Cedo Alteram

Yes, that's Latin for "get me another"; it was the nickname of a centurion who could be played by R. Lee Ermey.

Anyhoo. I finished rewriting my second SF novel recently. Tentatively entitled "The Dark Gates Stand Open," it features most of the characters from the first one, on a different planet, one Julian year later. Where the first sort of had "you're not on my side so I don't even have to keep my word to you" as its theme, this one has more to do with the way people will manage to combine atrocities with self-righteousness in the oddest ways.

The title comes from a quote from the Aeneid (sorry if you don't like this translation, but English accent-structure's so wonky we need end-rhyme):

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.

Say, what is it about the Gates of Hell that makes people want to wander into them? (obligatory MST3K reference).

Story's a bit darker this time around. One of the villains is a politician who talks the most high-toned drivel about progress and equality. And then he turns around and massacres civilians, arranges labor-laws so he has his pick of (destitute) ex-soldiers for his private army, and intentionally employs people with a penchant for atrocities, on the thinking that their excesses will cow his opponents, while the fact he didn't actually order them to do it means he's "clean". He's British, a member of the proud tradition of Pitt, Disraeli, Bertrand Russell, and others of the liberal/analytic tradition who talk like Sunday school teachers while their men or allies rape and massacre in places like Ireland, Armenia, or the Gulag.

The other villain, that guy's partner, is a continental European (German, specifically), who sneers at the shallowness of the British guy's skull (go look up "flachkopf" in Twilight of the Idols), from a Foucauldian/Nietzschean perspective. He's a judge in the ICC with connections to the UN's law-enforcement, and he also takes a sex-'droid everywhere and breaks taboos because they're there. He was hard to write, because a character who even talks like Foucault is real easy to turn into a cartoonish supervillain. Mostly because Foucault's concept of the "limit-experience" is less than a standard deviation away from the technical definition of diabolism.

The fact that the two representatives of contemporary philosophy (analytic and continental) are kinda bastards is not an accident. Of course it's unrealistic—no member of either of those schools of thought would ever really try to apply them in his life, what, did you think contemporary philosophy was for the real world? It's for attracting grant money and impressing the plebs with your contempt. But I used the old SF idea that something people are just talking about now, they actually do in the future.

There's a third antagonist (not a villain), a pirate of the alien species whose ancestor was executed by their Emperor. He's a badass, and not a bad guy...just kinda nuts. His son, his son's mistress, and two of his officers are significant to the plot, as is the concept of fate—and its irrelevance to civilized people. I don't really explain it, but space-piracy is made possible by the simple fact...people prefer not to be blown up. "Cease accelerating and prepare to be boarded, you will not be harmed" is pretty obvious; as a continuation of another theme of mine ("people will behave decently if indecency has a high probability of getting them shot in the face") the pirates have a code about not doing anything to their victims other than robbery, because it makes them less likely to be chased by the Empire's ships.

I have a few good British people (hey, SF is Romance, I'm allowed to have unlikely things) and another German guy, one of the ICC guy's men, who turns on his boss as a matter of principle—the principle is legal positivism, which is BS and is revealed as such, but having a poorly-thought-out reason for doing the right thing still means you're doing the right thing. There's also romance, comedy, lots of action, foul-mouthed androids, and a seven-foot-tall felinoid woman who trips on her own skirt a lot (claws+skirt+absentmindedness=adorable clumsiness). It ends on a wedding (the first one ended with a wedding reception, give or take one epilogue, but I needed to show this wedding itself, because it's an alien one).

It has orbit catapults (the first one had orbit elevators, but the planet this time around has different conditions), made survivable by the technology that also gives artificial gravity (it bleeds acceleration-forces into the surrounding space-time geometry, while producing a comfy 9.8 m/s/s acceleration inside the ship). It also has fights in space between ships that can barely see each other (if at all), and the interesting tidbit that text messages are more polite than audio if time-lag is a factor. Think about it.

The members of the revived samurai class return, and there's an expanded role for their Korean equivalents, who base their system on the hwarang. In this future Japan and Korea are slightly uneasy allies (because China invaded both of them), Korea's mostly Buddhist/shamanist and has changed its name back to Goryeo (a compromise, see, between North (Chosŏn) and South (Hanguk)). Korea's also brought back its secret police, the amhaeng-eoseo (am-eng-uh-suh) or Secret Remote Mobile Inspectors.

I delve a bit more into the felinoid aliens' culture and philosophy—that their rules of engagement, for instance, are very kind, unless you use chemical or biological weapons...then they stop offering surrender, though they'd still spare you if you surrender on your own. And if you specifically target civilians or try to use abuse of prisoners as a terror tactic? Then they show no quarter (except to non-combatants, they're sticklers for that). I have a discussion of the philosophical implications of evolution, which also brings in the aliens' version of the Four Causes (they say Five, the extra one being Being—"Does it exist?"). I also go into the interaction of being an ambush predator with being a rational person (as I said, stealth is allowed but deception isn't), and that they're not remotely intimidated by helmets with blank, nontransparent face-plates (subconsciously they feel like their enemy ain't lookin', which is actually a confidence boost, for them).

When I get the damn thing out there, please to inspect, O king. Yeah, it's a reference to Bazaar of the Bizarre, that's how I roll.