The Salvation War: Pantheocide Epilogue Up

[atheistcanuck]

And of course, I would like to know how the resurrection was pulled off. I know angels showing up in the tomb and pulling the body out deals with that, but what about the actual public appearances? Can a dead body be used much as a living one was by an angel?

Probably an angel pulling off that mind-entanglement thing to make people see him as Jeshua.

[Edward Yee]

"Most everybody thinks you killed him. Oh, not you personally, you humans. He was in command of the Incomparable Legion of Light when it was nuked. The Host is certain that he died there."

Veeeery nice. Not a single bit of it is actually a lie, but it completely misleads and deflects from the truth.

And I would be very surprised if Petraeus failed to notice that Michael didn't actually answer the question.

In this case though Michael was speaking to COL Stevenson, not GEN (Armies) Petraeus.

Quick thought... assuming that both Elhmas and Simon Peter were telling the objective truth about what happened down there back during "Jesus"... where'd Paul fuck up things? (In TSW, not IRL.)

[Bayonet]

There was a photograph on the wall behind his desk that showed the hazards of the Minos Gate. As an experiment, DIMO(N) had driven a HEMTT up to the gate and then backed the rear half in. The vehicle was now half-size, the part that had been pushed through the gate boundary had vanished. Nothing that crossed that boundary ever came back.

I'd be wary of assuming that "half" in conversation equals 0.500. The HEMTT is a multi-axle vehicle. Given a bit of momentum, you'd get in a little farther than the forward back axle. That would be spectacular enough to say, "The truck was cut in half."

[Stuart]

My favorite part so far was when that demon (Drippy maybe) was fighting angels in the pillbox. Not sure exactly what it was about that, but it struck a chord with me.

The point was how undaemonic it was. He had taken cover in a slit-trench and was shooting the opposition down from behind cover. I other words, he was fighting like a human. Drippy (who made his first appearance very early on by the way - he was one of the guards at the Heavengate in Hell when that was closed) is becoming human by association and that has all sorts of implications.

In the process, it essentially declares the Biblical narrative of Jesus's life to be false- he was never a serious political contender, people never really took him that seriously; he just tried rum-running in a state with unsympathetic authorities. It also detracts from Ehlmas's significance, if the human he 'ran' was killed over something like that.

With respect, that's a bit of a misreading. The situation was that Jeshua went around preaching his message while his disciples were fermenting mash and selling the product (moonshine has been known for a very long time; people didn;t know they were distilling things but production of strong spirits goes back a long way). They "forgot" to pay the tax and the one thing the Romans took seriously was tax evasion. That's always been a hole in the Biblical accounts that greated with me; the Romans didn't really take people who went around preaching seriously. If they had a lot of support, their god sort of got incorporated into their Pantheon, if he didn;t, he wasn't a problem. If the preacher was lecturing on the virtues of peace and non-violence to the subject peoples, then YIPEEE. He's doing the Romans job for them.

So, the Roman reaction to a preacher was rather atypical but tax evasion? Now that's serious boys. Go get him.

Also, read the end again. Jeshua and his disciples are betrayed and caught. Jeshua takes the fall for them, accepting his own gruesome death in order to save their lives. That's a pretty noble thing to do and it would leave the disciples (who were really responsible for his death) with an overwhelming burden of guilt. So they try to assuage that burden by carrying on with his work and telling a suitably expurgated version of his story. I'd suggest to you that it would be a likely background to what really happened (probably not involving bootlegging but something else - for example some of the disciples may have had contact with Jewish insurgents or insert any other crime the Romans would have taken seriously. The real point in all this is taht Jeshua comes out as a more than decent and very honorable character in his own right and his controller Elhmas had nothing but the best intentions yet the road they took quite literally led to Hell. Yup, its a parable.

And do you remember anywhere in the story this guy being mentioned again? No. He was taken away and most likely shot to second death and buried. Never to be heard of again. It was more along lines of revenge than justice, with lack of trial and all.

