Into the Light Snippet #13

There is several potential answers, depending on which scenario is right, either:

the "herbivore" mind set has a tendency toward safety, towards the benefit of the "herd" and to ensure that the herd is safe they have instigated "safety features" at every level of their technology. Given that the bulk of the Hegemony is ruled by "herbivores" it becomes some sort of self fulling process even if it has handy capped their development

though the Hegemony invented their own technology, they missed the potential of that technology due to some sort of internal/external pressures e.g. social conformity.

Someone/something else is pulling the strings, after all Vald and his vampires are obviously some sort of advance tech/biological hybrid and that source had to have come from somewhere/someone and not Earth.

PeterZ wrote:One makes the guess that most of the foundations for future human tech are set. What comes next are the fiddledy bits of engineering and manufacturing. Politics are basically other nations slowly getting accustomed to joining the new world union. Pretty soon we jump to Vlad, jump years ahead or both.

Any guesses on how many more chapters that'll take?

phillies wrote:
Let's see. First there are the British, who recently passed through Brexit, and whose enthusiasm for joining up with the Europeans is negative. (Well, perhaps they's be agreeable if the closest bit of land to the UK was the Crown Colony of France.) Then there are the Europeans, who read the draft Constitution, perhaps discover that it includes the right to keep and bear arms, not to mention that it does not view insulting speech as not protected by the First Amendment, does not view medical care as a Constitutional right, and want to negotiate about teh core document. There is a reason why a free trade agreement can take a decade or more to finish. Then there are all the folks whose treatment of women, foreigners, people of other religions, etc. would not go over well in America, including in ways unsuitable for discussion on family-friendly pages.

Of course, the Afghans will be interested to note that they may have a new set of foreign invaders, who appear to be the same as the American invaders.

Of course, there are the several groups of folks who think they are allowed to live in Tibet or Palestine, though at a guess there may have been a final solution to the Palestine problem. Fighting over the Wailing Wall and he Dome of the Rock is less interesting when there is now a large lake at that location.

The author has plenty of opportunities for more issues.

phillies wrote:
Then there may come the point at which the President makes a big mistake, and realizes that if he were the Emperor of Earth no one would have done something different to make the mistake visible.

Sure, but that story doesn't sound nearly so interesting. We already have Safehold to tell that.

PeterZ wrote:

PeterZ wrote:One makes the guess that most of the foundations for future human tech are set. What comes next are the fiddledy bits of engineering and manufacturing. Politics are basically other nations slowly getting accustomed to joining the new world union. Pretty soon we jump to Vlad, jump years ahead or both.

Any guesses on how many more chapters that'll take?

phillies wrote:
Let's see. First there are the British, who recently passed through Brexit, and whose enthusiasm for joining up with the Europeans is negative. (Well, perhaps they's be agreeable if the closest bit of land to the UK was the Crown Colony of France.) Then there are the Europeans, who read the draft Constitution, perhaps discover that it includes the right to keep and bear arms, not to mention that it does not view insulting speech as not protected by the First Amendment, does not view medical care as a Constitutional right, and want to negotiate about teh core document. There is a reason why a free trade agreement can take a decade or more to finish. Then there are all the folks whose treatment of women, foreigners, people of other religions, etc. would not go over well in America, including in ways unsuitable for discussion on family-friendly pages.

Of course, the Afghans will be interested to note that they may have a new set of foreign invaders, who appear to be the same as the American invaders.

Of course, there are the several groups of folks who think they are allowed to live in Tibet or Palestine, though at a guess there may have been a final solution to the Palestine problem. Fighting over the Wailing Wall and he Dome of the Rock is less interesting when there is now a large lake at that location.

The author has plenty of opportunities for more issues.

phillies wrote:
Then there may come the point at which the President makes a big mistake, and realizes that if he were the Emperor of Earth no one would have done something different to make the mistake visible.

Sure, but that story doesn't sound nearly so interesting. We already have Safehold to tell that.

Different interests for different people. He doesn't have to make that big an error. And my it's-not-safehold novel is that rara avis, a novel dominated by economics. Some people liked it.

PeterZ wrote:Sure, but that story doesn't sound nearly so interesting. We already have Safehold to tell that.

phillies wrote:
Different interests for different people. He doesn't have to make that big an error. And my it's-not-safehold novel is that rara avis, a novel dominated by economics. Some people liked it.

The last Safehold novel wasn't dominated by economics? My point is that having another sort of story will be more interesting. Reading similar stories is less so.

