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Stories you wish were told?

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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by JeffEngel   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 8:55 am

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kzt wrote:
Valen123456 wrote:My private thoughts are that it will demonstrate that Leonard really was a genuine idealist who desired to improve the whole human race, and prove just how far the Mesan Alignment has fallen from his goals. (Or maybe even that in the end before he died, he regretted setting what would become the Alignment in motion.... Unlikely i know, but would make for a fascinating plot twist).

I rather suspect he was a completely genuine idealist who was perfectly willing to climb over mountains of bodies to accomplish his utopia. There are at least a dozen people in the last century who collectively managed to kill something like 200 million people failing to achieve their new Soviet Man, Aryan superman, Tutsi-free Rwanda or whatever insane ideal motivated them.

I figure he may be that or a genuine idealist willing, enough, to climb over a certain small number of bodies to accomplish his ideals - on the whole, a man with character flaws that should be repellent but with enough virtue to make it uncomfortably mixed.

His successors, by contrast, have elevated those ideals to a sort of sacred platform, denuded of the human care that gave them life, and have hardened themselves against all serious consideration of the costs so that they will always, always, be worth it to accomplish any smallest measure or least chance of those sacred goals.
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by hanuman   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 11:45 am

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Valen123456 wrote:
hanuman wrote:Also, and this is purely personal, I would love to see even just a passing mention of a gay or lesbian character.


There has been one already in Honor Among Enemies, her name was Elizabeth Showforth. Unfortunately she was a vicious bitch of a character and one of the ships bullies. She also proposed a rather nasty way of killing a popular character (none of this was due to her sexuality - she was just a nasty piece of work). She was later vaporized while locked in the brig when the ship fought a battle-cruiser.

Several characters in Beowulfs BSC have been mentioned to be bi-sexual, which is also quite common on Beuwulf anyway. And Honor's wife Emily has even stated that if she wasn't crippled she would probably find Honor very attractive too.


Well, that's okay with me...it's not as if I'm a saint myself, you know?
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by SWM   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 11:48 am

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JeffEngel wrote:I figure he may be that or a genuine idealist willing, enough, to climb over a certain small number of bodies to accomplish his ideals - on the whole, a man with character flaws that should be repellent but with enough virtue to make it uncomfortably mixed.

His successors, by contrast, have elevated those ideals to a sort of sacred platform, denuded of the human care that gave them life, and have hardened themselves against all serious consideration of the costs so that they will always, always, be worth it to accomplish any smallest measure or least chance of those sacred goals.


That's approximately what David has said. Quoting the Pearls, http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/293/1:
runsforcelery wrote:One thing I hope will become clear in the course of the next few books is that the Mesans in the onion are what I think of as benign sociopaths. Quite a lot of what they have to say actually makes sense, and their ultimate objectives actually cast them (in their own minds at least) in the role of the Good Guys. As they see it, the entire galaxy took a tragic wrong turn when those idiots and biological neo-Luddites on Beowulf disagreed with their own enlightened ancestors on the degree to which the human genotype should be improved. They argue (and this is demonstrably true, looking at what they've achieved in their own Alpha lines) that the human race's potential could have been enormously improved over the last six or seven centuries if only they'd been permitted to pursue that goal openly. They don't really recognize, and certainly don't accept, Beowulf's logic, and I'm not sure I've managed to make Beowulf's position fully clear for the reader in the books to date, either.

. . .