That story isn't quite finished yet There's a bit to follow in the next book that takes that particular arc further. You're right though; the legal consequences of death being a step rather than an end are immense. For example, life insurance is quite likely to change from "I pay so much per month and my relatives get this when I die" to "I pay so much per month and I get this when I die and my bloody relatives can work for a living for a change." The problems are almost never-ending. The question of capital punishment is a big one. One could argue that capital punishment is no longer a punishment, it's an escape route for the perp. I have no doubt that somebody will argue that.

hell, he couldn't even leave Heaven alone and just had to make it all some kind of glitzy illusion of glamour concealing ancient decay instead of anything genuinely impressive, and even put the pearly gates in a goddamned crummy hut, looked after by a crackhead.

One of the things you don't see is the suggestions and comments that got sent to me by pmail. Some ideas I pick up (for example the amphibious invasion of the center of Heaven was a paradrop in the original plot outline but I thought the Marines going in was much better). The idea of making Heaven decaying under its glitz was very widespread, I'd say more than a dozen people independently pitched the idea to me. What made it attractive to me is that was very much how Rome was presented in the HBO series. Superficially very impressive but underneath the glitz, decaying and in urgent need of repair. There's also an analogy there; the city is a metaphor for Heavenly rule. Superficially attractive but actually rotten to the core.

Finally, the descriptions also reflect the time the myths were written. The conditions humans live in are actually heavenly - by the standards of the first or second centuries (take AD or BC to choice). They are well fed, don't die of horrible diseases, don't get get overrun by bandits or soldiers who kill them in gruesome ways, their women don't die in childbirth. they have warm, comfortable places to live. It's a pretty good way of life compared with what they are used to. So they work the land owned by the angels or they act as menial servants? It's not a big price to pay for what, again by their standards, are warm and comfortable conditions. The problem is with us; our expectations are just so much higher and they're ones angels couldn't possibly begin to fulfill.

Go back to TSW-verse 1000 years ago and this really is quite a fucked up horrible grimdark universe that Stuart has created. If you're a human your fate is to be born, probably live a shit life full of suffering, and if you're real lucky you'll then get to spend the next 100,000 years as a slave until you finally die for good, but much more likely instead you'll get to spend it swimming in flaming notlava with maybe the occassional break to be raped in the ass by some demon's 12 inch barbed wang for variety.

Don't blame me; that's the world the mythology created. Not me; I took it as it was writ. You've just described exactly what (say) 10th century people believed existance was like. They got what was expected. Yes, it was Lovecraftian; I would argue that most theistic religions are Lovecraftian in that respect. (So, Cthulu fh'tang. Serve him loyally and he will eat you last). I think one of the probelms the hysterical-haters of this particualr book have is they recognize that it exposes the concept that lies under the mythology and they really don't like that. Making fundies think causes their heads to hurt.

I think the story would probably be more emotionally moving if it brought this point home a bit more, but I rarely really felt it. Even the guys who'd spend hundreds or thousands of years swimming around in notlava in Hell didn't really seem all that adversely effected by it besides it making them mad (granted I've probably missed a bunch of chapters but I'm talking about in Armageddon).

To some extent I agree with you. The real problem is length. Squeezing everything into a book-length novel was very hard. It doesn;t help to focus more tightly (say on a tank platoon or infantry squad) because the amount of backstory needed to make the novel comprehensible would swamp it. It's not like writing a story about WW2 where the backstory is known. Imagine trying to write a novel about (say) a tank crew in WW2 that includes explaining what Nazi Germany was and why America was at war with it. In a way, TSW is the backstory into which future novels can be fitted. By the way, if you want to take a shot at writing a story from your particular viewpoint, please feel free. This is our sandpit, anybody can play. Just run the parts past me first so that I can check them out for continuity.

As to the characters, by necessity we concentrated on the handful who did come out fighting mad rather than catatonic. After all, how can one write a story about somebody who has been clubbed stupid and catatonic with agony and can do nothing else but endure the centuries of agony? We've mentioned that such people are the vast majorty of the recoveries and that they need a lot of tender loving care before they can even begin to recover. We also made the point that the majority of those who were active had either been in Hell for a very limited time or in one of its less-dreadful parts. (Ori and Aeneas were exceptions I agree).

