This morning I talked about the new Cape Grace and some of the things I’m contemplating as I’m working.
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I really felt that Richard and Otto would argue that magic of the Shaman’s Gift is quite true. And my impression in the story was that it was – though much of what Richard did was pure psychology.
And I don’t think we ever actually get told that Otto was bullied – it was just that nobody could see a *reasonable* way in which Otto would have agreed to marry her to a bully. Myself – I never really thought so, as Otto might well have never seen his abusiveness in general.
Perhaps there’s a bit of an economic crisis – there’s too *much* economic activity taking place as a result of dependents, which limits how much need for imports, so the import/export balance is getting out of whack.
I like that.
All yours. You’re the one who has to figure out how it works – but simply piling up credits in a bank account causes all kinds of problems, according to the current economic thinking. Plenty of money is coming in to the Company, and gets distributed back out through the Company, but the monies that come in to the fishers and farmers, that gets exchanged between the dependents, ultimately just keeps accumulating, with only limited amounts going to buy offworld luxuries. They don’t need to spend money offworld to meet the lowest levels of Maslow – food, clothing, shelter. Even entertainment is often stories told around the bar. Even off-world travel rates can’t be *TOO* expensive, or people could just build micro-vacation homes in shipping containers and *ship* themselves as freight. But mentions of Ish’s Mom taking him on trips to Neris Orbital suggests it’s not out of line for regular people – Ish’s Mom can afford to do it maybe once a quarter – a fisher on St. Cloud could probably afford to do it once every couple of years.
Have you thought about net learning / home schooling so that the kids that go out on the boats can get their education in the evenings, that way each planet can keep a similar level of basic education to make life easier when applying for off world university’s and the like
What about the husband? Why did he marry Sarah. Maybe to use her shamanism as he was a shaman’s son with zilch. Maybe he talked Otto into thinking the marriage was a good thing by saying Sarah could work through him and Otto wouldn’t lose her? Win win, right, except he turned out to be not a nice person. It is hard to be a good shaman when you are beat up and beat down all the time, so that wouldn’t work either. Once Otto realizes—–
Perhaps the company had been letting adult children stay past 18 (breaking up families like that sounds horribly like the old slave trade), but too many unemployed people hanging around started causing problems, leading to some big incidents( like the gangs of apprentices in Tudor England?), and causing a backlash and a general “clearing house”.
Possible. Arguing against that is that this is a whole *PLANET*, undeveloped for the most part. However, with fairly decent money coming in, and not later flowing out (unless I’m reading the economics wrong), you have what is effectively idle rich – and that’s seldom a really good thing. This is one of the things that was somewhat glossed over in the Share novels – a planet is a *BIG* place, and with a half-reasonable colonisation package delivered by something not much if any larger than the Lois, within a 100 years or so there’s really not *that* much need to trade off world for things. There almost has to be some artificial scarcity that creates a way to force that trade along. Otherwise, resources go from planet to free-floating bodies, and that’s about it. (This is also one of the major issues at this point in writing hard realistic SciFi on the 100 year time frame. Assuming some way to *GET* there, a small nuclear power plant, a decent CNC machine/3D printer, a bunch of patterns, and some seed raw material is all you really need to take with you. We will, in the not very distant future, be able to take things apart atom by atom, and build them atom by atom – so long as the elements are present, and energy can be obtained, food is not a problem.)