[In case it doesn't go without saying the above comment is very much tongue-in-cheek and I do not seriously think of your work as "rote".]
]]>(I take it you're referring to what he calls the fourth Satellite).
]]>This is why we don't see any intelligent civilisations in the universe: The aliens invent writing, their writers write about strange configurations of matter and electromagnetism, some crackpot try it out ... we should ban writing entirely, it is too risky with all these ideas we don't quite know the origin off.
]]>If you haven't read the books yet, there are spoilers ahead.
One thing that seems unresolved to me is the question who is actually the big bad of the series. A thread on this blog from last year settled on Dick Cheney. But he's too obvious an antagonist. He's not the puppetmaster, but more like a puppet that refused (and had the means to refuse) to be a puppet anymore. As for the true big bad, to me Patricia/Iris seems a good candidate. We still don't know for sure which game she is playing. Did she really just want to protect Helge/Miriam by raising her in the US? We already have enough reason to believe that she isn't fully open and truthful to her daughter. And during her last conversation with Hildegarde the narrator lets the Grand Dowager Duchess reveal her master plan, but cuts away from the scene when Patricia is about to reveal hers. Ultimately, we're left in the dark about her true plans, which made me expect that they'd be revealed at some climactic point. But it didn't happen before The Revolution Trade ended.
The other thing totally unresolved is the major cataclysmic event that the Lee family just went through. Elder Huan's strategy of securing the family position by choosing a patron backfired spectacularly, because his choice of patron proved to be catastrophically wrong. And as a result, the complete Lee family now finds itself detained in a comparatively small internment camp together with the much-hated other five families, and at the mercy of their dead patron's enemies. Also their lockets just became useless, because on the other side there is now a nuclear wasteland. What will this turn of events do to Elder Huan's authority, especially when James was already in opposition to the plan that went so horribly wrong? The Lees seem clearly set for an internal upheaval. And as if that wasn't enough, they also have to cope with being forcibly reunited with the long lost cousins, with literally no room to hide. I would have liked to read something about that.
I hope that's all going to be answered in the new books. I'm a little worried, though, because they're not going to be direct sequels, but will be set many years afterwards. At least, I can infer from this that not everybody killed each other in the interment camp, which is a start.
]]>Your readers/posters empathize since quite a few have their own muses/monkeys. So for those whose pet near-future scenarios include new materials technology that can be produced in any kitchen and with which anyone can change the world ...bwah, ha, ha!
Scalable production of large quantities of defect-free few-layer graphene by shear exfoliation in liquids (Keith R. Paton, et (very many) als ... after all, this was published in Nature Materials ...)
Seriously though, this author manufactured his own high-quality graphene using a kitchen mixer.
]]>I think you're possibly misreading the ending. At the end of the first trilogy Miriam is substantially in charge, has got the functional part of the families to (temporary?) safety from the U.S. Government and most of the internal squabbling will be over in the face of the need to work together against the common enemy. Cheney and disaffected members were (I think) the main enemy, assisted by the Lees, and that threat is over - assuming the disaffected members survived at all - Cheney is dead, the U.S. government doesn't know if there were any survivors, far less where they are, and the conservatives are toast.
It's pretty much a clean break, though I would like to have read the bit where Rudi demonstrates the Mosquito prototype to the Ordnance Board in New Britain.
The next trilogy is where the chickens start to catch up with Miriam, I suspect, and I'm <&em>seriously looking forward to reading it.
]]>Also: www.DeadPeasantInsurance.com
]]>Yes, the series so good I actually did buy it twice!
]]>The latter. (I was on a 3 book contract, 100,000 words per book +/- 10% permitted. I couldn't wrap everything up in volume 6 by the time I reached it, and I was too burned-out at the time to go back for another contract -- especially as I was being offered much more money for doing stuff that was more fun by my other publisher.)
As for the true big bad, to me Patricia/Iris seems a good candidate. We still don't know for sure which game she is playing.
By the time "Black State" opens, she's long-since dead -- but one of her plans is still ticking. No, she's not the "big bad" -- I don't believe in black hat/white hat fiction plots. But she's worse than Miriam realized, and is still raising trouble from beyond the grave.
I believe what happened to the Clan survivors after the internment camp may surprise you ...
]]>Would you like me to drop you a long rambling email about it?
]]>