I should be getting ADCP in the mail sometime this week, hopefully i’ll have time to start it soon. I’ll let you know how i get on (if you’re interested)

I hope that line made the final edit

Feel free to jump on the bandwagon and add a few witty comments in a few of our other threads. Theres bound to be a cover or two in here that make you smile.

There’s no republican or democrat in the books. I think the only parties mentioned, or ireasonably inferable, are the Federalist (US), Progressive (US…and, I suppose, those are close to some notion of Dem and Repub, but Progressive is more openly social democrat while I never did lay out a platform for the Federalists), the Tsarist-Marxist Party (Volgan Republic), and the Legion and the Oligarchs (neither of which have a party name) in the Republic of Balboa. There’s also, in The Lotus Eaters, a series of epigraphs taken from that well known 25th century text, Historia y Filosofia Moral, by Jorge and Marqueli Mendoza (the real Marqueli is my wife’s cousin and she’s perfection in miniature).

Oddly enough, and personally I consider it very odd, the main character, Carrera, will have ended up setting up a state that is, on the one hand, highly timocratic, a la Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but also heavily socialized. He didn’t intend to. The road that got him there is one that no self-respecting socialist would care to trod. But it was also fairly inevitable, in context.

I don’t recall if I left the line in, but in at least one version there was a moment, an epiphany, where he thought to himself, “Crap! I’ve created a socialist worker’s paradise. Crap! And it works reasonably well. Dammit!”

I don’t think i’ll mind ADCP too much. I’ve read a few reviews now and it seems again to have attracted more than its fair share of controversy. I honestly think i’ll fall into the category of people who disagree with its political message, but you have given me fair warning.
I also think it won’t have quite the same effect on a UK reader as it would on a US reader, since i have no allegance to democrat/republican party or anyone else for that matter. I think i’ll still be able to enjoy it for a good novel.

I really like the Lotus Eaters piece of artwork, especially the top half (pretty grusome). It looks 3D rendered. Still not convinced i like the style of art in general on a book cover though.

Again, fair warning, the torture in ADCP is considerably more methodical and organized. Not everybody captured gets tortured. I gave the subject quite a bit of thought, though some of that thought only shows up inferentially. It all takes place on a ship out at sea. Nobody is tortured who has not been found guilty of a war crime and sentenced to death (which is almost a rubber stamp as the charge is generally “Conspiracy to conduct war in an illegal manner,” which _everyone_ on the other side is guilty of. And I figure if you can put someone to death you can do less than death, too). Everyone subject to torture is put to death and turned into chum after being wrung out. The numbers of people doing the work is kept deliberately low to help ensure that only those who are most likely to yield actionable intelligence get the treatment. And everyone gets the tour of what can and will be done (taking a leaf from the Spanish Inquisition) before any pain is applied. Some, many even, talk without pain.

I don’t know that I’ll convince you or anybody that torture is the right thing, and surely not that it’s an inherently good thing. I couldn’t because it isn’t. I think I’ve succeeded, though, in making a fair number of people admit that it’s a lot more ambiguous a question than they’d have preferred to think. That’s good enough for me.

I don’t think it’s a fair claim that liberals won’t fight. After all, they surely have, time and again. It is a fair claim that some of them won’t fight, liberalism being so broad an outlook, and that most of them (not all, see, eg, Alan Derschowitz) will be rather more squeamish about the methods of fighting to be used. It’s also a fair claim that some of the knee-jerk, generally Marxist, anti-Americans would fight, physically or with words and ideas, but only against the west and/or the US. They’re not liberal, though.

Covers again…you’re probably right about certain types of covers doing better or worse in some places than others. If you google, “Warta na Renie,” which is the Polish translation for Watch on the Rhine, they’ve got a completely different cover, though even more garish. And German covers, generally, are both garish and have not a blessed thing to do with the book.

The wife…yeah. Panamanian women are good looking, generally, but she was and is something else. Very traditional family, been ranching the same land for about 400 years. I didn’t get to take her on an unaccompanied, after hours, date until we were married. Somewhat like her 97 year old grandmother (now deceased), the one with the shape of the 14 year old girl, _after_ bearing a dozen children that _lived_; she still has the shape of a young women. Yolanda, even when pregnant was an hourglass with a pot in front. The grandmother, by the way, is Digna in Yellow Eyes. She looked a lot like Yolanda but tiny, blond, French, and with bright blue eyes. Yoli’s mostly Euro – half Spanish, a quarter French, and about a quarter of the local Indian, with some small admixture of Arab or Berber in there somewhere.