Besides, this story has VAMPIRES. Why waste that novel element?

Garth 2 wrote:There is several potential answers, depending on which scenario is right, either:

the "herbivore" mind set has a tendency toward safety, towards the benefit of the "herd" and to ensure that the herd is safe they have instigated "safety features" at every level of their technology. Given that the bulk of the Hegemony is ruled by "herbivores" it becomes some sort of self fulling process even if it has handy capped their development

though the Hegemony invented their own technology, they missed the potential of that technology due to some sort of internal/external pressures e.g. social conformity.

Someone/something else is pulling the strings, after all Vald and his vampires are obviously some sort of advance tech/biological hybrid and that source had to have come from somewhere/someone and not Earth.

Looking at what we know:

The herbivores are oriented to safety.
Level Two civilisations have 'protected' status.
Many Level Two civilisations die before attaining Level One.
Only one carnivore race ever survived to become part of the Hegemony.
The carnivore race which survived has a social structure that discourages innovative intelligence.
The only other race which innovated even half as fast as humans never got out of Level Two.

And...
... Hegemony citizens appear to think all of the above is the natural order of things.

The questions I'd ask are whether the 'safety features ' include genociding any race that might threaten the status quo by being too inventive or too carnivore? Was the Invasion of Earth indeed a 'buy one, get one free' tactic to get rid of the humans and the Shongari?

I'm just amused here as everything being discussed re: computers are common discussion topics on why doesn't the honorverse have X.

feyhunde wrote:I'm just amused here as everything being discussed re: computers are common discussion topics on why doesn't the honorverse have X.

The Honorverse doesn't have self-aware AI for two reasons. One is that I had just finished two different novels, both of which had fully self-aware AIs in them, and I wanted something different. Same reason for the keyboards; both Mutineers' Moon and Path of the Fury had direct neural interfacing and I wanted something different for the Honorverse.

There's a heap of "expert programs" and "brilliant software" running in the Honorverse; it's usually just far enough in the background that it doesn't show, and the characters don't think about it a lot more than a 21st century American thinks about electricity. It's just there, doing it's job. You see some of it surfacing occasionally, usually when the AI is interfacing with a human character and usually in a civilian setting. Verbal commands are not used by the military for a lot of reasons, but the big one is that I've written using voice recognition software for 26 years, and in that time I have been greatly impressed by its ability to misunderstand me even under optimum audio conditions. I know perfectly well the Honorverse's tech could deal with that; it's just pissed me off enough upon occasion that I decided I wouldn't use it, so there, nyah-nyah!

And of course another reason is that I set the basic template for the Honorverse's tech 27 years ago. There's a limit to how far I can adjust some of the underlying assumptions without violating canon and continuity. I think that may be THE biggest single problem with writing a science-fiction series that runs as long as this one has.

In the case of these books, I'm starting much later (from the viewpoint of my own contemporary tech base); the gradient between the Good Guys' and Bad Guys' starting tech is much steeper' and a big part of the plot relies on the human need to overcome that gradient --- to reverse it, really --- absolutely ASAP. So we're looking at a society whose basic tech level and entire understanding of the laws of physics are in what might be called a state of whirlwind change. Which also changes what the characters are going to be talking about in the foreground. Unlike folks in the Honorverse, they haven't built their "baseline tech" yet, so they're going to be discussing it a lot more.

I wonder if the humans of this new terran empire will turn more on a Roman style. Conquest, give rights and even citizenship to the conquered, different laws on who and how can exercise a franchise. Think of what "subject races" can do that are not just outright slavery

runsforcelery wrote:

feyhunde wrote:I'm just amused here as everything being discussed re: computers are common discussion topics on why doesn't the honorverse have X.

The Honorverse doesn't have self-aware AI for two reasons. One is that I had just finished two different novels, both of which had fully self-aware AIs in them, and I wanted something different. Same reason for the keyboards; both Mutineers' Moon and Path of the Fury had direct neural interfacing and I wanted something different for the Honorverse.

There's a heap of "expert programs" and "brilliant software" running in the Honorverse; it's usually just far enough in the background that it doesn't show, and the characters don't think about it a lot more than a 21st century American thinks about electricity. It's just there, doing it's job. You see some of it surfacing occasionally, usually when the AI is interfacing with a human character and usually in a civilian setting. Verbal commands are not used by the military for a lot of reasons, but the big one is that I've written using voice recognition software for 26 years, and in that time I have been greatly impressed by its ability to misunderstand me even under optimum audio conditions. I know perfectly well the Honorverse's tech could deal with that; it's just pissed me off enough upon occasion that I decided I wouldn't use it, so there, nyah-nyah!