When I go to heaven can I take my sword, wade into some tall grass and fight randomly encountered monsters just like in one of my Japanese RPGs?

Only if PETA lets you

it just grated a bit more with me that humans were still winning easily without all our fancy toys (size, strength, natural body armour, and thousands of years of experience in melee are huge advantages if you take away the guns, tanks and missiles).

Actually, they didn't win easily. Six of them took down a single daemon by surprise by that was it. They couldn't do much of anything until they got supplied with modern weaponry. It was still stressed (as late as the showdown along the Styx) that, without their modern weapons, humans could not fight daemons on even terms. I had one amusing suggestion by the way, that at the end of the series, when all the fighting is over, the real Heaven opens and all the tanks, guns, aircraft etc, get translated to heaven (since they did all the work) and the humans are left behind.

[Stuart]

I'd be wary of assuming that "half" in conversation equals 0.500. The HEMTT is a multi-axle vehicle. Given a bit of momentum, you'd get in a little farther than the forward back axle. That would be spectacular enough to say, "The truck was cut in half."

Absolutely.



This is a HEMTT. Back it in and there's a good chance what is left would balance on the front four wheels. But, as I said, we have no idea what is happening the other side of the gate. It may be that the half that is in the area beyond the gate is simply transformed to something else that doesn;t come back. So nobody knows. But, teh fact that things happened the way they did is good data. See, "poke it with a stick and see what happens" does work.

[Stuart]

When I read the Jesus+tax evasion lines, I couldn't help but think of Al Capone. Tax evasion takes everybody down!

Doesn't it make much more sense than the nebulous "subversive" accusations?

IIRC (perhaps Thanas can help here) the Roman tax collection system worked by a tax collector buying the right to collect taxes from a specific area. He then had to collect those taxes and kept the proceeds with the difference between the amount he spent to buy the position and the amount he collected being his profit on the deal. So, to him, somebody who was defaulting on his taxes was a very personal crime.

[Ascaloth]

Finally, the descriptions also reflect the time the myths were written. The conditions humans live in are actually heavenly - by the standards of the first or second centuries (take AD or BC to choice). They are well fed, don't die of horrible diseases, don't get get overrun by bandits or soldiers who kill them in gruesome ways, their women don't die in childbirth. they have warm, comfortable places to live. It's a pretty good way of life compared with what they are used to. So they work the land owned by the angels or they act as menial servants? It's not a big price to pay for what, again by their standards, are warm and comfortable conditions. The problem is with us; our expectations are just so much higher and they're ones angels couldn't possibly begin to fulfill.

....so in other words, Heaven's 2nd Lifers come from a background quite similar to the peasants of North Korea today? Which means the situation in Heaven during The Lords of War is going to be the Reunification of Korea, writ large?

[Brovane]

Last time that I looked the Hostilities didn't end until Heaven's forces surrendered.

But have you noticed that despite this, humans were setting up infrastructure to run Minos gate in permanent sense.

This is because it is far better to do system from beginning which is not totally ad hoc in nature. Removing it and replacing it is far more troublesome than trying to figure out how to do it more or less right straight away.

There is lots of legal questions swirling around here about contract(s). However if legally you are not the first life person when you die then what becomes of jail sentences? If I am 20 years into a 100 year sentence and I die then when I wake up in Hell reception area I am no longer legally that person so am I free and clear to walk away?

To put it simply, letting people continue as same person as they were in first life is completely insane. They will not settle to anything but full rights and privileges and that means you pay their pensions for rest of eternity.

I remember in the first book the Israeli's going after a Nazi from the first life. If he isn't the first life person legally then they have no cause in his second life to go after him.

And do you remember anywhere in the story this guy being mentioned again? No. He was taken away and most likely shot to second death and buried. Never to be heard of again. It was more along lines of revenge than justice, with lack of trial and all.

