Christopher G. Nuttall's Blog, page 4

Free Books (And Now I’ve Got Your Attention, Merry Christmas!)

As a Christmas gift to my readers, I am giving away a number of books for free! Please feel free to download, and share this post far and wide.

Meet the brave rebels standing up against fascism in a world where Nazi Germany survived the war, join a hopeless war against alien invaders, fight beside marines stranded on a distant world when their empire abandons them, fly into battle beside an outdated carrier which is all that stands between humanity and total destruction and meet a girl without magic, who must somehow survive in a school for magicians … and uncover a very old secret.

These books will be free, between 25th and 29th December.

Merry Christmas!

Storm Front – Amazon

Outside Context Problem – Amazon

The Empire’s Corps – Amazon

Ark Royal – Amazon

The Zero Blessing – Amazon

OUT NOW – The Fires of Freedom (A Learning Experience IX)

To stop a war, they have to start one.

The Solar Union has honoured its debt to the Belosi by sending a covert fleet to liberate their homeworld and free their people from a rapturous alien power, but now the Galactics are mobilising, intent on crushing the Belosi as an object lesson to any other slave race thinking about making a bid for freedom. Given time, they will bring their immense power to bear and the Belosi will be exterminated.

Caught between the certainty of annihilation and the dishonour of abandoning humanity’s allies to the fire, isolated from the rest of the Solar Navy, the Firelighters come up with a desperate plan to trigger the long-feared war between the major powers, a plan that can have only two outcomes. They will win the Belosi time to secure themselves …

Or they will start an inferno that will burn the galaxy to ashes.

Read a FREE SAMPLE, then download: Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS, Books2Read

Next Project?

Hi, everyone

I’m currently sixteen chapters into Stolen Glory (Morningstar II) and I hope to have the first draft completed shortly before Christmas. (Obviously, school holidays and suchlike are going to play merry hell with my schedule. I’m hoping to get it done before the kids get off school, but no guarantees of that.)

Anyway, I have decided I want to do a fantasy novel between Stolen Glory and The Counterfactual War, which is the direct sequel to Conquistadors. Would you rather:

-The King’s Secret (The Zero Enigma)

-The Princess Exile, which is a Schooled In Magic spin-off (probably a stand-alone, but with room for one or two more books) following an idea I had a while back, in which a Princess is kidnapped and replaced by a sorceress and forced to make her way back to her kingdom before the sorceress, now posing as a Princess, takes over the kingdom. Along the way she makes friends (grin) and, perhaps more importantly, learn the skills she needs to chase a sorceress out of the kingdom before it is too late.

-The Blademistresses, which is an expansion of the Blademaster’s tale and is another Schooled In Magic spin-off. I intended it to be out by now, but one thing led to another and editing has been delayed.

What would you like to see first?

And if anyone has a potential name for the Princess, please feel free to suggest it.

Chris

Two New Fantastic Schools Anthologies – Submissions Wanted and Welcome

(If you are interested, or know anyone who might be, please get in touch.)

Fantastic Schools is currently looking for submissions for two new themed collections:

Universities – stories set in a university or college environment, with older students and/or lecturers, featuring a combination of magical and mundane academic issues. Stories about new students going to a new home, away from home and in the big city for the first time in their lives; stories about academic research projects and teamwork, stories about academic honesty and dishonesty, from tutors struggling to get tenure to younger academics trying to game the system so they can carry out research instead of teetering, or younger tutorials trying to reform a very old and cumbersome, indeed conservative, system.

Familiars – witches and wizards have often had familiars, animals that help them in their magic, often sharing a magical bond with their master. Cats and dogs, snakes and owls … we are looking for stories centred around familiars, from the tiny duckling that turns out to be a dragon or sickly familiar that turns out to grow into real monster, to the haughty human-level intelligence familiars that see themselves in partnership rather than bondage, or have to be placated to convince them to assist their human ally. Stories can feature everything from a simple non-human ally to a familiar bond that is actively dangerous, perhaps even cursed.

As always, please send us a query first to ensure that we do not have too many stories on very similar subjects. Please send to the below address:

Ideally, the deadline for both is currently set at July 2025. However, that may change to later in the year depending on submissions and/or time commitments.

The general rules remained unchanged:

The Fantastic Schools anthologies are intended for a YA and general audience. Stories do not need to be directed at a YA audience, but story content should be appropriate for both teen and adult readers.

Magic schools must be original to the author or used with the author’s express permission. No unauthorized fan fiction will be accepted.

Please query with your story idea, so to avoid too many stories on the same exact topic.

Word count: 3000 to 12,000 (for longer stories, inquire.)

Payment: Authors will receive equal shares of 55%  of profits.

Julia 1984 – A Review

Julia 1984 – A Review

-Sandra Newman

The voice from the telescreen boomed indistinctly, and she stood with chin raised, gazing up at the enormous face. Twenty-seven years it had taken her to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the black moustache. But it was all right, everything was all right. She had won the victory over herself at last. She hated Big Brother.

When I first heard that there was to be a second novel written in the world of 1984, and one that was supposed to be a feminist take on one of the most important pieces of literature in the Western canon, I must admit my hopes weren’t high. Presenting the events of the first book to a second set of eyes rarely, in my opinion, works out very well even when it is written by the same author: the alternate character interpretation of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, which stands in stark contrast to the character portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale, is difficult to swallow at least partly because it implies one of the more unpleasant characters in the older book was actually good all along and that her acts of evil, often petty, were for a greater good. Julia, Winston Smith’s love interest from1984, is nowhere near as vital as Aunt Lydia, yet presenting the events through her eyes run the risk of minimising or degrading Winston Smith.

And after reading Julia, I have to admit the results are decidedly mixed.

Julia starts at the moment lays eyes on Winston Smith for the first time, framed in a manner exploring the lives of lower-class party woman in the world of 1984. It is strange to realise that Winston, for all that he is trapped in a totalitarian nightmare, is actually one of the most privileged characters in the setting. Julia lives in what is effectively a barracks with other women, watched constantly by the party, and – like the rest of the women – is at risk of exploitation by powerful men. They are forced to pretend to believe in the party’s ideology, while making concessions and compromising themselves to gain even a minor degree of safety. For example, on one hand, the Party regards sex as inherently wrong and nearly every female character is supposed to disdain it, but on the other they are often forced into sex, which results in pregnancy, and the only way to escape charges of unsanctioned sex is to apply for artificial insemination. Early in the book, Julia realises Vicky – a young and naïve women who has been exploited by an older man – is pregnant and needs an excuse, but because of the near-constant monitoring (both through bugs and informers) can only hint at it and in the end the poor girl winds up having a back-alley abortion rather than go through with the pregnancy. There is no such thing as safety, despite their best efforts, and saying the wrong thing can easily be disastrous.

Through Julia’s eyes, we also see the formation of the regime and the effects on people who live outside the city. Julia found herself living on a farm, after her mother took her child and fled from the conflict raging over England, watching helplessly as the old order passed away to be replaced by inexperienced bureaucrats wielding power over people and farms they simply didn’t understand, a cross between Cambodia, North Korea and the early days of Bolshevik Russia. The schoolrooms are run by stern and brutal teachers, who teach learning by rote and severely punish children who cannot memorise the Party’s approved texts. The book describes in gruesome detail precisely what sort of people flourish under such a system, from informers who betray their neighbours to paedophiles; Julia herself is forced into a relationship by an older man, and she is uneasy aware that several younger girls were taken to see some party bigwigs one day, after which they simply vanished. It is a testament to how dark this world is that Julia’s mother concedes the one good thing about her lover, her rapist, is that when he knew the Party was finally coming for him he shot himself, rather than let himself be interrogated. He would almost certainly have betrayed Julia if he had lived longer.

