Stories you wish were told?

kzt wrote:

Valen123456 wrote:My private thoughts are that it will demonstrate that Leonard really was a genuine idealist who desired to improve the whole human race, and prove just how far the Mesan Alignment has fallen from his goals. (Or maybe even that in the end before he died, he regretted setting what would become the Alignment in motion.... Unlikely i know, but would make for a fascinating plot twist).

I rather suspect he was a completely genuine idealist who was perfectly willing to climb over mountains of bodies to accomplish his utopia. There are at least a dozen people in the last century who collectively managed to kill something like 200 million people failing to achieve their new Soviet Man, Aryan superman, Tutsi-free Rwanda or whatever insane ideal motivated them.

Valen123456 wrote:

hanuman wrote:Also, and this is purely personal, I would love to see even just a passing mention of a gay or lesbian character.

There has been one already in Honor Among Enemies, her name was Elizabeth Showforth. Unfortunately she was a vicious bitch of a character and one of the ships bullies. She also proposed a rather nasty way of killing a popular character (none of this was due to her sexuality - she was just a nasty piece of work). She was later vaporized while locked in the brig when the ship fought a battle-cruiser.

Several characters in Beowulfs BSC have been mentioned to be bi-sexual, which is also quite common on Beuwulf anyway. And Honor's wife Emily has even stated that if she wasn't crippled she would probably find Honor very attractive too.

JeffEngel wrote:I figure he may be that or a genuine idealist willing, enough, to climb over a certain small number of bodies to accomplish his ideals - on the whole, a man with character flaws that should be repellent but with enough virtue to make it uncomfortably mixed.

His successors, by contrast, have elevated those ideals to a sort of sacred platform, denuded of the human care that gave them life, and have hardened themselves against all serious consideration of the costs so that they will always, always, be worth it to accomplish any smallest measure or least chance of those sacred goals.

runsforcelery wrote:One thing I hope will become clear in the course of the next few books is that the Mesans in the onion are what I think of as benign sociopaths. Quite a lot of what they have to say actually makes sense, and their ultimate objectives actually cast them (in their own minds at least) in the role of the Good Guys. As they see it, the entire galaxy took a tragic wrong turn when those idiots and biological neo-Luddites on Beowulf disagreed with their own enlightened ancestors on the degree to which the human genotype should be improved. They argue (and this is demonstrably true, looking at what they've achieved in their own Alpha lines) that the human race's potential could have been enormously improved over the last six or seven centuries if only they'd been permitted to pursue that goal openly. They don't really recognize, and certainly don't accept, Beowulf's logic, and I'm not sure I've managed to make Beowulf's position fully clear for the reader in the books to date, either.

. . .

The bottom line is that the central purpose of the Mesan Alignment ideology is beneficial. Their driving principle is the maximization of the genetic potential of the entire human race and the rectification of that horrible error they believe Beowulf and the rest of humanity made in the wake of the Final War. The problem is twofold: (1) they are willing to do anything at all that will help them to achieve their goal in the belief that the nobility of their purpose sanctifies any means to which they might choose to resort; and (2) they've long since lost track of the fact that what matters is accomplishing their goal rather than proving that they were right and Beowulf was wrong. They — or, rather, their ancestors — began this project when the revulsion against genetic engineering was still at witchhunting levels. In which the equivalent of the village mobs storming Baron Frankenstein's castle were all too likely and they felt that they had to resort to underground, clandestine, and (frankly) highly illegal means. When they were finally able to relocate off of Beowulf to Mesa, they began a gradual process of offering genetically modified (very carefully avoiding the term "improved") workers and colonists which tended to be snapped up by large industrial concerns. This, in turn, began the long association of Manpower with the transstellars of the Solarian League. They were also very careful never to join the Solarian League, which meant that they weren't covered by the League's policies and laws which had grown out of the Final War and the Beowulf Code. And as their very capable medical researchers began rivaling the Beowulf community they'd left behind, they began attracting a client base of their own — one which generally understood that Mesa was going to be at least shaving the edges of what a Beowulf-sanctioned geneticist would do for them. But well before that stage was reached, the Mesan Alignment had already gone underground and organized itself and — even more importantly — its ideology around the need to defeat rather than modify Beowulf's biosciences code.

Jonathan_S wrote:

hanuman wrote:Also, and this is purely personal, I would love to see even just a passing mention of a gay or lesbian character.

Apparently certain characters we've already seen are gay or lesbian, it's in their extended bio information in RFC's private series bible. But he said there hasn't been a particular reason for it to come up. (When you think about it we probably know about less than 10 character's marital status or dating habits)

RFC did say that Mark Sarnow is gay (and happily married).
It would be nice to get a short story, or a chapter or two about how he (and his husband) are adjusting to being out in (Manticoran side of) Selesia and the burden and responsibility of running the fleet out there (and showing a bit of how his husband, as a navy spouse, is helping him adjust to it).

Eagleeye wrote:I'd like to read a story about a run-of-the-mill Solly family on a core world, which discovers for the first time how vulnerable the style of life is, which it took for granted - after Lacöon hit the League.

cthia wrote:Abigail Hearns is the first Grayson naval officer and we'd certainly like to see her rise to Admiral.

But who was the first Havenite and Manticoran woman to really strut their stuff?