Sequel to Cauldron of Ghosts - sort of spoilers, maybe

Weird Harold wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:Alison immediately comes to mind

Strange, I immediately thought of Victor and Thandi -- you kno since they were the protagonists of the last book and Victor has been the main protagonist in all of the previous Torch series.

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Cachat advising Mesan Gang leaders (excuse me, Neighborhood Benevolence Associations) on forming an Erewhon-style government, overthrowing (re-aligning) the social structure and bringing in the Seccie and Slave population into the Mesan franchise could be a scary concept.

-- Stewart

Weird Harold wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:Alison immediately comes to mind

Strange, I immediately thought of Victor and Thandi -- you know since they were the protagonists of the last book and Victor has been the main protagonist in all of the previous Torch series.

Well, Thandi is on site already, and so is Victor, and we know Victor is going to be part of it. The big issue with Thandi is she's more of a military specialist instead of an intelligence specialist, and she's already well known on Mesa, for better or worse depending on the group.

JohnRoth wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:A

Strange, I immediately thought of Victor and Thandi -- you know since they were the protagonists of the last book and Victor has been the main protagonist in all of the previous Torch series.

Well, Thandi is on site already, and so is Victor, and we know Victor is going to be part of it. The big issue with Thandi is she's more of a military specialist instead of an intelligence specialist, and she's already well known on Mesa, for better or worse depending on the group.

A couple of other issues. Thandi doesn't look like Thandi. So she's likely to return even briefly to Beowulf. She could command the Torch supervisors or lead expeditions to take over their client planets.

ldwechsler wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:
Well, Thandi is on site already, and so is Victor, and we know Victor is going to be part of it. The big issue with Thandi is she's more of a military specialist instead of an intelligence specialist, and she's already well known on Mesa, for better or worse depending on the group.

A couple of other issues. Thandi doesn't look like Thandi. So she's likely to return even briefly to Beowulf. She could command the Torch supervisors or lead expeditions to take over their client planets.

Go back to the Manticore Salon scene at the beginning of Cauldron- it pretty much lays out a Torch led invasion of Mesa, with whole units from Haven, Manticore and Beowulf seconded to Torch, all heavy with Slave or slave decendant troops - but with the Torch Army in command. So Thandi's presence is paramount, even if she is just a figurehead.

Zach and Gail represent a developing difficulty for the Alignment. They have been through the Houdini evacuation and a bunch of trama in getting to where they are now- on the way to Darius. How many other people who were pulled -as essential staff/researchers etc- and being relocated to at least the Darius system are also going to be thinking of what the system they were raised in is showing cracks and flaws? Are they going to be held off Darius? Probably, othewise they could have too much interaction the the "don't know they are slaves" majority of the population of Darius.
How much effect is their introspection and shift in view of what the Alignment represents going to do with what they do once they get to their nice new living and working arrangements? Back to plot development and what will happen over the next 20+ years as all these smart people are living and interacting with the Darius population.
I suppose that it could be very much the same situation there as was on Mesa with the top levels of the Alignment managing things from behind the curtains and seperation of the Alignment being isolated from the general workforce including much of what will- in 20 years- the Alignment Navy and military structure. We have seen that the Alignment can be more than ruthless in dealing with people who fall short of being true believers and that culling the organization is treated somewhat worse than throwing people into some gulag of research for possible dissaffected scientists who are needed for research and development. What will the Alignment do? What criteria will they use to determine when someone is no longer worth the risk to the stability of their Darius System order and safety? Lab accidents? Air car crashes? At what point will people there- the Darius population- start noticing people who die because they say the wrong thing or don't quite behave as right-thinking Alignment or whatever the term that will develop for the general population of Darius?
Only time will tell

From Eric Flint's Facebook page yesterday:

======================================

I turned in my corrections to the page proofs of 1637: THE POLISH MAELSTROM. That's a damn good novel, if I say so myself.

And now. back to the Honorverse novel David Weber and I are writing.

We have a working title for it, by the way: TANGLE OF TALES. That was my suggestion, given the task of figuring out how to make a novel work right that mumble mumble and mumble mumbles. David agreed to the title because he wants to include tum te tum te tum.

Sadly, while Alexander the Great's method of untangling things has its appeal, it just doesn't work right in story telling.

GOOD GUYS WIN (NOT WITHOUT SOME LIMITS, THIS BEING THE UMPTEENTH BOOK IN A SERIES) AND BAD GUYS LOSE (EXCEPT NOT EXACTLY, GIVEN THE QUALIFICATION ABOVE ABOUT SERIES.)