Like many others in such controlled circumstances, Julia responds by rebelling in what few ways she can. Sex is one of them, and her initial impression of Winston Smith is not exactly positive. It takes her time to get close to him, made harder by the constant monitoring, and some of their interactions take on newer and more sinister meanings. She finds it exciting to tease him a little, yet is also fearful of the beast that lurks underneath all men; she rolls her eyes at his belief, as they dive further into their covert rebellion against a system that is not inclined to forgive anything, that the proles will eventually rise and save them. But Julia, as is made clear from the text, has more contact with the proles than Winston.

Their love affair is discovered, of course. Julia finds herself used by O’Brien to lure Winston further and further into sin, at least partly because Julia is a little more perceptive than Winston and realises fairly quickly that Carrington’s shop (and the room above they use for their trysts) could not exist for long without the Party knowing about it and approving. She is caught up in a maze of conflicting emotions, a seething mess of torment that only grows worse when she is approved for artificial insemination and is injected with what (she is told) is Big Brother’s semen. Now pregnant, Julia was forced to play her role and aid in Winston’s arrest, one flicker of hope torn away brutally when she too is sent to prison. The only thing that saves her from far worse treatment than Winston is her pregnancy, and that will not last forever.

After torture, Julia is released (like Winston), and left to play out the rest of her life as a warning to the rest of the Outer Party. Finding a kind of solace in being ostracised by everyone save her fellow former prisoners/object lessons, Julia (unlike Winston) manages to convince herself that she hates Big Brother. It is that that gives her the strength to flee the city when she discovers the country has been invaded, eventually encountering the invading army – a combination of English exiles and escapees from Airstrip One – as it takes Big Brother prisoner and completes the destruction of the regime. Julia asks to see the man she has been told to idolise for most of her life, and is shocked to discover that – at the end of his era – Big Brother is a senile old man. She reflects, bitterly, that his body could almost certainly no longer produce sperm, leaving the precise question of who fathered her child up in the air. It may or may not be a happy ending, but at least she has hope.

Just as it is impossible to understand Romeo and Juliet without understanding that the two lovers were young, it is impossible to understand 1984 without realising that it is not so much a thriller or an action story, regardless of poor doomed Winston’s pretensions, but a piece of literature describing life in an omnipotent tyranny that destroys everything it touches, including the brief love affair of Winston and Julia, not only because it can but also because it must. The thought police are not so much looking for enemies as they are creating them, deliberately entrapping Winston just to give themselves something to do. This is both a strength and weakness of the original book: the soviet union appeared undefeatable in 1948 when 1984 was written, but at this point we know that such regimes eventually collapse under their own weight. This is not to say, of course, that such collapse is painless. The sheer level of hatred such regimes engender, the bitter frustration of being unable to speak your mind and the curdling of harmless thoughts into something dangerous because they cannot be expressed, ensures the explosion – when it finally comes – is terrifying. The French Revolution would not have been half so violent if the French Monarchy had not been so repressive.

This provides an interesting contrast between the two books. Winston is trapped an ever-present now. To him, the picture of a boot stamping on a human face forever is all too real; the Inner Party is all-powerful and the Thought Police are infallible. The constant rewriting of history is created a world in which the Party is in power, has been in power, and will always remain in power forever. Julia, by contrast, saw the foundation of the Party and the Rise of the New Order from a very different point of view, and knows the Party is made up of people, who are deeply corrupt and have no qualms about exploiting their position to enrich themselves. This should make her naturally more rebellious than Winston, and in a sense she is.

At the same time, the fact that Julia is manipulated into helping to entrap Winston and catch him in the act gives her character a far darker nature than in 1984. This offers the interpretation that Julia has no choice, that she is a product of a repressive and truly horrific regime and therefore has little resembling the morals of someone born in a more civilised society; it also suggests that Julia was a target as well as Winston, that she too was being entrapped even as she helped to trap others. It is unpleasant to realise that Julia is inadvertently responsible for revealing Winston’s greatest fear, leading to the denouncement in Room 101 and Winston’s mental surrender to the Party. It is also strange to realise she slept with nearly every named male character in the original book, and that she was also responsible for Parsons’ arrest through telling him to use ‘down with Big Brother’ as dirty talk in bed.

Winston himself, seen through Julia’s eyes, is also a different character. Sometimes pathetic, sometimes angry, sometimes a rebel without a cause or a clue. Indeed, there are times when he has stereotypical incel-fantasies about hurting women, the kind of fantasies men often have when they are deprived of more suitable ways to vent their feelings. (Domestic abuse was terrifyingly common in Soviet Russia, and remains so in dictatorial states today; women, understandably find such fantasies alarming.) Julia is often internally dismissive of him, mocking his belief they are doomed and that they have to get what pleasure they can before the inevitable catches up with them. She is less inclined to be intellectual than Winston, but when does she have the time to develop intellectual interests? There is far less privacy, let alone intellectual freedom, for unmarried young women.

I have very mixed feelings about the reimagining of their affair. The whole point of 1984 is that the Thought Police cannot allow any threat to the Party’s dominance to exist, even something as minor as a love affair between a low level functionary and a mechanic. The idea of Julia not being genuinely in love with Winston damages the original relationship in some way, and making her an active partner in betraying Winston and others degrades her character.

On a wider scale, Newman adds a considerable degree of depth to the world of 1984 and outlines what is like to live in such a state. The endless shortages are made clear, with the black market the only functional economic net in the city, as are the indignities women and low-ranking Party members are forced to accept – or else. Julia sees more of the world than Winston, from wandering into the world of the Inner Party – like many other real-world regimes, the Inner Party members and their families have luxuries the rest of the world are denied, treated like aristocrats in every sense the word – and then travelling outside the city, where she encounters rebels and liberators. Where 1984 is intensely focused on Winston, Julia brushes against other characters, from a prole mother running the black market and trying to make sure her daughter marries well to Vicky and even a woman who was once a senior member of the Party, now a prisoner whom Julia encounters while held in jail herself. This adds an odd little twist to the story’s changed theme – the Party is in fact falling apart at the seams – because Julia’s mother met the senior member when she was a great deal younger and she has gone up to the top and then down again.

This is illustrated by another point: early in the book, the prole mother is proud of her daughter for getting engaged to a well-connected young man; later on, with the wolf at the door, this love affair has come to an end and the poor girl has to pretend as herself, in hopes of staying safe from her fellow proles.

Newman also offers a great deal of social commentary. The lack of proper sex education and birth control leads, rapidly and inevitably, to unwanted children, illegal abortions, and a great many other tragedies. The inability to talk about such matters openly ensures that many are ignorant, or – worse – dangerously misinformed and the results are often horrific. The endless Hate sessions seem ludicrous, but celebrations of hate turn people into monsters and poison entire societies. The Hate Month shown in the book has uneasy parallels to events in North Korea, Iran, and Palestine, as well as college campuses in the wake of the Gaza War. These are not intended to show support, but to intimidate people into keeping their mouths shut and pretending to love Big Brother. Ironically, as Donald Trump’s victory in the recent election suggests, such displays are often counter-productive. Watching college students cosplay Kristallnacht shocked the world.

The ending of the novel is a very different take on the world of 1984 and part of me thinks it would better if it had ended with Julia’s realisation that she hated Big Brother. Winston is trapped forever in a nightmare, unsure when he will be finally taken and executed and yet certain that one day it will happen. Julia encounters rebels, and witnesses the fall of the regime: she even discovers the truth behind the portraits of Big Brother. It reminds me, in some ways of the ending of The Owl House or even The Trial of Anna Cotman, in which the ultimate villain is much harder to take seriously without the mask, and lacks any grand cause. The ideal of Big Brother is very different from the reality, much as Saddam Hussein was just a man when he was finally hanged. In hindsight, the hate served an obvious purpose in keeping the dictator’s subjects under his thumb until it was too late.

