The Two General's Problem

penny wrote:Several posters, myself included, already believe that there is another hideout.

What posters, other than you, believe that there IS another hideaway? I believe that it would be smart if there was; but I also believe that is not the author's intention, because it would take the story too long to wrap up. Don't we all believe that the story will finish when the Malign is totally defeated?

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Several posters, myself included, already believe that there is another hideout.

What posters, other than you, believe that there IS another hideaway? I believe that it would be smart if there was; but I also believe that is not the author's intention, because it would take the story too long to wrap up. Don't we all believe that the story will finish when the Malign is totally defeated?

No. I do believe the series will end in a climactic battle that will defeat the MAN. But "totally defeated" I do not believe is possible. There will always be survivors and a remnant of their ideology seeded throughout the galaxy. With this rampant talk about what the author's writing style is, he does not seem to want to write about total extinction level events. The SLN are defeated but not destroyed. The MAN will be defeated but not destroyed. The author might leave the series up in the air for one of his daughters to resume. If she wants to.

penny wrote:Several posters, myself included, already believe that there is another hideout.

tlb wrote:What posters, other than you, believe that there IS another hideaway? I believe that it would be smart if there was; but I also believe that is not the author's intention, because it would take the story too long to wrap up. Don't we all believe that the story will finish when the Malign is totally defeated?

penny wrote:No. I do believe the series will end in a climactic battle that will defeat the MAN. But "totally defeated" I do not believe is possible. There will always be survivors and a remnant of their ideology seeded throughout the galaxy. With this rampant talk about what the author's writing style is, he does not seem to want to write about total extinction level events. The SLN are defeated but not destroyed. The MAN will be defeated but not destroyed. The author might leave the series up in the air for one of his daughters to resume. If she wants to.

Are you intentionally misreading total defeat as total extinction? Whenever Darius falls, some believers might live on, but they will no longer have the multi-generational wealth and carefully constructed apparatus that served the Malign; particularly if the Renaissance Factor is also exposed (which seems like a prerequisite for the exposure of Darius). Plus the whole basis for their motivation is already being weakened as Beowulf updates their Code.

The author has indicated that he has an outline of how the series is to end if he is not able to continue, whether it will be a family member or a writer recruited for the task (the way new James Bonds stories were written after Fleming's death). Tony Hillerman's daughter has written stories that were okay, but I have not been as interested. I prefer that he completes the task.

penny wrote:No. I do believe the series will end in a climactic battle that will defeat the MAN. But "totally defeated" I do not believe is possible. There will always be survivors and a remnant of their ideology seeded throughout the galaxy. With this rampant talk about what the author's writing style is, he does not seem to want to write about total extinction level events.

Quite possibly because he's already written total extinction level events -- in his Starfire books In Death Ground and The Shiva Option.

And he's already written last refuge colonies from a couple of perspectives including the entire Safehold series.

So he probably doesn't want to rehash those too much in the Honorverse; and he does keep his various universe's plot lines, technologies, and warfare fairly distinct.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:No. I do believe the series will end in a climactic battle that will defeat the MAN. But "totally defeated" I do not believe is possible. There will always be survivors and a remnant of their ideology seeded throughout the galaxy. With this rampant talk about what the author's writing style is, he does not seem to want to write about total extinction level events.

Quite possibly because he's already written total extinction level events -- in his Starfire books In Death Ground and The Shiva Option.

And he's already written last refuge colonies from a couple of perspectives including the entire Safehold series.

So he probably doesn't want to rehash those too much in the Honorverse; and he does keep his various universe's plot lines, technologies, and warfare fairly distinct.

Thanks for the info. I’ve not read any of those works.

But for whatever reason it seems to be true, it seems to be true. I suspect that what the author will do when handling the MA in the end will be similar to what he did with the SLN. Issue a disclaimer that he hopes the way he deals with the foe will be acceptable. As far as the SLN, it was, indeed, acceptable. I don’t expect it to be any different with the MA.

penny wrote:I suspect that what the author will do when handling the MA in the end will be similar to what he did with the SLN. Issue a disclaimer that he hopes the way he deals with the foe will be acceptable. As far as the SLN, it was, indeed, acceptable. I don’t expect it to be any different with the MA.

I am not sure what you mean by "issue a disclaimer" that he hopes will be found acceptable (*).

The Solarian League had been led astray by corruption and unchecked power. What was imposed demanded that executive power in the new League be representative and accountable. The Grand Alliance did not simply hope that this would be accepted, they demanded that this be accepted. In what way would that apply to the Malign? In what way did that apply to Galton? Only on Mesa, after the Malign had fled, could something like that work.

