(And I second it is a funny little novel - I got it through a Langford's column in White Dwarf, decades ago...)
]]>The influences are visible.
I loved Fistful of Digits and 98.4 as a teenager and they stand up pretty well. Somewhere I have them as extremely failing paperbacks (the books of that era really were not built do last). He seems to have been almost completely forgotten: a great shame.
Hmm, I see plenty at reasonable prices on Abe. Some spending may be done.
At some stage I really ought to write an essay on the ~30-year gap between out-of-copyright and worth-publishing.
]]>Ahem: I was stacking the deck in the interests of fiction. (It'd have been a bit boring if the Alfär air support was about as effective as a Sopwith Camel; ditto if they'd had stealthed orbit-capable flying saucers with death rays.) So I rigged the dragons to have roughly equivalent combat capabilities to an AH-64D Longbow Apache. Presumably the Alfär had real strategic air power back home, but the combined-arms ground force available to All-Highest didn't have the equivalent of a B-52 bomb wing attached to it, just a squadron of air cavalry.
(All-Highest's unit is a rapid reaction force based on the mostly-uninhabited western coast of a continental empire. It's mission is to watch for and intercept spies/infiltrators from the rival empire on the other side of the Atlantic, across a perimeter of a couple of hundred miles, and to provide a first response in event of an actual amphibious invasion, buying time while the Morningstar Empire mobilizes its main force. So it's highly mobile and has the ability to send out foragers (with air support) to round up infiltrators, and enough air defenses to survive long enough to notify GHQ they're under attack in event of a real invasion, and maybe slow up the attackers. But they don't have much by way of artillery or infantry, and strategic air power is right off the menu.)
]]>Money is not the only mechanism for resource allocation. If you go with Graeber's argument about the origin of money, it started out as counter/tokens for accounting for inputs/outputs in temple storerooms; letting the tokens out of the temple meant that foraging troops had something they could give the peasants to return to the temple or royal granary as proof that they'd paid their tithe directly to the army (rathern than the temple).
Humans then did a whole fuckton of recomplication that turned money into an abstract signifier for economic velocity.
Among the Alfär ... sure an All-Highest could starve everyone beneath them. But why bother? It's not as if they can eat everything that an entire tribe or civilization produces. So they don't generally do that — but high-status Alfär never go hungry, while slaves may starve at their convenience.
The other issue is the way the All-Highest allows his wife and Cassie to settle accounts by a deathmatch.
Challenges are the main way of mediating status changes among the Alfär. Second Wife has got All-Highest's ear and has largely discredited Agent First (who didn't exactly warn them effectively about the kind of resistance they were going to face). On the other hand, Agent First has delivered a magus, so doesn't rate execution out of hand. (Second Wife is not Cassie's mother — that's First Wife (deceased).)
]]>They're "uncivilized savages" the way the Japanese were uncivilized savages to the Russian Empire in 1905, or the european powers were to China in the 18th century, or the Arab world is to the west in the 21st century (hint: where did we get algebra from?).
Hominids always trash-talk their rivals. If the Morningstar Empire's neighbours were truly uncivilized savages, they'd have been overrun by the Morningstar Empire long ago.
]]>Ah; I'd imagined them rather as the Ainu were to the Japanese: a peripheral population difficult to assimilate and not worth mobilizing the military to exterminate.
But I still like the Enochian Bobby Tables idea. grin
]]>The Typhoons start with CAPTOR-E (the electronically-scanned version proposed for Tranche 3B and refit to Tranche 2 onwards) but then mention CAPTOR-M (the mechanically-scanned versions in Tranches 1, 2, and 3A). One or t'other, can't be both :)
Mention is made of "Military Aid to the Civil Power", and then the incorrect acronym MACV (which is something from a different army and decade altogether)...
]]>The Morning Star Empire is/was locked in a MAD stalemate with some other Alfar empire until someone on the other side screwed up and pushed the button obliterating everything south of Manchester down to Tierra del Fuego. The Host survived because they were stationed somewhere out on the backside of nowhere, isolated when the sky fell down. The Host also have a bunker in which to hide while the elder gods scour the surface.
All Highest is a second rate, caretaker General Officer slated for replacement if ever the Host were fully activated. The crash was so sudden, there is no chain of command left to take over and tell him what to do.
I see hibernation as unproven technology - one that mostly works, but with a high failure rate; a desperate gamble for survival. All Highest doesn't even have the resources to take his entire command into hibernation, so those he chooses are not necessarily the "best and the brightest", just those who APPEAR to be the most tractable.
]]>*since even Alex's ward stops a few thaumic lances, and Cassie was willing to use her mace with Alex in her line of fire. Plus the cavalry's anti-basilisk measures.
]]>forlorn
]]>Correct. This has already been addressed by SETI theorists, as a percolation problem; the conclusion is that given some enormous number of potentially habitable worlds there will be some places that haven't been colonized yet, even after a long period when traveling between worlds is possible.
]]>