I have mixed feelings about it. The ultimate point of 1984 is that the regime will never come to an end. By contrast, Julia offers hope – but it is the hope of outside liberation, rather than an uprising that destroys Big Brother. Perhaps Newman will write a second book, from the point of view of someone who managed to flee Airstrip One, join the rebel army, and return in triumph. Or perhaps it would better to leave such things to our imaginations.

In conclusion, what can I say?

1984 remains one of the most important books in our canon for a reason. It is a grim reminder of just how bad tyranny can be, a cautionary warning we should heed in a world where we are, as the meme says, developing the torment nexus. We live in a world where we are threatened by enemies within and without: the former insisting loudly that they are driven by good intentions while forgetting where good intentions lead; the latter exploiting our good nature, the morals we have developed over the centuries, and turning them against us … and in doing so, eroding them to the point of uselessness. Julia adds a certain depth to the universe, not just in fleshing out characters who are unmentioned in the original, but in outlining both the greater world around London and the effects growing up in such an environment, surrounded by lies and the evidence of lies, can have on human minds.

It has its flaws. In some places, it cheapens the original book. But the author does a very good job of creating the same atmosphere, and also offering hints of hope mixed with fear. And perhaps it will cause some people to think of the dangers of building the torment nexus, of allowing disagreement to be criminalised and dissidents to be dehumanised, to strip rights from people you don’t like or disagree with only to discover, too late, that those who play with fire will often get burnt. If the ultimate lesson of any sort of radical movement is that it will eventually be destroyed in a purity spiral, or taken over by people who intend to exploit it while using the movement’s lingo to justify their actions and excuse their crimes, it is no bad lesson to learn.

Down with Big Brother!

OUT NOW – Fantastic Schools Sports!

With an all-new Schooled in Magic novella!

Have you ever wanted to go to magic school? To cast spells and brew potions and fly on broomsticks and – perhaps – battle threats both common and supernatural? Come with us into worlds of magic, where students become magicians and teachers do everything in their power to ensure the kids survive long enough to graduate. Welcome to … Fantastic Schools.

Meet a team of outcasts, planning desperately to prove they can win games, and leaders willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead; meet a young student convinced that games are worthless and planning to prove it. Meet a team of young magicians playing games and practicing for war; meet another, using a remarkable talent to catch a cheat. Meet players of games that can only be played through magic, and others more mundane … but with a magical twist. And many more …

Play up! And play the game!

Download from Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS NOW!

Snippet – Stolen Glory (Morningstar II)

Prologue I

From: The Rise and Fall of Leo Morningstar. Baen Historical Press. Daybreak. Year 307.

What can one say about Leo Morningstar?

How can one describe a dancing moonbeam? How can one catch lightning in a jar? How can one describe the innermost thoughts and feelings of a person one has never met? How long can a writer extend a sentence, how purple can he write his prose, before the editor tells him that it is nothing more than blatant padding to disguise the fact he doesn’t have a clue and his incredibly long run-on sentences are mountains of nonsense that most readers will tune out before they get to the reveal?

And how can a writer keep his editor from cutting the above paragraph?

Leo Morningstar was born in Cold Harbour, on Daybreak, the child of Senior Crew Chief Davis (who was awarded the Navy Cross by then-Captain Sullivan and took the name of his ship in thanks, as was and remains customary) and Hoshiko Davis, the daughter of two immigrants who earned citizenship and became a teacher. His father enjoyed the patronage of Grand Senator (Admiral) Sullivan, and a combination of this patronage and extremely good test rests ensured that Leo Morningstar was able to enter the Naval Academy at sixteen. He was a brilliant student, who became class valedictorian three years out of four (owing to a quirk in the system, the four years of academy training were required as four different establishments)  and would have probably become valedictorian for all four years if his first year hadn’t been marred by a brutal confrontation between himself and then-Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone whom Leo nearly beat to death after the older student insulted his mother. It was only through the direct intervention of his patron that Leo was not summarily expelled in disgrace.

The incident did seem to teach him a little prudence, according to his class reports, and he was on track to graduate at the top of his class. Indeed, his desperate plan to save the lives of his peers after a training exercise turned devastatingly real ensured his promotion to lieutenant, if provisional, and a glittering career. His progression came to an abrupt halt, the night before graduation, when he was caught in bed with Fleur O’Hara, the wife of Commandant O’Hara.

This posed an unprecedented dilemma for his superiors. If they demoted him now, after completing his training, and denied him the right to make the formal valediction speech, it would trigger a political crisis. His patron would demand answers, and there would be no good answers they could give. It would be a very public scandal, one that would call into question the academy’s independence from planetary politics. On the other hand, they couldn’t allow him to serve as the valedictorian either, let alone go on to take the promised slot on a front-line combat starship. His actions were a severe breach of the honour code and could not be allowed to go unpunished.

Deputy Commandant Horace Valerian hit on a solution that paid more credit to his head than his heart. Instead of demoting Leo Morningstar, he gave him an unprecedented promotion to Lieutenant-Commander and assigned him to RSS Waterhen, an outdated starship with a very hands-off captain, so hands-off, in fact, that he served almost no time on his vessel at all. Leo would be the de facto commander of Waterhen, during her assignment to a far-distant sector, and no matter the outcome – they thought – there was no way in hell he would ever trouble them again. So far from Daybreak, his chances of being noticed and gaining further promotion would be very slim. It was a neat little solution. Leo’s patron could hardly object to Leo being promoted and Leo himself could hardly refuse the assessment. And it provided a cover story to ensure he wasn’t on the academy grounds when the time came to give his speech. Leo was, in fact, put on a shuttle to Waterhen shortly after being given the news. It was generally assumed he would never be seen again.

Leo was not best pleased, when he arrived on Waterhen, to discover a very unhappy ship indeed. The crew were the dregs of the service and the nominal captain was even worse, spending most of his days in the pleasure dens rather than doing his job. He was not, however, trained to give up, and working with the few genuinely decent crewmembers (and abusing his absent captain’s command codes) he worked hard to bring his new command up to par. Waterhen would never be a front-line combat starship, as she was too outdated to serve in any major deployment, but she would be an effective anti-pirate ship. When she jumped out, and started her long voyage to the Yangtze Sector, Leo had at least some reason for confidence. Being so far from Daybreak would allow him to operate without supervision, giving him a chance to use unconventional tactics to defeat the pirates and convince the locals of the value of being part of the Daybreak Republic. Or, as they knew it even then, the Daybreak Empire.

The sector was in turmoil when Leo arrived. Some worlds had been forced into the republic and chaffed under its rule, complaining of the lack of rewards for their submission. Others remained isolated, or plagued by pirates and insurrectionists; it was hard, almost impossible, for the newly-appointed Governor Steven Brighton to make any headway, as he lacked any real naval support until Leo arrived. Bringing order to the sector would be a challenge to any lesser man, but Leo gritted his teeth and got to work. Through a series of daring operations, he destroyed or captured a number of pirate ships and took control of a pirate base, giving him the nucleus of an auxiliary fleet to patrol the spacelanes and make life difficult for the pirates. It was far from perfect, as he acknowledged himself, but it was a start. He also earned the admiration of Gayle Bridgerton, the daughter of Deputy Governor Hari Bridgerton, and they became lovers.

It was also a threat to a local consortium, led by Hari Bridgerton, that had been conspiring against the empire. Their plan had been thrown into disarray by Leo’s arrival and his bid to actually do his duty, forcing them to launch an attack, gambling they could capture or destroy Leo and his ship before it was too late. Their plan came very close to success, as Gayle was one of the conspirators and she was able to lure Leo away from his ship. but Leo was able to turn the tables and – through a brilliant and innovative tactic – destroy the enemy ship. Hari Bridgerton was apparently killed; the fate of his daughter remained unknown.

