This storyline is the last hurrah for a group of Juniors this big. It's quite hard to write a good dynamic for a bunch this size.


It was a brief development during the final assault on the Parody Master, sometime in or around UT#321. As I recall there was more or less a couple of paragraphs in a list of descriptions of the multi-pronged attacks that Danny was undertaking for Mumphrey.

The flooded with refugees bit and the return to the Pacific rim are new information this chapter. Had poster-spiffy stayed around for the end of the Parody Master story there might well have been a chapter covering this bit of the storyline, drawing on the "fortress under siege" motifs of WW2 Malta - or the Alamo. What we're hearing about here is the shorthand version of a sub-plot that actually happened offscreen in the end.


Probably wise.

I admit to also having some reservations about the way of reform outlined in this story. I'm with the people who hold that slavery is bad. On the other hand, having established a fantasy world parodying the various slave-culture cliches in SF I find myself unable to believe that a whole society would just decide that slavery was bad and change overnight. It seems too unrealistic to my sensibilities. On the other hand, I do want to suggest progression and the possibility of eventual resoluton. This was my compromise.

It's interesting to speculate what might have happened had the US Civil War not happened. Abolitionists got a bit of a free ride because of the conflict. Maybe slavery would have come to an end anyhow in decades to follow given the evolving social pressure and changing economic situation; maybe not.

In this case, though, the parallel I had in mind was ancient Rome, where a slave-based society evolved slowly into a property-owning a society in part because slaves were allowed to buy their freedom, buy their family's freedom, then climb the social ladder to full citizenship. It was a much slower change that some of the more sudden legislative resolutions - like the British law that eradicated slavery across the Empire at a stroke - but then Rome was far more dependant on slavery than later Europe and the Americas ever was.