It was still cold and a bit nippish, but I walked after the sun broke through the clouds.
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It wasn’t that Greta took control and told Ish to piss off – it was that she told Ish that *HE* wasn’t allowed to say there couldn’t be a relationship. It *HAD* to be her decision. Very typical D/s dynamic, but… he never signed up to be the slave. He suffered, but because it wasn’t at *HER* hands, that wasn’t enough. She rejected him so that his suffering would be *her* power, and then once she felt he’d suffered enough at her hands, why then it would be ok to have a relationship – because he’d always remember that *HE* was the one crawling back.
This is, yes, a very realistic and common female tactic. It’s part of why there continues to be a war between the sexes. She couldn’t just explain that he was fucking up the functioning of the crew, that his whole “don’t screw with crew” thing was a reasonable rule in many dynamics, but that in the long run, it didn’t work, and that he could move towards other rules that worked better in getting a real relationship going…
Ultimately, she set up him. And at this point, he’s really little better off, in the area of romantic socialization, than he was before she came – he never got the chance to learn what a horrid bitch she really was.
The slingshot question – I’ve always been a bit iffy on that one, too. We, of course, don’t have the actual text of the warning – but they seemed to be going well outside of the Roche Limit, so I can’t see why the ship breaking up would be a risk. Perhaps it had a significant ring system around the body? Or a previous civilization had died from the Kessler Syndrome, and their orbiting junk field had not had time to dissipate? Still, it wasn’t as egregious as having to accelerate inwards from the edge of the stellar system (and I did spot that one, and should have asked about it…) But I really don’t think that was that bad a call.
*chuckles* I hate to say it, but the CPJCs *are* a government. They in most ways control the *legitimate* initiation of force. So while an Orbital would have problems kicked them off of the station in isolation, a *planet* would have the resources to stay independent, and no reason why a planet couldn’t support an Orbital by itself. The committees of course, *must* know this – which is why they tend to not be particularly ham-handed in their regulations, but the whole Company Planet thing does seem fairly ripe for at least *ONE* bad case.
Honestly, I think you have perhaps created the one form of government that might actually work in the long run, as long as the various committees are kept locked against each other, and there isn’t some over-riding Central Planets Joint Committee On Committees that can arbitrarily act in the favor of one over the other. As soon as there’s a Committee in charge of the Committees, it all falls apart, of course. We see this happening in the current situation in the US – the States were, at least in theory, more or less supposed to act in the way the various Committees do – dominion in their domain, negotiate where there’s overlap and interface. The Federal Government was supposed to be very minimal, but has in fact become *the* central power, and so the states squabble and do what they can to take over that power for themselves, instead of actually taking care of their own people.
Yeah, I know – I’ve gotten kinda yappy here. I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about what you’ve created here, and how parts of it *must* work to match what you’ve shown us as happening. In a great many ways, it’s a very libertarian ideal of a system.
Here are my impressions, but I don’t think I’d recommend rewriting. (It always seems like I can’t do that without it impacting on the tone of everything that comes before and after.) Just write the next book and those things will be cleared up!
The hiring of the new CEO was very straight forward.
The buyout was there, but very lightly touched upon, “the decision washed over me” and then we’re left to assume that it went through, and now Ish is going somewhere, but it’s not clear at all. It’s almost as if an epilogue would help. (Probably not!)
That Simson would have been using gramps and the other bodyguards as spies wasn’t clear at all. Readers could have wondered that, but it wasn’t very clear. (All of the bodyguards, some of them, to what extent…)
That gramps had a lot of things going on to cause Ish to overly trust him (relationships with Kirston and Christine, etc) was there out in the open, but would have required just a bit of thought if you wandered in that direction.
Regarding a better book, I can’t say for sure, but I did notice almost immediately that Zypheria’s Call was a “deeper”(I don’t know what this means!) book than Ravenwood. I’d guess that you may have been practicing making your characters richer (thinking of the warehouse man, and the ship owner and his son.) Probably just writing more and practicing different aspects is the best way to go about this.
I am waiting patiently for more Ishmael. The one thing I had trouble with about Ishmael and his actions in owners was his letting gramps get by with so much of not doing his job, especially to do with care of the ship and environmental. With his background–? I couldn’t see him ignoring that level of neglect on his ship. D would haunt him. The rest was ok and needed to get Ish on his way to new things.
Don’t worry about anything like rewrites. You have been in old-work mode for long enough as is, and to be honest, the only weirdness for me in OS was the fight scene, but you only had Ishmael’s eyes to work through so that’s understandable. In fact, my favorite aspect of the entire series is that we only get it through Ish’s POV. Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes like epics with dozens of POVs, but the large majority of the time I think that less is more. Once I understood that the story we were getting through Ish wasn’t exactly the whole (or even necessarily correct) reality, which was somewhere in QS, I was hooked. Trying to think about what people on the other side of the conversation are thinking is a very entertaining way of looking at the series.
I don’t see Ishmael ever being big into violence, but I don’t think he has to be in order to tell the further stories. Pretty much any new experience is entertaining to read through Ish’s eyes. I’m hopeful for the story arc as a whole, but regardless I’m sure I’ll have fun reading through it.
Very much enjoyed listening to you talk about your writing this morning, Nathan. BTW, you were right the first time: it’s William Simpson — Wallis Simpson is someone else entirely!
And I think Tara Li is rather hard on Greta. She just seems to me to be trying to exert a bit of control in her life.