Leo had good reason to be pleased with himself, as his reports winged their way back to Daybreak. He had defeated a serious threat, put together a small squadron that could keep up the pressure on pirate operations, and proved that Daybreak was in the sector to stay. But all of his accomplishments were thrown into jeopardy by the arrival of reinforcements, commanded by Commodore Alexander Blackthrone, uncle to Lieutenant-Commander Francis Blackthrone, who had good reason to hate Leo’s guts …

Prologue II

“I can’t believe you got away with that,” Cadet Judy Singh teased. “What were you thinking?”

Leo smirked. The navel combat simulator was the most complex system known to mankind, the most realistic depiction of naval combat outside actual live-fire exercises. It had taken him weeks to even begin to get to grips with the sheer complexity of the system and his instructors had been at pains to assure him, and the rest of the cadets, that it was nowhere near as complex as serving in a real Combat Information Centre. There were no communications breakdowns, no speed of light delays, no subordinates who misunderstood your orders and did the wrong thing at the worst possible time. Leo had questioned the value of such a system and had been told they had to learn to walk before they could run, to understand how to handle the mock combat under ideal conditions before facing the fog of war and all the other little problems that made the simplest things difficult in the real world. And then he’d had his head handed to him by an officer who had commanded an actual deep-space engagement. It had been embarrassing.

His lips twisted at the memory. Losing to an experienced opponent was one thing, but it hadn’t been remotely a fair fight. Or so he’d thought. He’d actually lodged a protest when he’d been told he’d have a heavy cruiser, crammed with missiles as well as energy weapons, and his opponent would have a destroyer, barely armed with anything more than outdated missiles and popguns. The odds had been so heavily in his favour that he’d almost been embarrassed to step into the training simulator, knowing it would make him look like a bully. Or a coward. And then he’d lost the engagement, so decisively it had made him a laughing stock for several days afterwards. Sure, he’d had the firepower, but his opponent had known all the tricks. In hindsight, he should have rammed the destroyer with his heavy cruiser. It would have been a less embarrassing defeat.

“You had the edge on paper, Cadet Morningstar,” Instructor Griffin had said, afterwards. “But in practice, the victory will always go to the officer who knows his enemy and knows himself.”

Leo had taken the lesson to heart, after being forced to write no less than three after-action reports to explain his defeat. The instructor had known the capabilities of both ships and tailored his attacks to take advantages of weaknesses and blind spots, deploying his far more limited drones and other pieces of equipment to get close to the heavy cruiser’s hull and tear it apart at point-blank range. Leo couldn’t help thinking he’d deserved his humiliation, that if he’d played the engagement a little more carefully he would have won … not, he supposed, that he would have been able to enjoy his victory. On paper, the odds had been ludicrously in his favour. He might as well have been a grown man beating up a toddler. What sort of monster would applaud that?

He grinned. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Judy snorted, her lips wrinkling in a manner Leo would have found cute if he hadn’t been so tired. “Barely.”

“It worked,” Leo repeated. It wasn’t the sort of tactic he’d have cared to use in a real engagement, if only because there were too many things that could have gone wrong, but they’d been strongly advised not to even think about it. It hadn’t taken him long to realise they hadn’t been ordered not to try it. A loophole … small, he conceded, but there. “And if the OpFor CO had been a little more careful, the trick wouldn’t have worked.”

His lips twisted into a smile. He had no idea who’d been played the OpFor CO commander, but he’d been so convinced of his victory that he hadn’t even bothered to come in on a random vector. Perhaps he’d just wanted to get it over with, because he’d advanced towards the planet on a least-time course, something that had given Leo plenty of time to get his ships into position and power down his drives. The vessels had looked like holes in space, practically undetectable on passive sensors, until he’d hit the switch and opened fire at point-blank range. The OpFor CO had been caught completely by surprise, not even managing to get a single shot off before his ships had been blown away. Leo had no idea who’d been in command, on the other side, but he was going to get one hell of a lecture from his superiors. If the engagement had been real, it would have been the most one-sided victory in space-navy history.

Judy pointed a finger at him. “That won’t work twice.”

Leo shrugged. “Probably not.”

He followed her into the refectory, where the rest of the first-year cadets were eating before the next set of lectures and training exercises. They had been told it would only get harder, as they passed through the four-year training course … Leo winced inwardly, noting a handful of cadets who were likely to drop out before the exams at the end of the year. The instructors were good at spotting promising cadets and helping them overcome their early fumbles, but there were limits to how far they were prepared to go. Leo knew, without false modesty, that he was amongst the best. He also knew he was incredibly lucky to be anywhere near the academy. If he hadn’t had a prominent patron, the odds of him entering the academy would have been very low. He would have had to join the navy as a crewman and then become a mustang.

Which is far from impossible, he reminded himself. Quite a few officers, famed in song and story, had started their careers as simple crewmen. You just need the dedication to succeed.

A hand fell on his shoulder. “Morningstar!”

Leo tensed as he spun around. Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone was everything Leo detested wound up into one, a dashingly handsome young man who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The Blackthrone Clan had been amongst the original founders of Daybreak and they never let anyone forget it, certainly not the current generation who had no deeds of their own to their name. Francis’s name had been down for the academy since birth and there had been no question that he’d attend, something Leo would have sold his soul for. He had often wondered, as the older cadet hazed the youngsters, if Francis had actually wanted to attend. But the price for being a Blackthrone, it seemed, was upholding the family tradition of naval service followed by a political career. Whatever else could be said for a clan that had a habit of honouring the letter of the law while blithely subverting the spirit, they did ensure their children earned their citizenship. The only other option was disinheritance. A far worse fate than death.

Francis glared. Leo had often wondered if the young man had had his face reshaped into something that was a little too handsome to be true, the picture-perfect young officer with lantern jaw and stern features that could have stepped right out of a holomovie. It was odd to see such an expression on such a face, as if it wasn’t quite equipped to sneer properly. And he’d never liked Leo. Leo himself hadn’t been so concerned. Francis was a bully, like far too many lads he’d met at Cold Harbour, and most bullies were cowards at heart. The others, at least, hadn’t hidden behind rank and family name.

Leo loathed bullies. But he’d give them that much.

“What were you thinking?” Francis clenched his fists, his voice so loud the entire refectory heard it. “Why?”

Leo hastily ran through a mental checklist. What had he done? He’d showered at First Call, made his bed as per regulations, eaten a health breakfast and gone straight to his first lecture. He hadn’t even seen Francis for the last few days, and while the senior cadet was supposed to inspect the dorms he wasn’t supposed to do it until the end of the week. Perhaps he’d decided to do it early … no, there was no way the inspectors would let him get away with it. They gave Francis and the other seniors some leeway, but not that much.

He pasted a blank expression on his face. “This cadet requests clarification.”

Francis looked as if he was about to throw the first punch, a severe breach in regulations. “You tricked me!”

“I did?” Leo was honestly perplexed. He hadn’t had time to think about Francis and even if he had, pranking a senior cadet was asking for trouble … oh. “You were the OpFor Commander?”

“You tricked me,” Francis repeated. “You …”

Leo had to fight to keep his smile off his face. He hadn’t known Francis was the OpFor Commander, and the possibility had never crossed his mind, but … oh, that was glorious. Francis wasn’t a trained instructor, someone who might make a plausible mistake to see if the cadet noticed the window of opportunity and fired a salvo of missiles through it, and his mistake had been a honest one. Leo almost wished he’d been a fly on the wall, when the instructors pointed out in agonising detail precisely how badly Francis had screwed up. If he’d launched a single drone along his flight path, or realised his ships had already been detected and bringing the active sensors online wouldn’t make the situation any worse, he’d have won a pretty much effortless victory. He could have made Leo look a fool if he timed it just right … and even if he didn’t, Leo would still have put his ships in a bad position, effectively checkmating himself. It would have been an utter disaster. The instructors didn’t normally strike their cadets, but they might have made an exception for him.