Also my question still stands. In the first-life people are being forced into military service, so why not forcing the second life people in service? For example is the USAF going to give up a pilot that they have spent millions in training on just because he died?

You again forget that there are limits of authority. If first-lifer and second lifer are considered same person, they are citizens of that nation and they have ALL the privileges that come with it.

INCLUDING PENSIONS! (I can't repeat this often enough to make it sink to everyone that this would be massive issue. Those who have to pay the pensions would have no way to find enough money to cover first and second lifers all)
And voting rights.

In the novel there was mention of a collision between planes where several people died and hours later the same dead people where back to flying with their original countries again.

Did they volunteer for service like Kim?

In some ways they are going to have to in some ways to treat the first person legally as the second person. If not you could have a flood of people with long prison sentences or life without parole sentences committing suicide and then do you just let them walk away from the hell reception area free and clear?

Again, offer alternative which does not mean financial ruin through eternal pensions, massive dead voting block and so forth.

Remember, once that criminal kills himself, he can no longer ever set foot on Earth.

We also see mention of the dead partners in Goldmans-Sachs suing the SEC for canceling there trading licenses. At some point all these legal issues will need to be dealt with and it will be a issue in regards to what courts have jurisdiction.

If it is not your territory, it is not bound by your laws is rule of thumb.
If it is not your territory, you cannot readily declare your laws to apply. If it is your territory and your laws apply, be ready to start running your own version of welfare system there as well (as those tend to apply to ALL of your territories).

Try to treat the second lifers as less-than-full-citizens and they flock even more readily to Caesar.

Variety of cans of worms coming from declaring first lifer = second lifer.

The Pension issue is very easily settled. Pension, SS, Annuties payments end when you die in your first life. There is your alternative. You just put a time limit on benefit payments that currently have no time limit. There still has to be somewhat a legal connection between a person first life and second life.

For a convicted killer rotting in prison second-life is going to look much more attractive than rotting in prison for the rest of there first-life. To have absolutely no connection is completely insane. Basically somebody could do whatever they want in there first life and then just walk away from any prison time by committing suicide. For example that Craiglist killer who committed suicide in jail before the trial. Does he just walk away from all the responsiblity for murder? There is a lot of serial killers currently sitting on Death Row. There is nothing making first-life attractive to them. Lets see I can stay here in a cell 23+ hours a day and rot away or I can committ suicide and get transfered to Hell where body will be re-born as young again and I will be free from any legal entanglements. The choice will be simple for them.

[Guardsman Bass]

I confess part of me would like to see the West-African trickster god Anansi, legendary for his ability to trick and evade other gods, is still alive and wandering.

We know that the Aesir exist. Maybe Anansi was Loki in disguise tripping around Africa?

[Stuart]

We know that the Aesir exist. Maybe Anansi was Loki in disguise tripping around Africa?

That's the sort of way my mind is running; a lot of pantheons are just the same people in other interpretations - much like the Greek and Roman pantheons are (more or less) the same. It's just that different people in different locations interpreted the same folk-memories different ways.

[Darth Yan]

What's the current date in the story?

[Gogyra]

If the Minos gate does act as a disintigrator, does that mean it would be emitting Hawking Radiation?

Uh... almost certainly not?

Can you give a good reason why not? So far as we can tell, the Minos gate acts pretty similarly to an event horizon: stuff goes in, but can't get out. Thus, if a particle pair comes into existence close enough to the gate, one particle might be lost to the gate, in which case the other particle would not be annihilated, and would instead be radiated away from the gate.

[Simon_Jester]

Can you give a good reason why not? So far as we can tell, the Minos gate acts pretty similarly to an event horizon: stuff goes in, but can't get out. Thus, if a particle pair comes into existence close enough to the gate, one particle might be lost to the gate, in which case the other particle would not be annihilated, and would instead be radiated away from the gate.

