SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

I agree with the complaints about the lack of plot advancement in Shadow of Victory. I found it frustrating and disappointing too. However I can see how RFC might have written himself into a corner and felt it was impossible to move the plot further forward in time than he did.
And I can see where he thought that some backstory was necessary for future developments to have an impact. And for the most part he succeeded in this. But he did it at an unnecessarily high cost in causing the lot to drag. I think most of the damage was done in the Damien Harrap parts and the depictions of the worlds that he tried to subvert. These needed to be there to allow the later Manticoran unravelling of his plots to have an impact. The scale of the Mesan Alignment subversion and manipulation had to be shown. But they did not need to be as long or in so much detail. As it was they slowed things down and irritated.
But there is one necessary bit of backstory that needed to be there and was not. And that is the explanation of how the Mesan Alignment prevented defections and exposure for so long.
When RFC revealed how long the conspiracy had been going on a lot of people fount it implausible for it to have hidden itself for so long. He explained that for most of the time it had been much smaller than in the current period. And he explained that it had isolated itself and had turned into an echo chamber. I think people took the approach of wait and see. But he did need to show how it had psychologically isolated itself and what was stopping people from growing out of the ideology as they matured. And some would have. It is an ideology for young romantics out to overturn the world. As people get older they usually develop more of a sense of proportion and are more involved with others. Fanaticism is likely to fade.
Also, has the MA been mucking about with peoples moral drives? Have they been engineering their membership towards fanaticism and psychopathy? There is no indication of this in the text but I could see their genetic interventions having undesirable effects that they might be blind to.

JustCurious wrote:But there is one necessary bit of backstory that needed to be there and was not. And that is the explanation of how the Mesan Alignment prevented defections and exposure before this moment.
When RFC revealed how long the conspiracy had been going on a lot of people fount it implausible to have hidden itself for so long. He explained that for most of the time it had been much smaller than in the current period. And he explained that it had isolated itself and had turned into an echo chamber. I think people took the approach of wait and see. But he did need to show how it had psychologically isolated itself and what was stopping people from growing out of the ideology as they matured. And some would have. It is an ideology for young romantics out to overturn the world. As people get older they usually develop more of a sense of proportion and are more involved with others. Fanaticism is likely to fade.
Also, has the MA been mucking about with peoples moral drives? Have they been engineering their membership towards fanaticism and psychopathy? There is no indication of this in the text but I could see their genetic interventions having undesirable effects that they might be blind to.

I thought that was fairly obvious, but apparently a lot of people didn't.

The first thing is that there is an outer "Mesan Alignment." It's a sort-of secret association of people who believe deeply in the idea of uplifting the entire human race to its maximum potential. Most of them hate Manpower with a passion, because they think it's gone in the exact wrong direction. They're a drop in the proverbial bucket of Mesan society.

It's the recruiting ground for the inner levels of the onion. Candidates are vetted and tested to see if they can keep their mouths shut. I suspect that one of the major disqualifications is being one of the "young romantics out to change the world." That doesn't go with someone who's willing to work in a long-term project that won't see results in their lifetime, or probably the lifetime of any of their descendants that they live to see born.

The outer alignment has a million or so members on Mesa. The MAlign has several tens of thousands of members, that is, about 3 to 5% of the membership of the outer Mesan Alignment. This doesn't seem unreasonable for the proportion of outer Alignment members that can be trusted to keep their mouths shut once they're let into the "secret." Most of them aren't at the very inner core, of course; that's why it's called the onion.

Within the onion, discipline is merciless. There's a lot of nanotech that's used to make sure people keep their mouths shut. We've seen a couple of cases of that already. I suspect that one of the very basic criteria for selection is that the candidate is willing to commit suicide to protect the "secret."

RFC seems to have built in a bias so that extreme intelligence has downsides, like a vicious temper - something that Albrecht Detweiller specifically has to keep in check.

munroburton wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Not Torch, but Kornati.

Or New Tuscany. 50,000 counts of first degree murder.

First degree murder requires intent to kill those specific people. The charge would more likely be aggravated terrorism or murder committed in the course of another crime - that's similar to the charge for killing someone in the course of an armed robbery.

JohnRoth wrote:

munroburton" quote="Fox2! wrote:Not Torch, but Kornati.

Or New Tuscany. 50,000 counts of first degree murder.