“You should have been a little more careful,” he said. It wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a senior cadet, who had plenty of ways to make Leo’s life miserable, but it was true. “If you turned on your active sensors …”

Francis purpled. Standard tactical doctrine was to keep active sensors offline as long as possible, if only because their activation would tell the enemy where to aim, but Leo had already had a good idea where to point his guns. The ambush wouldn’t have worked so well if Francis had come to the same deduction and altered course, avoiding engagement and winning the match without so much as firing a shot or forced Leo to alter his own position before it was too late.

“You son of a whore,” Francis thundered. “You …”

Leo stilled, ice prickling down his spine. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your mother is a whore,” Francis snapped. Two bright red spots appeared on his cheeks, a reminder he’d been humiliated beyond words. Losing a simulated engagement to a junior cadet with just over nine months in the academy wasn’t unprecedented, and the instructors wouldn’t hold it against him, but losing in a manner that owed much to his own foolishness was a very different story. They wouldn’t let him get away with it. “She was screwing Sullivan and …”

Leo saw red and hit him, driving his fist hard into Francis’s chest. All cadets were required to take classes in martial arts, and Leo knew he was good at them, but he’d learnt most of his lessons on the streets. Neither polite words nor submission worked on a bully, a man so degraded he saw the former as a hint of weakness and the latter a confession. It was one thing to be insulted himself, to have everything from his uniform to his performance dissected in great and mocking detail, but his mother? His mother had raised him and his siblings alone, after their father had died in the line of duty, and an insult to her could not be tolerated. The idea she might have been cheating on her husband, his father …

Francis doubled over, gasping in pain. Leo brought his knee up hard, slamming it into France’s face. He felt the older cadet’s nose break, his body tumbling over and crashing to the floor. Leo kicked him as hard as he could, knocking Francis out. The darker part of his mind noted that it might have been a relief, almost a mercy. Francis had been in terrible agony. And he’d deserved every last bit of it.

Leo clung to that thought, afterwards, as the redcaps led him away, as the staff explained that only the direct intervention of his patron had saved him from expulsion. Leo had never felt particularly sorry, although he had learnt to control his temper a little better. Francis was too great a fool to have planned to let Leo throw the first punch and then beat the shit out of him, but someone a little smarter might certainly try. He paid as little heed to Francis as possible for the rest of the year, watching – and concealing his disgust – as Francis graduated a lieutenant. His family had to have arranged that for him, Leo was sure, perhaps in hopes of turning him into an asset in their endless struggle for power. Leo told himself, as he started his second year at the academy, that it didn’t matter. The odds were good he would never see Francis again.

In that, he was dead wrong.

Chapter One

Under other circumstances, Leo would have enjoyed the flight to RSS Pompey.

The battlecruiser was an awesome sight, a gleaming dagger against the stars and the blue-green planet below. Her lines were long and sleek, a stark contrast to the blunt outline of a battleship or the crude and functional lines of Waterhen. The designers had been allowed to let their imaginations run riot for once, crafting an starship that looked like a sword, ready to be drawn in the defence of the republic. Or for its expansion. Leo had believed firmly, only a year ago, in the mission, but now – if he were forced to be honest – he knew the galaxy was a messy place. There were no simple answers to the crisis that had provoked the Great War, and the rise of Daybreak, and there never would be.

He felt his heart sink as the battlecruiser grew closer, his mind torn between admiring her lines and the blunt, icy message that had summoned him to her. The battlecruiser was the flagship of a task force sent out to reinforce the naval presence in the sector, something he would have greeted with untrammelled delight if he hadn’t known the squadron was commanded by Commodore Alexander Blackthrone. Leo didn’t know for sure how the commodore was related to Francis Blackthrone – the Blackthrone clan was easily the most complex in the republic – but he would be. There was no one with a Blackthrone name who wasn’t one of the Blackthrones. The name belonged to the clan and the clan alone.

The pilot glanced back. “Sir, they’re requesting permission to take remote control.”

Leo shrugged. It was an insult, technically, but he didn’t blame the battlecruiser’s commander for being wary of a shuttle, no matter what IFF codes it was using. The trail of treachery that led all the way up to the sector’s Deputy Governor was undoubtedly alarming, if only because a man in that position could have easily obtained all kinds of information and access codes that should have been restricted to Daybreak personnel only, then forwarded the intelligence to his allies amongst the stars. Leo’s heart clenched painfully. Deputy Governor Hari Bridgerton was supposed to be dead, and his daughter too, but Leo feared Gayle was still alive. She was smart and adaptive and she’d pulled the wool over his eyes quite thoroughly, to the point he hadn’t had the slightest suspicion she was anything other than a young woman seeking escape from a humdrum life until it was too late. In hindsight …

Bad rolls of the dice are inevitable, he told himself, sternly. His instructors had pointed it out again and again, when the cadets had started training in earnest. No commander was ever-victorious and no career was ever unmarred by a mistake, one born of ignorance or simple misunderstanding. The trick is to pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, and keep going.

He scowled. He would see Gayle again. He was sure of it.

The shuttle rocked, slightly, as the battlecruiser took control. Leo didn’t need to look at the pilot to sense his unhappiness. They were well within communications range, the time delay so minimal it was barely measurable, and yet something could easily go wrong. The officer on the battlecruiser, flying the shuttle from a distance, didn’t have the feel for the controls or the craft itself that its real pilot had, nor was he in any real danger. Leo shrugged, putting the thought aside. Compared to all the other problems, the issue of who was flying the shuttle was decidedly minor.

He watched, coldly, as the shuttle levelled out and flew towards the docking hatch. Up close, the battlecruiser’s lines were marred by weapons ports, missile tubes and sensor arrays … a handful, he noted thoughtfully, looking decidedly out of place. The designers had left room for a piece of gear that would change the face of warfare, from what he’d heard at the academy, but – like so many other pieces of promised hardware – the new tech had failed to materialise. Leo had heard a great deal of speculation, from superluminal energy weapons to actual force fields, yet … he shrugged. He’d believe in such silver bullets when he saw them. He’d read Superiority. It was required reading at the academy. If it had been required reading elsewhere, a great many problems might have been avoided before it was too late.

A dull clunk ran through the shuttle as she mated with the docking point, followed by a low hiss and a faint flicker in the gravity field. Leo was almost relieved they’d been steered to the docking port, although it boded ill for his personal future. The idea of facing a welcoming committee of officers would be daunting at the best of times, and right now he was both a junior officer and a commanding officer. The navy was supposed to have protocols for everything, but he didn’t think there was a welcoming procedure for that. Probably. The commodore had clearly decided to dodge the issue completely. Leo didn’t blame him.

“Good luck, sir,” the pilot said.

Leo nodded, feeling a lump in his throat as he stepped through the opening airlock. He had no illusions about why he’d been promoted and sent to the sector, a knife in the back cunningly disguised as a reward, a poison pill he’d had no choice but to swallow. It would have been easy to sit in his cabin and sulk, or lose himself in the pleasure dens, or even join Gayle when she came to him … but he’d known his duty. He’d determined to make something of himself and … he’d done well. He knew it.

The inner hatch hissed open, revealing a figure Leo had hoped never to see again. Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone was as handsome as ever, with holovid star good looks Leo was sure were the result of gene-splicing and cosmetic face-sculpting. He was blond, with bright blue eyes and a face that managed to give the impression of both youth and maturity, wearing a dress uniform that was carefully tailored to show off his muscles without revealing any bare skin above the wrist. He was a Lieutenant-Commander now, Leo noted, with two stars on his collar … two starship assignments. Francis was four years older than Leo, and he’d graduated a Lieutenant three years ago, but that was still a surprisingly rapid advance. Or perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all. Francis was a Blackthrone.