The Malign will not be treated the same way that Haven and the Solarian League were. With them the rot was limited and could be removed; indeed it had already been cut away in Haven, before a resolution was discussed. With the Malign, the rot is at the core of its being.

*: I understand you to be saying that the author has written a disclaimer that he hopes will be acceptable to the readers. That is the extent of my possible understanding. What is the nature of this supposed disclaimer for the Solarians? How do you expect this will be repeated with the Malign?

penny wrote:Another possibility is that there could be another WH or terminus associated with it and/or a fast interstate hwy all the way there. Via the Streak Drive, and Albrecht could have been visiting it all along in secrecy.

Why would it be unbelievable? Several posters, myself included, already believe that there is another hideout. I simply have never agreed to a system with a limited population by a species that can grow people "on an assembly line." That is simply the mileage I get.

I believe it would have been smart of them to create such a hideout, but I also believe (as I said in the post above) it's irrelevant to the storyline and will not have any influence in the books still to come.

Finding another WH to a hideout is having the lightning strike the same place one too many times: twice for WH, three times for a colony world. That's why I said it's pushing credulity. Like I said in the posts above, other authors do use this technique of bringing back a villain, even stronger and/or more evil than before, to keep upping the stakes for The Good Guys™. That's not RFC's style of writing. Instead, in the Honorverse, we're now in the third different villain group.

The common objections to such a huge population I've come across is that a huge population of lab grown citizens would pose a logistical problem of how to train them. Which puzzles me in the case of the MAlign. Computers can train. These are already citizens who are accustomed to a lack of intimacy being birthed in the lab and not the womb. I do not see, cannot see, training and education as a problem for the MA at all. On the contrary.

I quite agree it should have been the case. The population of the MBS at a mere 3 billion after 500 T-years of existence is low. The population of the Sigma Draconis system at a "mere" 40 billion after nearly 2000 years of a technological society is also pretty low. We quadrupled Earth's population in the last 100 years and that was starting with early 20th century medicine.

Moreover, there's no reason to live on planets. There's no reason why the MAlign would need to find habitable worlds for their hideouts: they could build in space, using space mining and industry, and just have really large habitats in random systems, à la Culture series by Iain M. Banks, where the majority of the population of the Culture lives on Orbitals and in General System Vessels... with populations in the billions each. Heck, he describes one alien system in Surface Detail that has a megastructure with a population of 40 trillion. In a single system.

But I didn't make the rules; RFC did. He designed his universe so that the population growth rates are low, even with cloning and ex utero gestations. He also designed it so computers wouldn't be a key story plot.

So what you're saying could come to pass, in theory. But I'll be surprised if it is in the books.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Moreover, there's no reason to live on planets. There's no reason why the MAlign would need to find habitable worlds for their hideouts: they could build in space, using space mining and industry, and just have really large habitats in random systems, à la Culture series by Iain M. Banks, where the majority of the population of the Culture lives on Orbitals and in General System Vessels... with populations in the billions each. Heck, he describes one alien system in Surface Detail that has a megastructure with a population of 40 trillion. In a single system.

I believe there is one quirk in the Honorverse that favors living on a planet. If the orbital is multi-use, including manufacturing and military areas, then destroying it is not a Eridani Edict violation; the same as destroying Hephaestus was not an EE violation. On a planet, there is some protection for housing areas near a military post, but there are not necessarily in space. See the following quote:

runsforcelery wrote:There is one hell of a lot of difference between Oyster Bay and a deliberate genocidal attack on an inhabited planet, and it is one which is well recognized under interstellar law and philosophically in the Honorverse. The space station that was destroyed, and whose wreckage impacted the surface of Sphinx, was a legitimate military target because of its industrial, war-supporting capacity. The Eridani Edict has always recognized the “legality” of attacks on space infrastructure. The attacking party is supposed to give sufficient warning and time for civilians to be evacuated, but the Eridani Edict has also always recognized that that may not be militarily possible. The unintended consequences of a legitimate act of war are not the same thing as an intentional atrocity or war crime. While I despise the way in which the term “collateral damage” is used to sanitize the consequences of military operations, it has some validity, and this is a perfect example of it. And lest there be any doubt, while interstellar legal opinion frowns on undeclared wars, they have happened with great frequency in the Honorverse (as in real life). In the Honorverse, they are frequently called “OFS Peacekeeping Missions,” but other people have engaged upon them with depressing frequency.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:The common objections to such a huge population I've come across is that a huge population of lab grown citizens would pose a logistical problem of how to train them. Which puzzles me in the case of the MAlign. Computers can train. These are already citizens who are accustomed to a lack of intimacy being birthed in the lab and not the womb. I do not see, cannot see, training and education as a problem for the MA at all. On the contrary.

