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Tripoint Q4 - The Plot
Plots are notorious weak points for Cherryh. She would much rather explore states of being, thought patterns, families, politics, economics, motivations, and consequences than make complex and powerful plots. The particular ending here reminds me of Frodo arriving in the West at the end of LotR for some reason...
Does this work for you? Is the climax absorbing? Does it make sense given what came into it? Does it make you wonder what happens next?
Comments
Plots are not her strong point. As I said elsewhere, very little actually happened in the book. I think the book would have been better if more had happen. I get the feeling that this was a book written to fulfil a contract, rather than one driven by Cherryh's need to write a story.
As for the final fight, I always thought that the Merchanter universe was quite grounded in real physics and engineering.
I think the post-climax setting of "long series of jumps to unknown habitable world" would be more interesting for those who'd read many of the books, and therefore understand what just a huge deal it is.
As have I.
Yes! That is a book I would be fascinated to read, and why I asked that question.
I got lost somewhere during the climax and don't have a good idea of what happened. The back of the book suggest Tom is going to save everyone by trusting his father. Is that what happened?
Here's what the plot seemed like to me:
Marie discovers Austin's ship is in dock at the same time as hers. She's told to stay away from it, but being a brash person, she doesn't. Tom follows her to try and keep her out of trouble and is caught snooping in Corinthian's cargo bay. He's captured and effectively disappears as far as sprite is concerned.
Corinthian leaves and takes Tom with them. His captor is Chrsitian, his half brother who already seems to hate him. Christian mistreats Tom. Corinthian lands somewhere and Tom escapes. While in hiding, he's found by Tink and Sabi, who befriend him because he's a waaay better dude than his sullen half brother.
Austin gets wind of Tom's capture by Christian and is displeased with Christian's behaviour. He sends Christian to find Tom, but he never really does.
Eventually Sabi brings Tom back to Corinthian to meet his father, who turns out not to be the BBEG he was made out to be (because Christian usurped that role). Corinthian takes off again.
Just after, Sprite arrives with an angry Marie-bear on board. She wants to keep up the chase. She and Misha fight about this use of resources, and somehow Marie is able to oust the captain and continue the chase.
There follows some kind of space kerfuffle involving a guy named Patrick.
Once that's cleared up, Tom seems content to stay with his dad, and Mom decides she can live with this.
The end.
Yes, this just kind of passed me by as "ok they're off somewhere new". I hadn't clicked that it was a big deal - is this because navigation into the unknown is essentially Russian Roulette because of how the space drive works? So if you get out of the known space route you're totally blind?
In a sense, yes. Exploration is very difficult - most of the known settled stars were explored by STL before Jump was known, thus you already knew what was on the other end - i.e. food and fuel - before exploring a Jump route. All of this long series of jumps had fuel dumps prepared - otherwise no one would make it.
I guess I never worked out whether fuel was like say hydrogen that you could gather up for yourself if you had the time and energy, or like (say) petrol where you purchased a stock from somewhere but couldn't make it yourself on the fly. If the former then fuel dumps are a short-cut but not a necessity, but if the latter then I guess you're screwed without them,
I believe it is deuterium, heavy hydrogen, and thus the ships use a deuterium-deuterium fusion. if so it is far harder to find than normal hydrogen, and must be refined - probably by some combination of centrefuge, breeding with irradiation, and filtration. Proteum-proteum (p-p) - normal h2 - fusion is a lot more difficult to achieve. Boron-proteum (p-b11) is actually easier, but produces far less energy and consumes boron 11. Deuterium-tritium, (d-t) is also easier, but requires tritium, very heavy hydrogen, which is more scarce than deuterium. This is what happens when your SF writing partner is a plasma physicist...
It's more like petrol. Quantity and quality of fuel supplies is an issue in some other books. But it only comes up at the level of "fuel supplies is a problem that will cause drama for the characters in this book."