And I can hardly talk about rapid advancement, Leo thought, wryly. His promotion had set records, and would probably cause no shortage of raised eyebrows if he’d been sent to a regular duty station. It took him three years to do what I managed in a day.

Francis met his eyes. His face was stern, but there was a hint of fear in his expression. Leo found it both reassuring and deeply worrying. Francis had always been a bully, someone who had lorded it over the plebs, and like most bullies he was a weak man at heart. Leo was mildly surprised he hadn’t found a way to extract revenge on Leo for beating him within an inch of his life, although the combination of shock and fear of Leo finding him in a dark alley one day had probably stayed his hand. Or he’d been biding his time. A strong man could acknowledge when he’d been beaten and move on. A weak man would risk everything just to tear his enemy down.

He might have more time in grade than me, but we’re still the same rank, Leo thought. He can’t use his position to put me in my place any longer.

“Morningstar,” Francis said. His tone was as snooty as ever. Leo made a mental bet with himself that Francis didn’t spend any time with the enlisted men. The battlecruiser was big enough to have a private mess for officers, and Francis certainly wasn’t the kind of person to get his hands dirty if it could be avoided. “Commodore Blackthrone is waiting for you.”

Leo saluted the flag, silently relieved he didn’t have to salute Francis, and allowed the older man to lead him through a maze of corridors. The battlecruiser was surprisingly sedate, for a ship that had just completed a long voyage, something that puzzled him. The crew should be lining up for shore leave … it was rare, almost unknown, for a crew not to be given leave after such a long voyage. Perhaps the commodore was feeling paranoid. Leo didn’t blame him for that either. The sector was nowhere near as peaceful as Leo had been told, when he’d left Daybreak. He dared not assume the attempted revolt was over.

Francis stopped, outside a hatch. “You may enter.”

“Thank you,” Leo said.

He had the satisfaction of seeing Francis twitch, just a little, before the hatch hissed open. The commodore’s office was surprisingly bare, for a scion of one of the greatest families in the republic, decorated only by a large family portrait and a painting of a heavy cruiser spitting missiles at an unseen target. The artist was talented, but clearly had only the vaguest idea of the cruiser’s design, drawing missiles erupting from tubes that simply didn’t exist. And yet, it was very dramatic. The only other display in the chamber was a holographic starchart, showing the local sector. Yangtze was surrounded by a handful of tactical icons. The rest of the stars looked deserted.

“Morningstar,” a cold voice said.

Leo straightened to attention, kicking himself mentally. He had been a de facto commanding officer for too long, without any real superior. Even Governor Brighton hadn’t had authority over him, the navy protecting its independence from colonial governors with the same determination it showed in its endless quest to wipe out pirates, terrorists and insurrectionists alike. Leo’s orders had noted he was to work with the governor, not for him. There was clearly a great deal that had been supposed to be passed down as he worked his way up the ladder …

“Lieutenant-Commander Leo Morningstar, reporting as ordered,” he said.

Commodore Alexander Blackthrone looked very much like an older version of Francis, although his gaze was sharper and his hair starting to turn grey. It was a vanity in its own way, a sign of age and experience … and a maturity that kept him from having his body rejuvenated completely, to make him an old man in a very young body. There’d be nothing wrong with his physical health, Leo was sure. The navy wouldn’t tolerate a flag officer who couldn’t handle the pressure, and it had no shortage of places it could send someone who couldn’t be easily dismissed.

“Leo Morningstar,” Commodore Blackthrone said. He held a datapad in one hand, his eyes skimming down the opened file. “Why were you promoted so quickly?”

Leo winced, inwardly. On one hand, his promotion was genuine. It could hardly have been otherwise. But on the other, there was no way such a promotion – given to someone still in the academy – would go unremarked. Questions would be asked, and very unfavourable conclusions drawn. It would be hard enough for an officer on active duty to be confirmed in his new rank, whatever the reasons for the promotion, but ludicrous for a raw cadet. He might have been a Lieutenant, and on track to graduate as one, yet a Lieutenant-Commander? Absurd.

He found himself honestly unsure how to respond. The truth had been carefully buried, hidden away behind a mountain of bullshit. Deputy Commandant Horace Valerian had excelled himself, putting together a picture that would go unquestioned, at least long enough to get Leo well away from Daybreak. The hell of it was that Leo’s own actions had brought his earlier promotion under scrutiny. If he’d sat on his rear and done nothing, rather than trying to do his duty, there wouldn’t have been any reason for anyone to look into the matter. If he hadn’t done his duty …

“I did extremely well at the academy, sir,” he said, finally. “The Deputy Commandant thought a merited a promotion and a new assignment.”

“To a rattletrap of a ship and a sector so far from civilisation they think a ship is something that floats on water,” Commodore Blackthrone said, dryly. “I read the file very carefully, Morningstar. I read it and I noticed all the questions it left unanswered, starting with the obvious issue of just why they promoted you and then assigned you to a death trap.”

Leo felt stung. “Waterhen is not a death trap, sir.”

“She is an outdated ship on a long-range patrol,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Hardly the sort of ship I’d assign someone I wanted to see promoted, Morningstar. My nephew was assigned to a modern battleship, before he came here.”

Francis, Leo thought, coldly. The Commodore is his uncle.

“So tell me,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Why were you assigned to Waterhen?”

Because they caught me in bed with the Commandant’s wife, Leo thought, feeling a flash of hot anger. And they wanted to bury the scandal, so they gave me a promotion and a duty assignment that would take me a very long way from Daybreak.

“The Deputy Commandant said it would give me a chance to make a name for myself,” Leo said. It was technically true, if misleading. But he didn’t want to land Fleur in any more hot water. If she could repair her marriage, more power to her. “I believe I have succeeded.”

“Quite.” Commodore Blackthrone held his eyes for a long moment. “I am sure he will be very proud of you.”

His tone suggested otherwise. Leo wondered, suddenly, just how much he knew about the scandal. There had been no Blackthrones on staff, as far as Leo could recall, but that was meaningless. The Blackthrones were amongst the most powerful patrons in the republic, with a web of clients that stretched all over Daybreak and beyond, all the way to the outer colonies themselves. If Commodore Blackthrone had wanted to get the truth, he probably could find someone on the academy’s staff who would fill him in. Leo groaned inwardly. No matter what happened, it was going to be a nightmare if the truth ever came out.

“I have also read your reports,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “Your conduct in this sector has been decidedly mixed. On one hand, you conducted a very effective anti-pirate campaign which culminated in the capture of a pirate base and the defeat of a rebel attempt to seize Yangtze, but on the other you repeatedly displayed a degree of immaturity, perhaps born of your relative inexperience, that came very close to getting you killed. Your stunt with the Q-Ship was marginally justifiable, but leading the mission to seize a pirate ship was insane.”

Leo tensed. “If you are referring to the incident on Yellowstone, I was caught on the ground and there was no time to arrange for anyone to take my place.”

“You should not have risked your life,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “You were the commanding officer, in a dangerous situation. Your place was on the bridge.”

“There was no time to return to the ship, and no way to do it without being detected,” Leo pointed out. Boothroyd had said the same, and far more bluntly, but Leo still felt he’d made the best of a bad set of choices. “And it worked.”

Commodore Blackthrone smiled, humourlessly. “You also displayed several other errors of judgement,” he said. “You recruited marines without any vetting process, or indeed anything more than basic training. You recruited spacers as naval auxiliaries without clearing it with the authorities. You overthrew a planetary government without good cause and …”

Leo started. “Sir, I …”

“Please don’t interrupt,” Commodore Blackthrone said, the very mildness of his tone turning Leo’s blood to ice. “Worst of all, you allowed a young woman to seduce you … a young woman who turned out to be a rebel, perhaps even the rebel leader.”

