SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

I think among most of us who have faithfully followed the series all these years, it was a sense of "Wait, you left us with a cliffhanger of an attack on Beowulf (ART), a cliffhanger of Mike Henke leaving for Mesa and several planets on the edge of revolt-would they get SEM help or not? (SoF), and a cliffhanger with Thandi and Victor seemingly saved at the last minute with Wallers replacing the calvary, and you didn't progress more than one day later from there?

I'll grant that setting up Lester to team with Mike was nice and (eventually) we got the revolts settled satisfactory, but there was a feeling (which seems to run in this thread) that it should have gone farther, set more of the scene for what is to come, whet our appetites a bit more.

Still, RFC seems to believe he knows what he is doing. I'm still of the opinion that he's set a goal for the last book that he could have set up better. But I'll guess we'll have to wait a year or so to find out.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

And one major thread does come to complete total closure. With a BOOM of several megatons.

Readers will find a few minor typos. None are significant. One might have been hard for a noon-mathematical editor to spot. (Alternatively, claims of the Invincible Solarian League Navy that the neobarbs produce SDs by buying old frigates, and painting "I ARE SUPERDREADNOT" on the side, are validated, in that a fleet of 62 of them is identified by the Mesan Space Navy as having a mass of a half-million tons rather than the expected half-billion tons. )

First - the general feeling:
It is a good book all by itself. But (as many others still have pointed out) I, too, was a little bit ... on the frowning side concerning the end point of the story. Somehow I'd wished, that we had seen a little more development down the road; that the story would cover at least, say, the first 4-6 months after Mike Henke visited Mesa.

2nd: The book: I know, it is an e-ARC, which means, it is a text with many typos in it. For instance, the Maya Governor is more than one time named Orville (instead of Oravil) Barregos.
But one thing really did upset me.

SOV, e-ARC, Chapter 17 wrote:something called Eroica by some ancient composer named Bayhoven

(Bolded text marked by me)
I hope that is simply a typo that get corrected until the final edit hits the bookshops. The guy who wrote Eroica is named Beethoven, after all ...

phillies wrote:And one major thread does come to complete total closure. With a BOOM of several megatons.

Readers will find a few minor typos. None are significant. One might have been hard for a noon-mathematical editor to spot. (Alternatively, claims of the Invincible Solarian League Navy that the neobarbs produce SDs by buying old frigates, and painting "I ARE SUPERDREADNOT" on the side, are validated, in that a fleet of 62 of them is identified by the Mesan Space Navy as having a mass of a half-million tons rather than the expected half-billion tons. )

Yes. Big Gotterdammerung. But in truth, as was pointed out elsewhere, the real need for Siegfried and Brunhilde, at least, to die at that moment seems forced at best. With their resources they most certainly should have been able to bury themselves deep somewhere for a while and escape to Darius later.

What kind of interstellar master evil overlord doesn't have a cutout or ten ready and waiting?

Eagleeye wrote:But one thing really did upset me.

SOV, e-ARC, Chapter 17 wrote:something called Eroica by some ancient composer named Bayhoven

(Bolded text marked by me)
I hope that is simply a typo that get corrected until the final edit hits the bookshops. The guy who wrote Eroica is named Beethoven, after all ...

Personally, I really got a kick out of that, and hoped it was intentional. It's sort of a nod at language changing over a couple of thousand years.

caias wrote:

Eagleeye wrote:But one thing really did upset me.

SOV, e-ARC, Chapter 17 wrote:something called Eroica by some ancient composer named Bayhoven

Eagleeye wrote:(Bolded text marked by me)

I hope that is simply a typo that get corrected until the final edit hits the bookshops. The guy who wrote Eroica is named Beethoven, after all ...

Personally, I really got a kick out of that, and hoped it was intentional. It's sort of a nod at language changing over a couple of thousand years.

It was. He got the name almost right when the music was . . . recommended to him.

