SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

JustCurious wrote:Nope. I think it ends with the fall of Darius. What RFC said is that the original plan was for the story to end with Raoul taking over there.

I disagree. I suspect that is left as an exercise for a future series.

So finally finished it. Despite my sniping about Mesa as full of idiots it was worth the $15 bucks, but I really wish we could have gotten further along.

But I found myself confused again and again where the heck we were. And having minor characters pop back up 100,000 words later without any further introduction is kind of annoying. I mean I'm sure David remembers the name of the SEM naval attache to yet another of the systems whose name begins with M, but I sure didn't.

kzt wrote:

JustCurious wrote:Nope. I think it ends with the fall of Darius. What RFC said is that the original plan was for the story to end with Raoul taking over there.

I disagree. I suspect that is left as an exercise for a future series.

Hm, i really dont think so. If RFC sticks to one final book, Darius is the only plotpoint that needs to be tied up to have some closure.
Even if the war with the League ends soon and without breaking it apart, the aftermath will take decades to sort itself out.
If he likes he can still have the RF factor and some Alignment remnant around to write about, but the threat Darius needs to be dealt with somehow.

I wished for SoV to move the plot much further along, but as things stand, its still possible to end it within one book.
2nd/10th Fleet will uncover the truth on Mesa somehow and mange to obtain the location of Darius. Honor will have to deal with whatever happens at Beowulf and the 2nd wave of SLN SDs. Afterwards the board is clear for the final push to Darius and one last - bloody - battle.
I kinda suspect lots of known characters will actually die there.
Maybe even Honor herself.

JustCurious wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:
Some people do, some people seem to grow up, mature and die without ever managing to develop that 'sense of proportion' that you seem to think exists. Do you really think that the MAlign has existed for so long without having assessment procedures that are quite reliable for detecting the likelihood of a candidate going soft as ce ages?

Another thing to remember: the biggest protection is Manpower and genetic slavery: the only reason that Jack McBryde and Herlander Simöes were believed is that several people had already deduced the existence of the conspiracy, and were looking for confirming evidence. I have no doubt that there have been people who have tried to defect. Quite a lot of them over the centuries. Most of them were simply not believed.

what I need to know is how the MA has identified those likely to develop doubts. I would actually expect them to be quite bad at it. They are not good at understanding other people especially those who oppose them.

They aren't good at understanding other people? Really? They run two planets, one from behind the scenes. They've got proxies that have taken over another dozen. They've got strings on huge numbers of people across the explored part of the galaxy. How does this correspond to "they aren't good at understanding people?"

They're not particularly good at understanding other mindsets, but that's mostly because they don't want to be. They're fanatics, and the very definition of a fanatic is an unshakable belief that they're right and everyone else is wrong. Since everyone else is wrong, there's no point in trying to understand them; it would simply waste time and effort that could be better spent in converting them or eliminating them.

JustCurious wrote:And how do they think? What is the social mindset that keeps them from questioning what they are doing? I would have liked to see this.

They're fanatics. One of the better current examples is Da'ash. The founder of that mindset wrote a book that's quite effective at radicalizing susceptible people. An older example of the genre is Mein Kampf. I haven't read either and have no intention of doing so - wallow through enough junk to not want any more.

JustCurious wrote:One thing I liked was the peek at life on Darius. It helped make the MA more real.
Agree with the likelihood of defectors finding it difficult to be believed. But the people likely to defect are ones who would have done so with plenty of evidence.

The ones with a lot of evidence are on Mesa, and Mesa is probably quite hard to leave without someone noticing - especially if you're inside the onion.

The ones outside of Mesa are either relatively low level operatives or deep cover operatives like the guy who got inserted into the SLN intelligence staff as a Captain. They've almost certainly got a lot of nanotech that will insure that anyone they try to defect to will be interrogating a rapidly cooling body.

JustCurious wrote:The thing that has made it comparatively easy for the GA public to accept the claims is the treecats vouching for Simoes, something that was not available in the past.

There's also a lot of very good opinion manipulation going on. It doesn't hurt that the Salamander is on board with that interpretation either, and that she's also a Grayson Steadholder with a sky-high reputation on Grayson.

I think it is plausible that confirmation of the MAlign existence will be found on Mesa but that the location of Darius will not.

The proof of the MAlign existence will be the key to the SL positively responding to the GA requests for meaningful dialogue, albeit too late to prevent the deaths of millions of Beowulfers.

That would leave the field clear for the cessation of hostilities between the GA and the SL, and time to pass for Raul to grow up and go after the MAlign. (Which is probably what rfc intended when Honor was originally slated to die in AAC.

runsforcelery wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:
1) I certainly hope you genuinely forgot to include please in your statement.

2) It is up to the authors of stories to include or otherwise any character(s) they wish.

I think he meant it as an observation --- and a very kind one --- not a command, George!

Good God, I got a direct response from rfc, does this mean I'm on the Red Shirt list

Wont work. The Mandarins cant let Manticore get away with it, they wouldnt survive.
Whether or not the Alignment exist in their minds is irrelevant to the strategic situation driving them.

JustCurious wrote: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.

JohnRoth wrote:Of course. There are a lot of holes like that, depending on which ideology you follow. The thing to remember is that the series was created in the early 90s, with the first book published in April of 1993. We've learned a whole lot since then; projecting what we know now onto the past and then criticizing the past for not being like the present is called presentism.

JustCurious wrote:Back then we knew enough to call his medicine and genetics implausible. It's that biology isn't one of RFC's major interests and so he does not have a good feel for biological phenomena. So he made some things up for story chrome without realizing that for some they would undermine the suspension of disbelief in some of his audience.

And yet, sometimes an author can be prophetic, when science catches up to his vision:
Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors

Star Knight wrote:Wont work. The Mandarins cant let Manticore get away with it, they wouldnt survive.
Whether or not the Alignment exist in their minds is irrelevant to the strategic situation driving them.

The SL does not need the Mandarins to survive as a political organization. And at least one senior SEM official noted this. The interest of the Mandarins and the SL members are not currently aligned.

kzt wrote:

Star Knight wrote:Wont work. The Mandarins cant let Manticore get away with it, they wouldnt survive.
Whether or not the Alignment exist in their minds is irrelevant to the strategic situation driving them.

The SL does not need the Mandarins to survive as a political organization. And at least one senior SEM official noted this. The interest of the Mandarins and the SL members are not currently aligned.

Could we say they are MAligned