And of course another reason is that I set the basic template for the Honorverse's tech 27 years ago. There's a limit to how far I can adjust some of the underlying assumptions without violating canon and continuity. I think that may be THE biggest single problem with writing a science-fiction series that runs as long as this one has.

In the case of these books, I'm starting much later (from the viewpoint of my own contemporary tech base); the gradient between the Good Guys' and Bad Guys' starting tech is much steeper' and a big part of the plot relies on the human need to overcome that gradient --- to reverse it, really --- absolutely ASAP. So we're looking at a society whose basic tech level and entire understanding of the laws of physics are in what might be called a state of whirlwind change. Which also changes what the characters are going to be talking about in the foreground. Unlike folks in the Honorverse, they haven't built their "baseline tech" yet, so they're going to be discussing it a lot more.

feyhunde wrote:I'm just amused here as everything being discussed re: computers are common discussion topics on why doesn't the honorverse have X.

runsforcelery wrote:

The Honorverse doesn't have self-aware AI for two reasons. One is that I had just finished two different novels, both of which had fully self-aware AIs in them, and I wanted something different. Same reason for the keyboards; both Mutineers' Moon and Path of the Fury had direct neural interfacing and I wanted something different for the Honorverse.

There's a heap of "expert programs" and "brilliant software" running in the Honorverse; it's usually just far enough in the background that it doesn't show, and the characters don't think about it a lot more than a 21st century American thinks about electricity. It's just there, doing it's job. You see some of it surfacing occasionally, usually when the AI is interfacing with a human character and usually in a civilian setting. Verbal commands are not used by the military for a lot of reasons, but the big one is that I've written using voice recognition software for 26 years, and in that time I have been greatly impressed by its ability to misunderstand me even under optimum audio conditions. I know perfectly well the Honorverse's tech could deal with that; it's just pissed me off enough upon occasion that I decided I wouldn't use it, so there, nyah-nyah!

And of course another reason is that I set the basic template for the Honorverse's tech 27 years ago. There's a limit to how far I can adjust some of the underlying assumptions without violating canon and continuity. I think that may be THE biggest single problem with writing a science-fiction series that runs as long as this one has.

In the case of these books, I'm starting much later (from the viewpoint of my own contemporary tech base); the gradient between the Good Guys' and Bad Guys' starting tech is much steeper' and a big part of the plot relies on the human need to overcome that gradient --- to reverse it, really --- absolutely ASAP. So we're looking at a society whose basic tech level and entire understanding of the laws of physics are in what might be called a state of whirlwind change. Which also changes what the characters are going to be talking about in the foreground. Unlike folks in the Honorverse, they haven't built their "baseline tech" yet, so they're going to be discussing it a lot more.

Lunan wrote:I wonder if the humans of this new terran empire will turn more on a Roman style. Conquest, give rights and even citizenship to the conquered, different laws on who and how can exercise a franchise. Think of what "subject races" can do that are not just outright slavery

I think the better parallel will be either Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Whatever world government arises as a result of the Shongairi attack will have heavy influence from the US Constitution. The US at the time they acquired both those territories tried to stand up those nations as independent states rather than dependencies. The Philippines wanted their total independence and the Puerto Ricans did not want total independence. They wanted the best of both worlds. I foresee the same sorts of choices confronting the Shongairi subject worlds.

Now, the Shongairi colonies are another kettle of fish. Those colonies will either get wiped or be forever subject to the Human Imperium. Well, perhaps not forever, but close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and antimatter planet buster bombs.

PeterZ wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Sure, but that story doesn't sound nearly so interesting. We already have Safehold to tell that.

phillies wrote:
Different interests for different people. He doesn't have to make that big an error. And my it's-not-safehold novel is that rara avis, a novel dominated by economics. Some people liked it.

The last Safehold novel wasn't dominated by economics? My point is that having another sort of story will be more interesting. Reading similar stories is less so.

Besides, this story has VAMPIRES. Why waste that novel element?

I think you didn't parse that last sentence of mine correctly. Or I was too obscure. Probably the latter. Or something. Search Mistress of the Waves on Amazon, though it may not be worth your time to do so, if you are curious what I was talking about. Otherwise, don't wirry about it, but I agree that the last Safehold novel was about economics.