I quite agree it should have been the case. The population of the MBS at a mere 3 billion after 500 T-years of existence is low. The population of the Sigma Draconis system at a "mere" 40 billion after nearly 2000 years of a technological society is also pretty low. We quadrupled Earth's population in the last 100 years and that was starting with early 20th century medicine.

Moreover, there's no reason to live on planets. There's no reason why the MAlign would need to find habitable worlds for their hideouts: they could build in space, using space mining and industry, and just have really large habitats in random systems, à la Culture series by Iain M. Banks, where the majority of the population of the Culture lives on Orbitals and in General System Vessels... with populations in the billions each. Heck, he describes one alien system in Surface Detail that has a megastructure with a population of 40 trillion. In a single system.

Though that quadrupling of Earths population might be a one-off. We got a cluster of improvements in health/medicine and in food production that combined to radically increase average life expectancy (largely by dramatic reductions in infant and childhood death rates) -- and the population growth rate has been falling and is projected to hit a peak population sometime this century.
It's just reductions in birth rates (tied to changes in labor needs, economics, and medicine) took longer to show up than the initial surge in life expectancy; so you get a boom and (hopefully mild) bust.

Beowulf and Manticore were (plague years not withstanding) pretty much always been highly educated and economically well off societies. Even with tubing available to make pregnancy less of an issue there were plenty of things their women wanted to do in addition to, or even instead of, having kids -- so the family sizes seem to have stayed relatively small - which would lead to relatively mild population growth. (And subconscious social pressures work on that too -- if everyone is having lots of kids you tend to feel you should be too; if everyone is having just 1-3 kids then that's the norm you tend to feel you should be aiming for too)

Now non of that explains why the MAlign wasn't cranking up population growth on Darius and Galton. I don't think there's anything to Penny's implication that there's some inherent lack of intimacy from being "tubed". But it does mean that the MAlign could "tube" a vast number of citizens (or slaves) should they want too. And even though computers can handle only some of the training, and very little of the young childhood nurturing and socialization required they can still scale very quickly by having older children help out with younger ones under the supervision of adults who themselves went through that process a couple decades before -- and since each can care for multiple children you can more than double the number of such providers coming out of each generation; who can then raise many succeeding generations. So there's some generational ramp time; but short enough for them to have driven Darius to basically arbitrarily high population levels in the time they've been there.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Moreover, there's no reason to live on planets. There's no reason why the MAlign would need to find habitable worlds for their hideouts: they could build in space, using space mining and industry, and just have really large habitats in random systems, à la Culture series by Iain M. Banks, where the majority of the population of the Culture lives on Orbitals and in General System Vessels... with populations in the billions each. Heck, he describes one alien system in Surface Detail that has a megastructure with a population of 40 trillion. In a single system.

I believe there is one quirk in the Honorverse that favors living on a planet. If the orbital is multi-use, including manufacturing and military areas, then destroying it is not a Eridani Edict violation; the same as destroying Hephaestus was not an EE violation. On a planet, there is some protection for housing areas near a military post, but there are not necessarily in space. See the following quote:

runsforcelery wrote:There is one hell of a lot of difference between Oyster Bay and a deliberate genocidal attack on an inhabited planet, and it is one which is well recognized under interstellar law and philosophically in the Honorverse. The space station that was destroyed, and whose wreckage impacted the surface of Sphinx, was a legitimate military target because of its industrial, war-supporting capacity. The Eridani Edict has always recognized the “legality” of attacks on space infrastructure. The attacking party is supposed to give sufficient warning and time for civilians to be evacuated, but the Eridani Edict has also always recognized that that may not be militarily possible. The unintended consequences of a legitimate act of war are not the same thing as an intentional atrocity or war crime. While I despise the way in which the term “collateral damage” is used to sanitize the consequences of military operations, it has some validity, and this is a perfect example of it. And lest there be any doubt, while interstellar legal opinion frowns on undeclared wars, they have happened with great frequency in the Honorverse (as in real life). In the Honorverse, they are frequently called “OFS Peacekeeping Missions,” but other people have engaged upon them with depressing frequency.

Another data bias is living on a near earth norm planet is always going to be cheaper than any other kind of living. The air is free, and "virtually" limitless. Living space is cheap. Temperatures/O2/CO2/sunlight/biomass only needs to be managed, not created. Food... just grows (I know farming isn't that easy, but we all have weeds that nothing will stop them growing.).

So yea, it can all be replicated on a station - but at a much higher cost than on a planet's surface.