The simple reason is that the Minos Gate isn't a black hole. It most certainly does not have an event horizon because things do come out of it: Second Life bodies come out of the thing all the time.

The Minos Gate is not described by general relativity or any of the same physics that describes black holes. Therefore the Minos Gate is not like a black hole. Conversely, a black hole isn't like the Minos Gate.

Black holes cause pair production around themselves because of the stress they put on the volume immediately outside the event horizon. The Minos Gate doesn't produce such stress, or need not do so (approaching the Gate does not cause you to get sucked in). There is no reason to expect the area around the Minos Gate to experience significant pair-production, and no reason to expect the Gate to spawn noticeable Hawking radiation.

With respect, that's a bit of a misreading. The situation was that Jeshua went around preaching his message while his disciples were fermenting mash and selling the product (moonshine has been known for a very long time; people didn;t know they were distilling things but production of strong spirits goes back a long way).

Are there documented cases of it going back past about the last thousand years or so, though? I had thought not, but could easily see being mistaken.

They "forgot" to pay the tax and the one thing the Romans took seriously was tax evasion. That's always been a hole in the Biblical accounts that greated with me; the Romans didn't really take people who went around preaching seriously. If they had a lot of support, their god sort of got incorporated into their Pantheon, if he didn;t, he wasn't a problem. If the preacher was lecturing on the virtues of peace and non-violence to the subject peoples, then YIPEEE. He's doing the Romans job for them.

My impression was that it was sort of a two-jawed vise situation: the Romans had no particular love of him (because by implication his claimed status as the Messiah made him rightful king of the Jews and they already had nice suitable puppet kings for the Jews) and didn't much care whether he lived or died. The Jews, on the other hand, found him to be an intensely annoying false prophet.

What finally killed him was that he got squashed between the two jaws of the vise: caught in a situation where his clashes with the local Jewish power structure got him into trouble that the Romans had absolutely no interest in bailing him out of, when they could instead ingratiate themselves with the local power structure by killing him.

Though adding tax evasion on the Roman side of the vise would only make things worse for him.

Also, read the end again. Jeshua and his disciples are betrayed and caught. Jeshua takes the fall for them, accepting his own gruesome death in order to save their lives. That's a pretty noble thing to do and it would leave the disciples (who were really responsible for his death) with an overwhelming burden of guilt. So they try to assuage that burden by carrying on with his work and telling a suitably expurgated version of his story. I'd suggest to you that it would be a likely background to what really happened (probably not involving bootlegging but something else - for example some of the disciples may have had contact with Jewish insurgents or insert any other crime the Romans would have taken seriously. The real point in all this is taht Jeshua comes out as a more than decent and very honorable character in his own right and his controller Elhmas had nothing but the best intentions yet the road they took quite literally led to Hell. Yup, its a parable.

OK, that makes sense. That said, you might then want to tweak the scene and give the disciples a less "benign" criminal background than whipping up moonshine. At least for me, that turns the opening half of the parable into a bit of a bad joke. And the (perceived) joke sort of discolored the later half, the part that carries the intended message (Jeshua literally does die for his disciples' sins, if not for anyone else's). Contact with Jewish insurgents would work better for the intended purpose, I think.

The cocaine didn't help either; it makes sense in context but felt sort of forced. The idea of Peter running a still does work, and can be fit into the background with the disciples and the tax evasion, though I still think adding some other crime to the list would make the effect of the parable greater: "he died taking responsibility for our screwing around with the People's Front for the Liberation of Judea" works better than "he died taking responsibility for our illegal still."

The problems are almost never-ending. The question of capital punishment is a big one. One could argue that capital punishment is no longer a punishment, it's an escape route for the perp. I have no doubt that somebody will argue that.

...You could just kill him again.

hell, he couldn't even leave Heaven alone and just had to make it all some kind of glitzy illusion of glamour concealing ancient decay instead of anything genuinely impressive, and even put the pearly gates in a goddamned crummy hut, looked after by a crackhead.

