Uncompromising Honor chatter

Since the topic is genetics, I ran across a book recently that I think gives a good mid-level introduction: Innate by Kevin Mitchell. He's a working neuroscientist at Trinity College, Dublin. He has a highly respected blog titled Wiring the Brain.

He writes clearly and doesn't waste page count on stories about the people involved. In other words, it's got a pretty high information density.

There are a few themes that run through the book.

1. The genome is a program for creating and running a body. It is not a design document. The only way of finding out what kind of body it's going to build is to run the program - that is, start with the fertilized egg and watch the body grow.

2. There is a considerable amount of noise in the process. Even identical twins are subtly different - and they may have vastly different probabilities of having, for example, schizophrenia.

The focus of the book is on the brain, not on the rest of the body.

If you're interested in what we currently know about genetics, this belongs on your shelf next to "She Has Her Mother's Laugh."

About Harahap. Anyone else packing the same baggage? . . .

“In his own way, he’s just as Old Testament as a Gryphon Highlander.”

Typecast brain. I just can't seem to shake the reference.

Harahap survived. 1st the subsuming of his homeworld by OFS and friends. Then he signed up with -eventualy- the SL Gendamerie. He gets into the undercover and eventualy detective/intelegence and eventualy black ops/agent provocateur. He then survives the assassination operation that kills his boss and is recruted by the Alignment.
Not quite sure if the Alignment's person who saved him was doing that just because he saw a talented, experienced and highly useful agent that could be recruited on his own merits or because he/someone decided that Harahap was much more useful as an Alignment agent and used an Alignment generated clean-up operation to both get rid of loose ends involving Meyers and the Gendarmerie to open a window Harahap would take to get out of what he though was probably a Transteller/OFS hit job to clean up on any number of criminal operations that could bite the in the neck.
So Harahap finds he both likes the people he is working with when he gets caught on-planet in the Transtellar/local politics events and even if his best way off planet is to help them win he does find that he has more he shares with them than just being stuck there. Getting handed over to Manticore is a lot better than shot out-of-hand.
And then there is the treecat.....and Harahap is now bonded to someone who also has had a lot of pain and is looking, as Harahap has been apparently looking all his life, to find somethingn that will fulfill a need since he was damaged. Harahap is one tough minded individual but very intelegent and analytical. He is also now helped in his focus and need to do some substantial and meaningful long term damage to the Alignment (which has been helping OFS and others in all the horrible things OFS has been doing.

C MPR MISING H N R
First off, my impression of UH, in a word, is as follows . . .

Masterpiece.

Other than that . . .

David Weberrrrrrr! Arrrgh!

I surely have many impressions. Secondly, and I give credit to TFLYTSNBN, for first broaching the subject. Megan Petersen, our little sweetheart. Megan did three things very well. She provided me with a tear-jerking passage. She rid the quadrant of silly sollies, and last but not least, she put my mind at ease that other characters can indeed rise to the occasion, and more than adequately substitute for Honor. . .laying the groundwork quite well in preparing fans for a possible future series without her. Kudos King Weber. It also provided me with a little something extra. I don't know how well a company I'm in with all of you, but I always imagine what Honor would have done with someone else's pickle. What would Honor have done, if she was faced with the same proposition as Megan's Fleet Officer. As Megan herself. It's the WWHD syndrome.

Force him to back down, win the battle psychologically without having to fight. If you can, force a man to surrender without firing a shot. In chess, it's akin to managing a good enough bluff to convince an opponent to lay down his king without completing the game -- even when oftentimes I can see his salvation even when he doesn't. But the point is to be able to get into his head enough that you can make it seem hopeless for him to continue. As expressed to Megan by the Salamander herself. In kind, Honor also wanted to make it a no brainer for Filareta.

As expected, there are many tear-jerking moments. Wrenching tear-jerking moments where I had to restart the engines at a later date. Oh. My. God. I don't understand why there isn't much-much more chatter going on about. Or is everyone trying to come to terms with the appalling losses as the Manties and I are. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I could have read UH except. . . alone without an emotional safety net.

