Well of Souls Forums

Nothing deters the true gourmet!

When I first read that article, I thought, "oh, so Alex's probably going to eat Perrein cuisine and find it appealing and that'll let him find some common ground with, I dunno, Tempo or someone." Now, upon re-reading it, I suddenly remembered what Carboniferous fauna were actually like. Centipedes ...

...Once again proving that citizens of a democratic society have no trouble rooting for aristocracy, as long as they can imagine that they'll get to be the aristocrats.

Well, the big problem with any despotism is structural - there are still internal power-plays, but they're much, much worse than in a democracy (where power plays are openly acknowledged and governing bodies are structured to control them) - part of it is how much more power is at stake, and part of...

If you surrender your people to a hostile power and you are rewarded by being made dictator for life and elevated to the enemy nobility, then that's called "selling out." I don't mean to give the wrong impression -- the series is well worth watching if just for the space battles, which are quite in...

Hmm. What if the Umiak are actually (in comparable terms) the 'good guys'? ;) If you think about it, they are more industrious, less concerned about honour, pragmatic, willing to accept surrender, individually pleasant, collectively xenophobic, and rather bad for the enviroment. Sounds like America...

The Loroi never used nuclear weapons against their own people, though they have since used much more terrible weapons against entire alien species. The ancestors of the Umiak fought a millennia-long global war against their more advanced Tizik-tik relatives in which (allegedly) weapons of mass dest...

That's more what I had in mind. The impression I get is that it's vanishingly unlikely that Umiak-on-Umiak violence is involved, just that someone saw the Bellarmine as a crucial piece in their game and torched it.

Is there an Umiak Chess/Go/Shogi equivalent?

Really loving the awkwardness and ambiguity of the Umiak translation, as well as the creepy implied movement of their mouth parts. You've done a really impressive job of selling them as alien, antagonistic, and frightening. Has anyone raised the possibility of intra-Umiak political maneuvering yet? ...

The quality of a weapons system has relatively little to do with engineering specs, except insofar as those specs satisfy the needs of the operator. Let's pretend the two battleships are roughly equal (they aren't, for all the reasons laid out above by other posters and more). By that standard, Bism...