“There was no clue,” Leo said. “It wasn’t until afterwards that we realised how closely she and her father, and the rest of the rebels, were working together.”

“It was a planned seduction,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “And you fell for it.”

Leo couldn’t deny it. “Yes, sir.”

“And that let you get lured into an ambush, and then forced into a knife-range engagement with a much heavier starship,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “You trusted the wrong person because you were sleeping with his daughter.”

“There was no reason to expect treachery on such a scale,” Leo countered, stiffly. “And we had no reason, either, to expect the enemy would have ships that could stand up to us.”

“And you still have no idea where those ships came from,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Correct?”

Leo scowled. His analysts had combed through the wreckage as well as every record they could find, trying to put together a trail leading back to the mysterious backers. They’d drawn a complete blank. The money didn’t appear to have come from Yangtze, and the ships themselves certainly couldn’t have. But where had they come from?

He gritted his teeth. “Yes, sir.”

“Which is a problem that will now bedevil my intelligence staff,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “Who gave the rebels those ships and why?”

He went on before Leo could outline his list of suspects. “You have done well for yourself, and lived up to Valerian’s faith in you. However, it is clear to me that you require more seasoning before you can be entrusted with a command, a formal command, of your own. This sector is becoming more important to the Republic and you can no longer be allowed to play at being a fleet commander out here.”

Leo felt his heart sink. “Sir?”

“Accordingly, Lieutenant-Commander Blackthrone will be transferred to Waterhen as soon as possible,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “I trust you will make his assumption of the post an easy one.”

He smiled, coldly.

Coming Soon …

Some Idle Thoughts On The 2024 Election

This girl killed herself – and died a horrible death. But each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it. But then I don’t think you ever will. Remember what you did, Mrs Birling.

You turned her away when she most needed help. You refused her even the pitiable little bit of organized charity you had in your power to grant her. Remember what you did.

(snip)

Well, Eva Smith’s gone. You can’t do her any more harm. And you can’t do her any good now, either. You can’t even say “I’m sorry, Eva Smith.” But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.

-Inspector Goole, An Inspector Calls

A few months ago, there was a brief flurry of excitement online about an American teacher who was discovered being an OnlyFans model and was fired, probably under a boilerplate morality clause. The news gave me some very mixed feelings. On one hand, I think that teachers (particularly teachers of teenage boys) should not be posting pictures on OnlyFans. It is very hard to think of someone in quite the same way if you have seen them naked, and this is particularly true for teenage boys. On the other, teachers are grossly underpaid for a number of reasons and a disturbingly high number of school staff have to supplement their earnings with gig labour and other non-academic sources. It is easy to condemn a teacher using OnlyFans when you are not worried about making ends meet, but a great deal harder to make ends meet on a poor salary earned by doing a very difficult job.

This leads to a point that often goes unremarked, although it is always true. A person in a bad situation will make bad choices. (For example, Severus Snape joining the Death Eaters.) It is easy to condemn such a foolish decision, but harder to provide an alternative that would keep people from doing something foolish because they see no other choice. I would have more sympathy for a school board that fired a teacher for using OnlyFans if that school board paid the teachers enough to ensure they didn’t have to use OnlyFans.

Most people, in my opinion, do not make bad choices because they get up one morning and say to themselves “today I shall make a bad choice.” They make bad choices because they have no other options. And then someone looks down from high overhead and condemns them, as Dumbledore condemns Snape, often choosing to overlook their own role in limiting someone’s choices so they can moralise without having to deal with the consequences of not making the best of a bad set of choices. People who wish to play ‘Sybil Birling’ often discover they are loathed and hated, not because they are inherently bad people but because they have no empathy for people caught in a trap they cannot escape.

So what does this have to do with the 2024 election?

Since it became mathematically certain that Donald Trump would pull off a near-unprecedented return to the White House, my friends list has been exploding with people who are gleefully exulting about Trump’s success and others reacting with absolute horror. The latter have no love whatsoever for Trump and his supporters, and they don’t have any empathic understanding of precisely why anyone choose to vote for him. This leads far too many to try to exclude Trump’s supporters, or to pour scorn on them in a manner that probably helped Trump win the election (every time you called a Trump supporter an idiot, Trump got an extra ten votes), and generally refuse to comprehend that for most of his supporters Donald Trump was the best of a bad pair of choices.

This is driven, I think, by elitist politicians who do not wish to face up to the uncomfortable truth that they, more than anyone else, laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. His election in 2016 should have been a wake-up call. Hillary Clinton was not a poor choice because she was a woman, but because she was an elitist who had very little empathy with the average American and effectively rigged the nomination in her favour. Kamala Harris had a very similar problem. Indeed, in many ways, Harris was in an even worse place. Hillary Clinton had far more experience and she had been challenged and questioned in ways Harris never faced.

I could say a great many things about this, but they all boil down to one point:

If you wish to defeat someone like Donald Trump, you have to provide an alternative. And that alternative has to actually be something the voters want!

The average person doesn’t care about elitist concerns. They care about the economy, they care about their ability to put food on the table, they care about crime and security and safety: they object, strongly, to being told they have to sacrifice, to put aside logic and reason and surrender their right to come to terms with the changing world in their own way. They want to feel that they have agency, that they have control over their own lives, and that is something that is increasingly stripped from them. In many ways, Kamala Harris was the ultimate representation of a lack of agency. There was no primary, not even a very hasty process, for her to replace Joe Biden on the 2024 Democratic ticket. She was just forced down the throats of countless Americans and they rejected her.

I believed that the 2016 election result would lead to a period of soul-searching on the part of both Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans would have to acknowledge their mistakes, the ones that allow Donald Trump to steal the party from its former leadership; the Democrats would have to admit that they lost touch with the average American and rebalance themselves to compete in the new political era. In that, I was completely wrong. The Republicans were frozen by the horror and indignity of having to cope with a Trump presidency, while the Democrats threw a four-year temper tantrum rather than admit their mistakes and come up with a proper alternative.

There is a lot I could say about this, but here is food for thought. Throughout the history of the Western World, there have been numerous violent upheavals, from the Young King’s War to the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the English Civil Wars, the American and French Revolutions and even the American Civil War. Although these events took place over nearly a thousand years of history, they all have one thing in common. The elitists, from monarchies to slaveowners, refused to give up even a little power, to share what they had and accept a new reality in which their whims were no longer absolute and the people they had once ruled were no longer disposed to accept a social order tilted against them. Their attempts to keep the lid on only ensured that when the explosion came it was disastrous, shattering the social order and sparking off wars and upheavals that still resonate today. Worse, after the upheavals came to an end, the elitists often showed that they had learnt no lessons from the affair.

Donald Trump’s election is not a victory for racism or sexism or –phobia or the all-purpose bigotry. It is a rebellion against the political elite, an elite that is steadfastly refusing to give up power and propagating policies that might be beneficial to the elitists themselves but extremely harmful to their subjects. Trump was elected because he saw there was an ever-increasing mass of angry and discontented people who wanted to push back, and made himself their representative. And it was easy, because there was no alternative.

It isn’t easy to let your own mistakes. It isn’t easy to empathise with people on the other side. But it has to be done.

Or else there will be many more upheavals to come.

A Brief Introduction To The Inverse Shadows Universe

The universe is a very strange place.

As it became aware of the possibility of life on other worlds, the human race was increasingly baffled by the absence of apparent alien civilisations. Logically, humans reasoned, any species capable of intelligence would eventually develop spaceflight and even if they were restricted to slower than light spacecraft they would have spread across the universe well before the human race discovered fire. A number of theories advanced to explain the lack of intelligent races, ranging from humanity being truly unique to a hostile force that tracked down and destroyed intelligent races as they developed technology. It was not until the human race developed warp drive, and later hyperdrive, that the truth was finally uncovered.

