Not the most pleasant morning, but I really did enjoy it.
Bummer. Wish I’d noticed I had a bit of the plastic cover in the frame before I mailed it off. :/
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That was different with the sound of the rain fall. Bravo for you, getting out there to do that!
I got an education this morning about the world of Trader’s Tales. It’s a treat to hear the ideas percolating.
I like your ideas, in a lot of ways, but … this seems much darker than you were portraying things in the Durandus forums in the discussion after Owner’s Share. Here, you suggest that the CPJTC doesn’t really *care* about much of anything – but for Lois McKendrick’s “revolution” to have worked – it must care in *SOME* respects. It suggests the CPJTC is subject to pressure from the news media. You wondered about “piracy” – and suggested that it’s not really possible, but if larger colonies like Odin’s Outpost started forming, they would more or less *have* to “pirate” smaller metallic, carbonaceous, and icy asteroids and moonlets from stellar systems, and the corporations owning the leases on those systems are likely to be unhappy about that.
I’m not sure that your conclusion about Lois McKendrick actually holds. I’ve probably misled you on how that story unfolded.
The points about piracy are valid but with a lot of unclaimed, undeveloped space, I’m not sure you really need to steal from somebody in order to have the kinds of cargoes you’re suggesting.
True enough – and part of the problem is the approaching singularity in manufacturing, where we’ll be building things almost atom by atom – a capability demonstrated in the early stages as far back as the 1980s, with IBM researchers using an Atomic Force Microscope to move atoms around to make the IBM logo. Von Neumann machines and some form of nanotech really makes story telling of this kind difficult to make really realistic – after all, there’s really little need for the Exploration Teams when the real way to do it cost effectively is to drop a few dozen Von Neumann machines into the atmosphere and come back in 50 years to a nice green planet with plants and animals grown from cells built from digital blueprints. It’s also one of the problems I had with the Trader’s Tales, and the range of computers in it – any reasonable extrapolation of machines suggests PDAs in the next 20 years that make current top of the line desktop computers look like first generation Palm Pilots.
(Sorry if I get kind of annoying with my posts, but I love your stories, and find myself in the position of feeling like a Trekkie, except about the Trader’s Tales – maybe I’m a Tradie?)
Nathan,
Have you considered what would happen to someone as talented and naive as Ishmael had he not stepped into a positive force leading forward and upward. What if his talents served him best for working around the system, not necessarily in a criminal manner but just far more secretive, and occasionally far outside the legal system. As with computer software there always seems to be a side door, a way around the security. Would his positive characteristics still shine. Could he still rise above his fellow shipmates to the position of Captain. Could his name then be “Oden?” Not an antithesis to Ishmael but an alternate wind of fortune. Your morning mind wandering has sent me toward this question. I have personally experienced times when I was explicitly told not to experiment or deviate from standard applications in program development, but the temptation to find an easier way, a smarter way led me down another road to prove I could do it, even if only to myself.