Date: 18 Sep 2013 01:09 Title: The High Cost of Dissidence
Well having read the full reversal it’s interest to see the true story behind that house fire in the Mirror Universe. I think you manage to capture the oppression and bleakness of living under the Terra totalitarian state. How everything can disappear with just one statement and how little choice the average person has.
I think you manage to give all four characters depth and believability, so that even by the end of this short story we care about their deaths on their own terms and not in a political prisoner camp or on the streets. Ending with the Terra media spin on the events just add to the heavy feel that even stands against the Empire can be white washed out.
Author's Response:
Yep, it's all propaganda and lies, all the tools of the totalitarian state.
Many thanks for reading (and I didn't know you'd read Reversal, too!).
Date: 12 May 2013 04:43 Title: The High Cost of Dissidence
In a word: Sad.
In two words: Very sad.
Wow. I knew the Terran Empire was brutal but I didn't think they were so brutal that suicide, with your children of all people, would be preferable to living a shitty life. I know Pete screwed up and I honestly kinda hated him for it, because it's not as though he was new at this. You never be critical of the Empire. So seeing him go didn't hurt.
Seeing that bright little life that was Charlotte go did. Man, in the short space you had here, you really made me like that kid. She was exhuberant. She was happy. She was bouncy. All fun, it seemed. I would have very much liked to seen if she could have maintained some of that out on the streets ... but she wasn't given the chance.
I don't agree with what the parents did here. I know their lives were going to hell but they weren't dead yet. There was still the faintest bit of hope but packing it in, dooming the children to death because you couldn't deal with the harsh reality that was coming ... didn't sit well with me.
The story hit hard. Well done.
Author's Response:
Wow, thank you - you're very kind.
Charlotte is Lili O'Day's counterpart. Life is, as you can see, very, very different.
As Thomas Hobbes said, it's short, brutal and nasty.
A lot of people see the MU as being a big, campy life. I don't. I see it as tarted-up totalitarianism. This is a big part of why Doug, for me, is such an important character. He maintains a degree of morality (although he perpetrates plenty of what we would consider to be crimes) that the others, for the most part, don't.