Voila! The End. That'll be $25.00, please, unless you want to wait for the mass market paperback, at which point it will cost you a measly $8.00 Cheap, cheap, cheap!

See what I mean? Just doesn't work.

dvdscar wrote:From Eric Flint's Facebook page yesterday:

======================================

I turned in my corrections to the page proofs of 1637: THE POLISH MAELSTROM. That's a damn good novel, if I say so myself.

And now. back to the Honorverse novel David Weber and I are writing.

We have a working title for it, by the way: TANGLE OF TALES. That was my suggestion, given the task of figuring out how to make a novel work right that mumble mumble and mumble mumbles. David agreed to the title because he wants to include tum te tum te tum.

Sadly, while Alexander the Great's method of untangling things has its appeal, it just doesn't work right in story telling.

GOOD GUYS WIN (NOT WITHOUT SOME LIMITS, THIS BEING THE UMPTEENTH BOOK IN A SERIES) AND BAD GUYS LOSE (EXCEPT NOT EXACTLY, GIVEN THE QUALIFICATION ABOVE ABOUT SERIES.)

Voila! The End. That'll be $25.00, please, unless you want to wait for the mass market paperback, at which point it will cost you a measly $8.00 Cheap, cheap, cheap!

See what I mean? Just doesn't work.

thanks for that

and also good news on the story line front!

I'm on board for Victor and Thandi or Zach and Gail, because I love both and Mr. Flint is an obscenely talented (and funny) writer whose work I never fail to enjoy.

But we all know what my one burning question truly is:

Does Eloise appear in it?

isaac_newton wrote:

dvdscar wrote:From Eric Flint's Facebook page yesterday:

======================================

I turned in my corrections to the page proofs of 1637: THE POLISH MAELSTROM. That's a damn good novel, if I say so myself.

And now. back to the Honorverse novel David Weber and I are writing.

We have a working title for it, by the way: TANGLE OF TALES. That was my suggestion, given the task of figuring out how to make a novel work right that mumble mumble and mumble mumbles. David agreed to the title because he wants to include tum te tum te tum.

Sadly, while Alexander the Great's method of untangling things has its appeal, it just doesn't work right in story telling.

GOOD GUYS WIN (NOT WITHOUT SOME LIMITS, THIS BEING THE UMPTEENTH BOOK IN A SERIES) AND BAD GUYS LOSE (EXCEPT NOT EXACTLY, GIVEN THE QUALIFICATION ABOVE ABOUT SERIES.)

Voila! The End. That'll be $25.00, please, unless you want to wait for the mass market paperback, at which point it will cost you a measly $8.00 Cheap, cheap, cheap!

See what I mean? Just doesn't work.

thanks for that

and also good news on the story line front!

First, I read the eArc of Polish Maelstrom and Eric is correct. It's great.

Second, of course not everything can be tied up. That would mean an end to the series. And RFC is talking about another arc. If everything were tied up we would have no new book to really look forward to.

dvdscar wrote:From Eric Flint's Facebook page today:

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I have now started working on the next Honorverse novel I'm co-authoring with David Weber. We are at the initial stage we always go through when we start a novel -- of which we have now written five together, two in my 1632 universe and three in David's Honorverse.

I think of this stage as the Nursery. This has two connotations. One is benign: this is the stage at which the story idea comes into existence. The other is, ah, grouchier. This is the stage at which the clear-headed and forthright partner in the collaboration -- that's me -- has to wrangle with the obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive fussbudget who is driven by an ultimately futile quest for background perfection to insist that every miserable goddam little plot twist has to be reconcilable in every respect with the ontological essence of the insanely complex nail-down-every-minutia setting he dreamed up over a period of way, way too many years when he could have been doing something practical and useful like washing dishes.

(Clears the throat.) In fairness, I suspect David has harbored similar thoughts when he's worked with me in the 1632 universe.

So. Back to the Nursery, where I currently have to contend with the stubborn one who is insisting that we have to develop a story line wherein two of Our Heroes -- actually, one hero; one heroine -- plot to overthrow the Wicked Establishment even though the evil ones have made sure that all their subjects are implanted with nanotech that causes them to commit suicide whenever they fall afoul of said evil ones or just find themselves in a bad spot where their continued existence might discomfit the evil ones.

Yes, we'll figure it out. Medieval theologians would be aghast at our tortured logic and dumbfounded by our devotion to the oxymoron called "true fiction."

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Actually we "could" have multiple pairs of Heroes & Heroines --

Zach & Gail on Darius
Victor & Thandi on Mesa
Faith & James and Raul & Katherine growing up
Helen & Paulo

with plot segments jumping every other chapter -- imagine the fun of keeping the plot threads straight !!!

-- Stewart