I think the only reason you can get away with it in scifi fantasy, is that the “bad guys” are evil, usually with no redeeming features, and the good guys only need to be slightly less evil to still be liked by the readers. Hence why SS Nazis vs Aliens intent on total world destruction somehow seems ok, but at the same time when you pick SS Nazis to be the heros you set them up as “good guys”, which they aren’t; they’re only relatively good guys. I’d like to think this is true in Watch on the Rhine

I think the problem with having characters represent a politcal viewpoint arrises when they stop acting like real people. Using the example of torture, average Joe american may agree that torture for the greater good is acceptable, but put the car battery or red hot poker in his hand and suddenly he REALLY has to think about where his morals lie.

Also problems arise when you stereotype politics. The Liberals won’t fight and they’ll just sit and cry as the invaders walk in. While at the opposite end of the spectrum you have people torturing children in the name of patriotism. I don’t mind it in novels, i just would hate to think the author is trying to convice me that the torture is the right thing for people in real life to do.

I’m pretty much rambling, but i completely agree what you are saying about it being impossible to avoid politics in novels on the large scale that you set them, but at the same time i think authors can fall into the trap of stereotyping once they start taking about politics.

You’ve interested me though. I’ve ordered ADCP and will read it with an open mind. Although i can respect that the cover expertly drawn and its cool that you have a working relationship with the artist (which seems very rare in the publishing business) and so much time and thought has gone into it. All im saying is that what advertises and sells a book well in the US doesnt necissarily do the same everywhere else.

One final point, i think because you have such a friendship with Kurt and he is a fan of your work, the covers actually mean something to the book. But very few artists really take the time to read the book and as a result the scene on the cover usually DOESNT happen in the book and characters portrayed there only have a vague resembalance. You’re pretty lucky to have Kurt.

P.S. Smart move proposing to your wife so soon after meeting her!

The statue in the center of ADCP is taken from one of my wife’s old modelling photos, which Kurt then turned into stone and added shadows to, since it is supposed to be in the central open courtyard of their house. This is her: http://www.tomkratman.com/yoli.html.

Unless you’ve got the big framed print on the wall, you can’t tell how really outrageously, even painfully, good looking she is (was, but really still is, although she’s pushing 50; odd genetics, her grandparents had nearly four centuries between them, and that’s with Third World medical care). I’ve seen her literally cause traffic jams and accidents just by walking along the sidewalk. And she got progressively better looking for the first 24 years we were married. Even those pics on my site don’t do her justice. Still, it’s a nice looking statue.

And that’s something else a cover can do for the reader. He can read the story, then reference back to the woman who motivates the man (or it could work the other way, perhaps) and understand, “Ohhh, _that’s_ why he goes a bit nuts after losing her…”

Let me give you an example: There’s little doubt in my mind that both Giuliana Sgrena and Suzanne Osthof volunteered to be kidnapped to help raise money for the opposition in Iraq. Osthof was probably acting as a privatus, but Sgrena was a member of the press, and as such held on to the altogether-too-overstretched notion of press inviolability. What we do about people doing things like this is a political question. How does one avoid politics when discussing the issue? How do you avoid politics when the motivation for the woman volunteering for kidnap is Marxism? (I won’t tell you what happens in the book to Giula Massera and Suzanne Westplatz, but you probably won’t like it.)

Torture? How does one avoid politics while discussing torture objectively? I don’t think it can be done. Reprisals, same deal. If you’re building an army afresh in a Third World kleptocracy, how do you avoid the politics of the cracy of the klepts? I doubt it can be done.

In a world where damned near every action by a major player has political implications, how do you make his actions logically consistent unless you give him (or her) a political philosophy?

A little warning is in order. A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex were supposed to be one book. I hit 360,000 words and the publisher said, “Too hard to bind; split it into two.” Collectively, though, they’re a roughly half million word single book. The bad part of splitting them is that the preparation to action ratio in ADCP is unfortunately high, while the preparation and background to action ratio in Carnifex is nicely low. That can make ADCP drag in places, unless you are really fascinated by the nuts and bolts of creating a military force from scratch. Some people really liked that, and some it drove to distraction.