I've taken on too many projects in my personal life as of late, and I haven't been able to put in the proper time in the thread I created about Grayson or the forum in general. Therefore, I've been trying to wait until time permits me to "bring the heat," so to speak, and to dry the tears trudging thru the Hallmark Channel lookalike that is UH -- that's meant to be a compliment to the author, btw, who has included lots and lots of emotion in this writing, at the expense of riling this particular native. Instead, the title could have been,

C MPR MISING H N R. . .because Onor surely went MIA.

At any rate, to start out easily, wouldn't it be nice if, one day, Katherine could not only hear memory songs as hoped and predicted, but sing them too?


INSTEAD OF OPENING UP A NEW CAN-O-WORMS, I THOUGHT I'D USE THIS THREAD. I HOPE NO ONE OBJECTS. I CAN ALWAYS BLAME THE HEAT I BRING ON MRZERO FOR CREATING THE THREAD! PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, AS THE MA TEACHES. LOL

The esteemed casualty list that slid in undetected, powered by a spider-driven graser torpedo. ::headshake::

Sir Thomas Caparelli, Patricia Givens, Lucien Cortez, Anthony Langtry, Tyler Abercrombie, Francine Maurier, Barton Salgado, Gabriel Caddell-Markham, Jukka Longacre, Joshua Pinder-Swun, Judah Yanakov and Michael Mayhew.

Of this list, Thomas Caparelli and Patricia Givens, I will sorely miss. Like, lots. It's as if the author has been charging us compound interest all along for allowing Honor to live.

****** *

The Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech and the more competent Manticoran medical establishment hasn't? I wonder if it will be included in the SLN's intact databanks.

cthia wrote:The Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech and the more competent Manticoran medical establishment hasn't? I wonder if it will be included in the SLN's intact databanks.

I am not sure what you mean when you write "the Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech"; it is more a case of them asking a person if they are a spy and sudden death means the answer was yes. They certainly believe now that the nanotech exists. I hope that the people who drop dead are immediately chilled and examined.

I still have hope for the Mesan operative (Lajos Irvine?) who died in Cauldron of Ghosts and was immediately put into cold storage. Perhaps his body will be examined in the next book.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:The Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech and the more competent Manticoran medical establishment hasn't? I wonder if it will be included in the SLN's intact databanks.

I am not sure what you mean when you write "the Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech"; it is more a case of them asking a person if they are a spy and sudden death means the answer was yes. They certainly believe now that the nanotech exists. I hope that the people who drop dead are immediately chilled and examined.

I still have hope for the Mesan operative (Lajos Irvine?) who died in Cauldron of Ghosts and was immediately put into cold storage. Perhaps his body will be examined in the next book.

I missed it the first time around in the dead letter version myself. I missed several key elements the first time around. I've a busy schedule traveling now and while reading the digi version I caught it. The half-assed geneticist was told what to look for and found it. It was stated that it refreshes itself over the lifetime of the user.

I also missed the reference of "General" Palane in all of the dead letter versions to date. I never realized Thandi was a general. Yea, I know, right?

cthia wrote:
The Solarians found the Alignment's nanotech and the more competent Manticoran medical establishment hasn't? I wonder if it will be included in the SLN's intact databanks.

I think it's a matter of having a fresh corpse (or even one put on ice immediately after death) as anything else. Even Tim Mears' body was held up by forensics after Honor shot him, rather than being frozen or take right to the pm table. Speed is of the essence in capturing enough of the nanotech for analysis.

IIRC some nanotech was found in Grosclaude(S) and I'm sure his body was not recovered and frozen immediately. I know it had a different purpose from the nanotech used in the "natural causes" deaths of the MAlign operatives, but the properties of both ought to be similar.

George J. Smith wrote:IIRC some nanotech was found in Grosclaude(S) and I'm sure his body was not recovered and frozen immediately. I know it had a different purpose from the nanotech used in the "natural causes" deaths of the MAlign operatives, but the properties of both ought to be similar.

If memory serves that is not nanotech but an engineered virus.