Intelligent races, it was discovered, generally fell into three categories. Some races never developed technology, never developed scientific methods they needed to understand the universe around them and therefore never progressed beyond the stone or iron age. Some races fell victim to their own technology, fighting a nuclear war or accidentally creating antimatter or black holes on their homeworlds, wiping themselves from existence. And still others developed socially as well as technologically, passing through the singularity and developing post-scarcity societies, and never felt the need to settle vast regions of interstellar space. It was surprisingly rare for a spacefaring species to colonise more than a handful of star systems, before they reached the point that further expansion seemed pointless. Their maturity led them to isolate themselves from other developing worlds, when they encountered them, and eventually to seek fulfilment by transcending become a higher order of life. In doing so, they effectively removed themselves from the universe.

The human race was unusual in that it developed faster than light travel before it was mature enough to handle it. Instead of a slow and steady settlement process, humanity exploded in all directions, expanding so rapidly that hundreds of planets were settled within a few dozen years and a number of races, trapped in technological bottlenecks, found themselves introduced to the wonders of interstellar civilisation. Humanity rapidly discovered dozens of worlds that had been left behind by races heading into the higher orders, and artefacts that veered from understandable to the completely incomprehensible; they stumbled across the Galactic Net, the creation of a long-gone race that allowed sufficiently advanced aliens to converse with their peers, and developed their own, often bootstrapping human technology on the remnants of alien civilisations. It was a time of great heroism, of pushing back the boundaries of the possible, but it was also an age in which some of humanity’s worst traits were allowed to roam free. Humans dreamt of a universe in which everyone was equal, but others dreamt of a galaxy ruled by the human race – or nightmares in which a handful of genetically superior humans would rule the rest of the race for the rest of time. In some ways, humanity’s vast expansion made it extremely difficult for the human race to mature, pass through the singularity, and develop a post-scarcity society. Even now, humanity has not quite faced up to the past and prepared itself to walk into the future.

It is often said that the Confederation is the last survivor of the wars for supremacy over the human race. It is a post-scarcity society in the truest possible sense; it has no trouble meeting the reasonable or often unreasonable demands of its human inhabitants, from simply ensuring they have more than enough to eat to churning out everything from private starships and fabricators to entire pocket universes and de facto immortality. The average inhabitant can live pretty much as they please, as long as they don’t infringe on the rights of others, and in consequence there has been a great flowering of technology, artwork, and everything else that gives the human race meaning. Crime is almost nil, with the exception of sociopaths (see below), and a combination of freedom of expression and very few laws have ensured a certain degree of maturity for the human race.

The Confederation has almost completely abandoned planets, choosing instead to build megastructures, pocket dimensions and planet-sized starships to house its population. The vast majority of humanity’s former colony worlds have been restored to their pre-discovery state, as much as possible, and left fallow in the hope they will one day produce an native race of their own. Earth herself is one of the handful of planets that remain inhabited, cleansed of the pollutants of early technological development and turned into a tourist attraction. Most humans will make a pilgrimage to Earth at least once in their lives. It is generally expected that the remaining worlds will be abandoned in the next few thousand years.

The average human child is born into a luxury their predecessors would have trouble comprehending. Most humans spend their first decades developing a basic understanding of their society, then indulging themselves until they develop the maturity to realise that pleasure is not the be all and end all of their existence. At that point, they start to search for meaning in their lives: they join the Peacekeepers (the de facto Confederation Navy), lose themselves in research, or join one of the uplift programs designed to assist races trapped in technological bottlenecks without destroying them through contact with a vastly superior species. A handful request private starships and set out on their own missions of exploration, although the Confederation generally maintains a careful watch on such missions and forbids unsupervised contact between humanity and races that have not reached interstellar space on their own merits.

The Confederation is a representative democracy, with each habitat electing a council that makes local decisions and a representative who speaks for the habitat in the Confederation Senate. Most matters are debated endlessly on the datanet, before referendums are held, and everyone is allowed to have their say (although there is no requirement for everyone else to listen). Politics are normally low stakes, which does tend to make debates more intensive. The few matters that are genuinely serious – contact with peer aliens, for example – are treated with more caution.

The Confederation’s medical science is second to none. The average human has been genetically improved to render them incredibly adaptable, to the point they are immune to almost all known diseases; it is child’s play, to the Confederation, for a human to change sex, skin colour, or even basic bodily form (or upload themselves into a datacore/android body/nanite cloud) and indeed most citizens will spend some time experimenting with such matters until they discover one they find comfortable. The average human is also effectively immortal, their cells regenerating automatically and in the event of actual death, most humans can be resurrected from their backups (although some humans choose not to have backups).

The Peacekeepers are the closest thing the Confederation has to a proper Navy, and they are – to all intents and purposes – the most powerful military force the human race has ever assembled, with weapons that can atomise planets and trigger supernovas. Service is strictly voluntary, with a training period followed by a first deployment; promotion is strictly on merit, and – unlike the rest of the Confederation – there is a firm chain of command. The majority of Peacekeeper starships are cruisers, capable of handling most operations alone, but backed up by planetoids if they face a more significant threat. Their ancestors would find the Peacekeepers disturbingly lax, when it comes to matters of discipline, but they are well trained and most discipline is internal (a consequence of most volunteers being constantly older than their ancestors when they join up).

Crime is relatively low within the Confederation, a natural effect of living in a post-scarcity society. There is no need to steal food, for example, and most human desires can be met quite easily without infringing on someone else’s rights. However, the human race has not yet managed to expunge all of its demons: sociopaths, humans who get their pleasure through hurting others (or playing games with other races), remain a constant headache. Most tend to be extremely adaptable and innovative, which makes them incredibly dangerous because they lack the morality of the mature human race. If they are caught, they are normally given a flat choice between personality reconstruction or permanent exile to an asteroid that has every luxury save one: the right to leave. It is often claimed that the Peacekeepers sometimes recruit sociopaths for dangerous missions, but that is simply untrue. The Peacekeepers have no trouble finding someone capable of handling nearly any mission, without the downsides of having to deal with a known sociopath.

Perversely, the simple fact that the sociopaths are willing to transgress so blatantly against the laws of their society gives them a kind of disturbing glamour. Some take advantage of this, broadcasting recordings of their crimes into the datanet and revelling in their infamy: others, perhaps driven by demons they do not fully understand, try to stay as undercover as possible.

The Confederation attempts to maintain friendly relationships with peer powers (alien civilisations advanced enough to give the Peacekeepers a fight). This isn’t easy. Some races are too alien to be easily understood, others resent or fear the human race; some are so distant, on their way to join the higher orders of life, that they are beyond all contact. A surprising amount of contact occurs at lower levels, meetings on neutral territory (such as the Life Sphere), or through the Galactic Net. By contrast, the Confederation attempts to keep its distance from less advanced races, fearing the disruption direct contact will cause to their societies. The possibility that the more advanced peer powers feel the same way, about humanity, is one the Confederation chooses to overlook.

Despite being one of the most advanced (and certainly the most populous) societies in known space, there are still mysteries that baffle the Confederation. A handful of inexplicable alien artefacts have been discovered, their mysteries beyond human understanding; several hundred worlds are dead, so dead they appear to be wrapped in timeless space and modern technology, no matter how advanced, is disturbingly unreliable on such worlds. The ancient sections of the Galactic Net whisper of godlike beings, and wars fought so long ago that they have passed into legend, and races that were actually designed by elder races, their origins long forgotten. It is rare for an archaeologist to stumble across something really dangerous, but isn’t unknown. The Confederation attempts to keep a watch on all potentially-dangerous alien artefacts, yet even the Confederation cannot keep an eye on all of them.

In some ways, the sheer scale of humanity’s advancement makes such mysteries harder to tolerate. But the quest to solve them may lead the human race into some very dangerous places indeed.