aslaleratu wrote:Is there unrest regarding Ms. Hemphill? Personally I didn't give her much thought after Basilisk until the Young court marshal, good or bad. Then, when I realize who she was I gainned some respect for her after her voting to throw young out.
Up until that point the author had given us nothing to make us like the person. Therefore it is not so much that there is unrest about her, but that the author has been hiding her good points. As it says about her in
Field of Dishonor:
Chapter 8 wrote:Admiral of the Red Hemphill, next in seniority after Kuzak, was harder to read, even after all the years she and White Haven had spent as adversaries. As fair-skinned as Kuzak, Sonja Hemphill was a handsome woman, golden haired and with striking blue-green eyes, but where Theodosia's face often hid the real Theodosia, the determination that was Hemphill's driving force tightened her features and made her look almost as opinionated as she actually was. Though twenty years younger and far junior to White Haven, she'd made her name early in the R&D community, and she was a leading advocate of the jeune ecole's material-based "new tactical thinking," whereas the earl was the acknowledged leader of the historical school. He respected both her personal courage and her abilities in her own areas of competence, yet they'd never liked one another, and their professional differences only made their natural antipathy worse. Their clashes had assumed mythic stature over the last fifteen T-years, and there were other worries this time: she was also a cousin of Sir Edward Janacek and heir to the Barony of Low Delhi, and, like Jurgens, her spiritual home was the Conservative Association.
-- snip --
Sonja might be a hard driver and more than a bit ruthless, and she was oppressively confident of the merits of her own pet technical and tactical theories, yet she was willing to admit she herself was fallible.
That last piece is where the author makes a favorable comparison to Commodore Lemaitre, almost the first time we know something good about Sonja, after her courage and competence.
After the reaction to the grav-lance, the author deeply regretted that he had ever introduced it and I think that is partly why he will write in later books that Sonja was not totally to blame for it.
