I get ya.
On the review, let's see...
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That said the longer you make a series the greater a need for discrete jumping in points where you can pick a book and not be completely lost in the sauce.
This is a tricky one because the books have a strong direct flow. However, the series has a hard stop at book 5, so we're not looking at thirty books feeding off each other. Back when we were first conceptualizing, we had already written the material that became the first two books.
(Funny part being that the material we had for the second book was almost entirely the run up to the battle of Julewa Keep and the battle itself.)
We had the concept in place for Ghost World but hadn't written it yet. Then we plotted it out, figured out what we needed for the next couple, and arrived at our hard stopping point. Now, while I concede the wisdom of never saying never, I have little enthusiasm or interest in picking up after the hard stop, which would involve an entirely new series. Maybe someday, but right now we're both ready to finish this series and move on to newer things.
We do have a prequel on the backburner that goes into more history of the World, revolving around the famous Theorist Lannit, who was mentioned briefly in the first book.
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Seg wants to change his culture and save his people and for the live of I can't see what he thinks is worth saving in this psychopathic mess of a culture.
Writing the People has given me a bit of Stockholm in that regard. I mean, there are the clear baddy bad bads, the assholes like the trio of maintenance techs or Akbas, but for the quasi-sympathetic People I tend to see them as what they could've been had they not be raised in an uber-asshole society.
I'm curious, being as how you're my actual combat anthropologist source, do they ring true to you in terms of development?
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I'm less enthralled with Elarn, the People medic but he grows on you through the book, much like Seg did in the last one.
It worked! It worked! That was exactly the progression we wanted most readers go to through with him.
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Elarn and Shan the pilot are meant to be stand ins for the normal members of the People, so at first you really dislike them but as they remove the sticks from their rears and drop the constant refrain of unearned superiority they become people you can bare, maybe even like.
Shan and Elarn are epitomes of Fismar's line about some people being caj. They're both social cast-offs, Shan due to being an average pilot with test anxiety issues that leave her doing shit jobs with shit outfits, and Elarn due to his bout of medical malpractice. Shan's relationship with Ama gives her an opportunity to drop her blinders, as Fismar does for Elarn.
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Lissil, the Welf women becomes a character of interest here as well. She frankly disturbs me a lot mainly because I can understand exactly how she became the way she did. Growing up as a member of a permanent underclass, her only means of advancement was the fact that she was pretty and knew how to play men like violins so she did so. Whenever we get a peek into her head it's a cold, rather emotionally barren place, not because Lissil is a bad person but because she was never given a chance to be anything but a cold calculating women who sees men as a tools and playthings. Why wouldn't she? That's all every person in her life ever treated her as...
The constant challenge with writing Lissil is to follow her progression as a character without making her twirl a mustache. She's a negative and malicious force, but as you've noted for totally logical and understandable reasons. Kris and I had the "Is she twirling her mustache here?" conversation over and over from this book on into the current one we're working on.
Whether we succeeded with that or not is entirely up to the reader.
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Additionally Seg takes his crew of half trained manics and decides to give the folks at home a full blown demonstration of why he's a genius and they're lucky he lets them breath on his planet.
Quoting mostly because I love the line, and because you have actually helped me appreciate Seg more. Bear in mind, as originally written he was even more of an asshole, and his progression was slower and he was more oblivious to it. When we were working with our Writer's House agent, he suggested we lighten Seg up and make him more likable, which I resisted. We didn't ever tilt him over to being something like a teddy bear or action hero good guy, but we did speed him up down the road toward abolitionism a full book sooner as a result. In the original drafts, he had a big Oskar Schindler moment in the fourth book, as in the scene at the end when Schindler realizes how many more people he could've saved. But this time around, Seg's already in the game a lot sooner.
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Storming (heh) a fortress held by a group of people descendant from a band of exiles who have degenerated into a society straight out of Colorado City, complete with lost boys. Frankly I enjoy seeing people like that getting shot, so it was rather good for me.
I wasn't entirely satisfied that we'd made the Etiphars loathsome enough for the readers to be happy with their conquest, nice to see that it worked for you at least.
Then again I'd just spent a couple hundred pages writing really loathsome shit so maybe I was a bit jaded by that point.
Just wait until you meet the As Dead in the third book.
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We also get to see Fismar as a killing machine. Which is pretty awesome.
One of my favorites to write. The mystery of Fismar is unveiled in the third book.
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I'm gonna be honest here, I would totally read a story just about Fismar!
Just for you I will take this under advisement. Seriously.
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As this book is pulls no punches towards them and almost delights in making them suffer for their mistakes.
That's Kris. She's always like "How can we shit on these characters? Okay, now that shit is raining down from the sky, can we set the ground beneath their feet on fire and maybe give them ebola?"
Thanks again for the awesome review, brother.
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