have made different decisions if they'd taken the time to think about it, but they had just a
tad on their plates dealing with millions upon millions of casualties. I think they can be excused for thinking less clearly than readers munching potato chips while they read about it.
Having said all of that, I would've sent
Cromarty anyway, exactly the way I did, because that was the scene
I wanted. Call it cheesy if you will, but I chose to indulge myself in it for a lot of reasons, including what it showed about the characters involved. And if I was going to wrap up a story arc to which I've given a quarter century, that I was by God going to do it in a way that forced me to shift to a keyboard because my voice kept breaking up when I tried to dictate it.
I say again, sue me!