First degree murder requires intent to kill those specific people. The charge would more likely be aggravated terrorism or murder committed in the course of another crime - that's similar to the charge for killing someone in the course of an armed robbery.[/quote]

The New Tuscans will use the old prosecutors tactic of legal dog pile. Basically piling on every criminal charge that is remotely viable. Charges like the a fore mentioned 50k counts of murder but charges like use of a WMD, use of a WMD in a terrorist act, destruction of government and private property,

JohnRoth wrote: This doesn't seem unreasonable for the proportion of outer Alignment members that can be trusted to keep their mouths shut once they're let into the "secret." Most of them aren't at the very inner core, of course; that's why it's called the onion.

Within the onion, discipline is merciless. There's a lot of nanotech that's used to make sure people keep their mouths shut. We've seen a couple of cases of that already. I suspect that one of the very basic criteria for selection is that the candidate is willing to commit suicide to protect the "secret."

Yes, but the very ability to keep their their mouths shut will lead to those who develop doubts doing just that until they decide to defect. And I was talking about a type of doubt formation that the MA would be especially vulnerable to. And that is the doubts that come from maturing and developing a better sense of proportion.

RFC seems to have built in a bias so that extreme intelligence has downsides, like a vicious temper - something that Albrecht Detweiller specifically has to keep in check.

Yes, this is one of the implausibilities of the series. It is biologically unlikely. So for that matter is having people who cannot regenerate. If you can bring about regeneration at all then you have to work with such fundamental aspects of development that they would almost certainly be universal.

RFC, are you running out of names? Really, a planet called Tevye with a city called Anatevka. Was it settled by a bunch of Sholem Aleichem devotees who follow the gospel of Tevye the Dairyman?

Seriously, I don't mind some inside baseball as in "the Clyntahn Foundation'" or SCA or dead pre-diaspora composers. But these two references don't seem to have any relevance to the story.

I haven't read the whole book yet since I just have the first half released with the monthly bundle so I'm assuming there aren't any other references later on that explain the use of these names.

Also, I do agree with an earlier poster who expressed the difficulty of parsing the various Polish names. I think his comment was that his mind just blanks and replaces the reference with "unpronounceable name goes here". I do think it makes it hard to follow the story.

Other than that, glad to have another Honorverse (and Safehold) fix soon. Now if you could only figure out how to crank out a Dahak novel or two...

OrlandoNative wrote:I sort of doubt you could stealth something like that. It's like one of our rocket re-entries, it's not exactly hard to miss with the glowing from air friction.

In a previous book, David and Eric pretended that nobody knew that a megaton range KE had been used on Mesa to destroy a tower and it was somehow due to the Secies having a bomb. How the hell everyone in the the entire metro area wasn't supposed to see that it was a KE is probably because everyone on Mesa is as dumb as a rock, which is why the Mesan military never did things like use the plasma cannon shown in one scene to destroy the other tower after it was mentioned that plasma weapons were so horrifically destructive to that sort of construction that attacking troops couldn't use much lighter version of them inside the tower due to the level of structural damage they caused.

JohnRoth wrote:Most of us were assuming that he had a critical part to play in finding Felix and then Darius. By getting him to Darius, RFC closed off one of the five possible ways of finding Felix and Darius that's been discussed.

I'm leaning to the belief that they simply never do. They were sufficiently effective in pulling the hole in after them that they are just GONE.

Just caught up on this thread....

Goodness, people, is it neccessary for us to take ourselves so seriously? This is just a passtime, however much we get into it

The real world is out there with terrorism, war, AIDS, Hillary Cinton and Donald Trump.

As we interact in this world, perhaps such things as seems all too frequently to be missing in the real world, kindness, patience, love, and respect could be given a stronger role. Finlly, gang, it's just a story so everybody take a deep breath and relax.

Cthia... loved your comment.

Don

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n7axw wrote:Just caught up on this thread....

Goodness, people, is it neccessary for us to take ourselves so seriously? This is just a passtime, however much we get into it
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Why do people read fiction? (______________)
Exactly, we do it for entertainment.

Therefore we want out books to be entertaining... Not full of back fill hogwash on corrupt crappy planets with whole hordes of bad guys or average guys who are either trying to game the system or just get along and whom die off in a couple chapters anyways. Who gives a Damn? No one. We want to read about stuff that gives us hope, and yes, entertainment. Reminding us way too much of real life, and guess what? The book is crap. No one wants to read about real life. If we wanted to read about real life we would be reading NON FICTION self help or biographies or..... If we wanted "reality", we would turn on the news, full of people claiming to be "journalists" who are in reality propagandists. When 90% of the anchors/editors in a news channel all vote a certain way and have done so for decades, you can't call it "journalism".

Ultimately it is up to the author to write for his audience, therefore increasing sales and his wallet, or for himself, or tries to balance the combination of the two.