The bottom line is that the central purpose of the Mesan Alignment ideology is beneficial. Their driving principle is the maximization of the genetic potential of the entire human race and the rectification of that horrible error they believe Beowulf and the rest of humanity made in the wake of the Final War. The problem is twofold: (1) they are willing to do anything at all that will help them to achieve their goal in the belief that the nobility of their purpose sanctifies any means to which they might choose to resort; and (2) they've long since lost track of the fact that what matters is accomplishing their goal rather than proving that they were right and Beowulf was wrong. They — or, rather, their ancestors — began this project when the revulsion against genetic engineering was still at witchhunting levels. In which the equivalent of the village mobs storming Baron Frankenstein's castle were all too likely and they felt that they had to resort to underground, clandestine, and (frankly) highly illegal means. When they were finally able to relocate off of Beowulf to Mesa, they began a gradual process of offering genetically modified (very carefully avoiding the term "improved") workers and colonists which tended to be snapped up by large industrial concerns. This, in turn, began the long association of Manpower with the transstellars of the Solarian League. They were also very careful never to join the Solarian League, which meant that they weren't covered by the League's policies and laws which had grown out of the Final War and the Beowulf Code. And as their very capable medical researchers began rivaling the Beowulf community they'd left behind, they began attracting a client base of their own — one which generally understood that Mesa was going to be at least shaving the edges of what a Beowulf-sanctioned geneticist would do for them. But well before that stage was reached, the Mesan Alignment had already gone underground and organized itself and — even more importantly — its ideology around the need to defeat rather than modify Beowulf's biosciences code.
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by hanuman   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 11:49 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:
hanuman wrote:Also, and this is purely personal, I would love to see even just a passing mention of a gay or lesbian character.
Apparently certain characters we've already seen are gay or lesbian, it's in their extended bio information in RFC's private series bible. But he said there hasn't been a particular reason for it to come up. (When you think about it we probably know about less than 10 character's marital status or dating habits)

RFC did say that Mark Sarnow is gay (and happily married).
It would be nice to get a short story, or a chapter or two about how he (and his husband) are adjusting to being out in (Manticoran side of) Selesia and the burden and responsibility of running the fleet out there (and showing a bit of how his husband, as a navy spouse, is helping him adjust to it).


Well, it's good to know one of the most bad-ass warriors in the Honorverse is a friend of Dorothy...I wonder if the phrase is still in use? Hmm...
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by Eagleeye   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 1:33 pm

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I'd like to read a story about a run-of-the-mill Solly family on a core world, which discovers for the first time how vulnerable the style of life is, which it took for granted - after Lacöon hit the League.
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by JeffEngel   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 3:15 pm

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Eagleeye wrote:I'd like to read a story about a run-of-the-mill Solly family on a core world, which discovers for the first time how vulnerable the style of life is, which it took for granted - after Lacöon hit the League.

I don't think the Solly on the nice street is going to suffer like that. Interstellar trade in the League is now seriously messed up, but it never was the source of people's food or basic necessities. Plenty of luxuries, sometimes cheaper manufactures... some manufactured goods of better quality, specific utility, adequate supply. All that, they're losing out on. But that's only going to hit hard the segment of the population whose livelihood depends on those goods moving.

Today, if you just couldn't buy a good 70" television without spending four times what you expect for half the features you assumed you'd get - well, I'm not going to cry for you, and I'm not going to cry for the Solly family who can't get something comparable either.

When the news hits that the Solarian League Navy cannot fight Verge navies on comparable terms, that people who've been fighting one another for decades are joining hands to resist the League and go after bogeymen, when the gracious, charitable hand of the Office of Frontier Security is rebuffed - successfully - on world after world, and when the best news sources outside Education and Information's control have it that those Vergers are in the right about all that - it's going to make more impact on how people feel about the League than having a devilish time getting off-world goods is.
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by kzt   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 5:04 pm

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Would you feel really bad if there was a big riot in the capital of American Samoa? Would this have a significant impact on the average New Yorker? Why would you expect it to impact the SL core any more?
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by HB of CJ   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 5:23 pm

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How about a little bit of story and back story on rumours from returning very long range exploration ships and what they have found way way out beyond the borders of known space? The good, the bad and the uglys?

Specifically all the way from just beer hall talk all the way up to the Queen being advised by serious folks that yes there is somebody way way out that a way and yes they may either be a strong alley ... or a very bad enemy.
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by cthia   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:31 pm

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Abigail Hearns is the first Grayson naval officer and we'd certainly like to see her rise to Admiral.

But who was the first Havenite and Manticoran woman to really strut their stuff?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Stories you wish were told?
Post by JeffEngel   » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:36 pm

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cthia wrote:Abigail Hearns is the first Grayson naval officer and we'd certainly like to see her rise to Admiral.

But who was the first Havenite and Manticoran woman to really strut their stuff?

Probably among the first two or three officers - or prominent enlisted personnel - of either navy. Unlike Grayson, both Haven and Manticore took sexual equality as a matter of course before they ever had space navies.
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