I'm in the weird position of seeing what the author tried to do, acknowledging that the thing was well done, and believing that the author shouldn't have done it.

I'll have to read it later when I can do it without fighting the lurking dread that the book was a bad idea. It got in the way of all the emotional beats.

So, I read the book in one sitting as soon as the eARC was up, and thought I'd let my initial impressions settle for a couple of days before I commented.

I quite enjoyed the book, although it wasn't at all what I was expecting. I do like that it gives a great feeling of scope to the universe, and fills in a lot of gaps. I thought there might have been one too many revolutions going on "on-screen", and I found it difficult to get emotionally invested in all of them because of it. But perhaps that's just me.

I did sincerely miss "Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Book", especially in a couple of scenes where it felt like she should have had a major voice. Specifically, when discussing the Tourville deployment, Eloise and Elizabeth seem to be the prime movers, and it seems more like an Honor scene, as the commander of Grand Fleet. Further on that topic, I would have really enjoyed seeing a scene/chapter regarding Honor's travails with organizing Grand Fleet, after the offhand mention in CoG about it. EDIT to add: within the scope of what this book was, I think that scene would have fit. I'm not trying to write a wishlist of what I think the book should have been.

Also, I pretty much loved the Maya plot. This being my first experience with an eARC, I couldn't decide early on if RFC had mistepped or if we were getting slightly heavy-handed "this is not Manticore" signals. The reveal, though, was gold.

jgnfld wrote:

phillies wrote:And one major thread does come to complete total closure. With a BOOM of several megatons.

Readers will find a few minor typos. None are significant. One might have been hard for a noon-mathematical editor to spot. (Alternatively, claims of the Invincible Solarian League Navy that the neobarbs produce SDs by buying old frigates, and painting "I ARE SUPERDREADNOT" on the side, are validated, in that a fleet of 62 of them is identified by the Mesan Space Navy as having a mass of a half-million tons rather than the expected half-billion tons. )

Yes. Big Gotterdammerung. But in truth, as was pointed out elsewhere, the real need for Siegfried and Brunhilde, at least, to die at that moment seems forced at best. With their resources they most certainly should have been able to bury themselves deep somewhere for a while and escape to Darius later.

What kind of interstellar master evil overlord doesn't have a cutout or ten ready and waiting?

I think you're missing the point from Albrecht's perspective.

He is an absolute, 100% certified Believer, and so is his wife. He's just authorized the deaths of thousands, and more thousands are going to be killed, to be certain the onion's membership disappears tracelessly. His survival isn't necessary to the working out of the plan that's been put into motion, and — believe it or not — he actually feels a sense of responsibility and (dare I say it?) guilt over the cost of the accelerated Houdini. He now has a fleet in-system that isn't going to let a microbe leave the planet — or the system – until it has been thoroughly inspected, and the very act of thermonuclear destruction he's about to carry out — which has to be carried out under Houdini is going to start investigators trying to figure out what got covered up and what might be trying to hide.

Under the circumstances, his actions are — in his opinion — necessary, and trying to "hide in the general population" would risk undoing the very thing he killed all those people to accomplish.

And that's why he did it.

Bill Woods wrote:
This requires a fair amount of cooperation from other systems. I suggest the new military governor of Mesa put out an announcement that, Manpower, Jessyk, etc. have been disestablished with prejudice. Would system governments please oversee the shutdown of their local operations -- sell their assets, pay off their employees, pay back taxes, etc. And please send copies of all corporate records, ships' logs, whatever. After taxes, fees, bills are paid, I wouldn't expect a lot of money... but you might get a fair amount of information.

I also wouldn't expect much co-operation. I suspect that most of those transtellers would just create a new headquarters - with the people who up to then were the regional controllers, elsewhere.

Or maybe those regions would just go independent on their own.

Certainly few, if any, of the Solly governments, system or Federal, would probably co-operate, as long as the "graft stream" they've been seeing was maintained.