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quite possibly a cat wrote:Also their name is probably Shannon Foraker.

runsforcelery wrote:

Bruno Behrends wrote:
Wow - thank you for the long explanation!

I figured something along those lines (except for the after her death part it comes out that ... which yeah, might have been cool!) and I know uncle Jaques was there from the start.

And of course there are advantages for the story with her kind of having inherited the anti-Alignment fight from the Beowulf side.

I also still love the series

You're welcome. There are a lot of times I regret having lost the story arc launched by Honor's death. Not because I wanted to kill her off but because there were a whole bunch of neat scenes and events that are never going to make it into print now.

I will say, however, that I have so far managed to hide one last . . . unanticipated family connection of Honor's.

Until this book, at least.

Well this one was tuckerized twice... And should be Rosie's girl on Messa in my opinion..

"Lieutenant General Gillian Drescher gazed across her desk at Colonel Byrum Bartel, her chief of staff, her almond-shaped eyes narrowed in something that wasn’t so much disbelief as a desire to disbelieve. After Green Pines, she’d thought she’d seen just about anything that could happen during her three years as the commander of the Capital District of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce."



"He punched in a command and one of Thandi’s dead monitors flickered to life with the image of a petite, dark-haired woman in the uniform of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce with a lieutenant general’s insignia. She was a few centimeters taller than Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, yet she strongly reminded Thandi of the Beowulfer. That was irritating, given how much she’d liked Benton-Ramirez y Chou."

ldwechsler wrote:They just seem to be like people yet the freed slaves we've seen come across as being far smarter and more interesting. DuHavel seems smarter than any of them; JeremyX is described as the best shot anywhere. Paolo is descended from pleasure slaves yet is brilliant at electronics.

Frankly, the Malign comes across as a dud.

Reality: RFC is human, not superman. No author can properly portray an intelligence too far above their own.

roseandheather wrote:So, about those Next Generation stories... ::waggles eyebrows::

Next Generation stories are great to behold.. Me thinks we nee a mini series between the generations also.. Alas not sure we will have enough celery..

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:They just seem to be like people yet the freed slaves we've seen come across as being far smarter and more interesting. DuHavel seems smarter than any of them; JeremyX is described as the best shot anywhere. Paolo is descended from pleasure slaves yet is brilliant at electronics.

Frankly, the Malign comes across as a dud.

Reality: RFC is human, not superman. No author can properly portray an intelligence too far above their own.

And if he did, very few readers would understand it as anything other than an ad-hock Deus Ex Machina.

JohnRoth wrote:
And if he did, very few readers would understand it as anything other than an ad-hock Deus Ex Machina.

Probably. It’s like Olympic level athletes. They are unbelievably good at pretty much any sport they decide to do.

At my gym a girl, who is now the 63kg US weightlifting record holder and current champion, used to train. She also got into the CrossFit games, so she’s an unbelievably good athlete. And I mean that. She could casually do things that nobody in our gym could reliably do. I first saw her as she was doing her post workout cool down doing sets of 5 muscle-ups, when you jump up, grab an overhead bar and then do a pull-up so your arms are locked out hands below your waist with your upper body above the bar. These are incredibly hard to do for normal people, and she was casually and seemingly effortlessly doing sets of them until she got bored after lifting twice her body weight for an hour. She made everyone else look weak and uncoordinated.

I have always assumed Jean-Claude Nesbitt was an alpha line. I also figured that his cousin Tony Nesbitt while technically an alpha was never brought into the fold. I imagine a fairly high percentage of sleepers who are born in raised in a given society are never told the truth because the fear they wouldn't be on board with it.

roseandheather wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:I have to say that I dont remember that... can you remind me where?

I guess what you are saying is that a 'lost' alpha line person might not develop the less pleasant little MA ways.

I can't remember which book it was, but one of the many Detweiler-centric expositions mentioned that not all Alpha lines were still in the Alignment because they'd died out, moved to other worlds, couldn't be trusted, or some other reason, so there are people out there from Alpha lines who don't know they're from Alpha lines. So yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Does anyone remember where this comes from? I only have dead tree sources to go from.

I'd really like to see the exact words - as we have so often seen with RFC - these can make all the difference in the world to the correct interpretation!!!

ldwechsler wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:Aside from the infrequency of books in recent years, my biggest disappointment has been the lack of exceptionality shown by those in MAlign. SNIP

SNIP

Frankly, they are a disappointment. SNIP.

SNIP

Frankly, the Malign comes across as a dud.

I wonder if it may partially feel that way because they are not obviously as frothingly mad wild eye evil as - say Citizen Ransom or some of those people on Grayson & Masada, or a sociopath like Oscar St Just, or even deeply, deeply corrupt like Young or High Ridge - and are - in once sense actually trying to build something?

isaac_newton wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
SNIP

Frankly, the Malign comes across as a dud .

I wonder if it may partially feel that way because they are not obviously as frothingly mad wild eye evil as - say Citizen Ransom or some of those people on Grayson & Masada, or a sociopath like Oscar St Just, or even deeply, deeply corrupt like Young or High Ridge - and are - in once sense actually trying to build something?

In some ways, that's how they are supposed to come across. I think iwhat you're seeing is some of the banality of evil peeking through, because that's exactly how they see themselves. Of course, so did Rob and Oscar, but I think I took you more fully inside their heads in some ways than I've done with the Alignment. The thing about the Alignment is that both they and the Mandarins represent one of the things I find most dangerous in all the world: people in positions of vast power who never even question the total, complete, and exclusive validity and rectitude of their belief system. . . especially if it just happens to validate their right to power and feed their own rapaciousness. People in those positions come in two really deadly varieties. (1) The scumbag: the system I embrace absolves me of my responsibilities in time of peace and I will embrace any means to protect it (and, of course, me) when it comes under threat. (2) The true believer: the sheer sancity off the system I embrace automatically validates anything I do in its support. (And, of course, it that allows me to remain in power as the vanguard of the proliferate or whatever, that's merely evidence of the wise judgement of a benign providence.) Hard to exaggerate the damage either of them can do, but the really scary thing is that if you really get inside their heads, everything they do makes sense from their POV.