One of the things you don't see is the suggestions and comments that got sent to me by pmail. Some ideas I pick up (for example the amphibious invasion of the center of Heaven was a paradrop in the original plot outline but I thought the Marines going in was much better). The idea of making Heaven decaying under its glitz was very widespread, I'd say more than a dozen people independently pitched the idea to me. What made it attractive to me is that was very much how Rome was presented in the HBO series. Superficially very impressive but underneath the glitz, decaying and in urgent need of repair. There's also an analogy there; the city is a metaphor for Heavenly rule. Superficially attractive but actually rotten to the core.

But the Pearly Gates aren't even that: the superficial attraction isn't there. Giving said gates a chipped mother-of-pearl facade is fine, but having nothing but a decaying caretaker's hut is taking the premise too far. If the recurring theme of Heaven is decaying grandeur and beauty that vanishes when you zoom in on it, you at least need to have grandeur and beauty to begin with so that there's something to decay and vanish.

And, again, I'd advise removing the cocaine from the scene, because I still think it doesn't work. More because of social connotations than anything else. A different drug (more marijuana?) might be a better choice.

Actually, they didn't win easily. Six of them took down a single daemon by surprise by that was it. They couldn't do much of anything until they got supplied with modern weaponry. It was still stressed (as late as the showdown along the Styx) that, without their modern weapons, humans could not fight daemons on even terms. I had one amusing suggestion by the way, that at the end of the series, when all the fighting is over, the real Heaven opens and all the tanks, guns, aircraft etc, get translated to heaven (since they did all the work) and the humans are left behind.

I wonder what a tank's idea of Heaven is. Valhalla-like, Happy Hunting Grounds-like? Peace, quiet, and regenerating Second-Lifer tracks?

Hmm...

[Jusu]

Hmm, I'd like to call myself a practicing Catholic. And no, I'm not gonna bash the cocaine scene, I'm actually going to praise it. It makes sense now that I think of it, the whole tax evasion thing, and it also fits with what Eihmas (spelling?) told Michael. It's a great story so far, some of my more religious friends may hate it, but I think it's a nice way to also look at religion.


That and also I think a bunch of Korean War soldiers stabbing a Baldrick to death in the first book was fucking amazing. This book didn't disappoint too, when Lee got schooled and the Marines were in heaven's streets.

[GenghisQuan]

I think the story would probably be more emotionally moving if it brought this point home a bit more, but I rarely really felt it. Even the guys who'd spend hundreds or thousands of years swimming around in notlava in Hell didn't really seem all that adversely effected by it besides it making them mad (granted I've probably missed a bunch of chapters but I'm talking about in Armageddon).

[snip]
As to the characters, by necessity we concentrated on the handful who did come out fighting mad rather than catatonic. After all, how can one write a story about somebody who has been clubbed stupid and catatonic with agony and can do nothing else but endure the centuries of agony? We've mentioned that such people are the vast majorty of the recoveries and that they need a lot of tender loving care before they can even begin to recover. We also made the point that the majority of those who were active had either been in Hell for a very limited time or in one of its less-dreadful parts. (Ori and Aeneas were exceptions I agree).

With respect, I think you should make it more clear that they at least do run into people who've been clubbed stupid and catatonic with agony. At present, the story *does* make it seem too easy for humanity, even if you have people talking about how hard the war was - from the POV of the average reader, there's a dissonance between the officers and political leaders saying "the war was hard, and we had supply problems" and the war scenes showing curbstompage everywhere.

Going back, I don't agree with most criticisms of this piece (as they're founded on assumptions about supernaturals that this story expressedly points out aren't necessarily always true), but I do believe you could do better in showing supply problems beyond having people talk about them. Maybe an infantry guy running out of new rounds and having to switch back to the old m-16 rounds, or something along the lines of combat units having to make do with less efficient/effective tools b/c there are not enough of the new effective stuff to go around.

it just grated a bit more with me that humans were still winning easily without all our fancy toys (size, strength, natural body armour, and thousands of years of experience in melee are huge advantages if you take away the guns, tanks and missiles).

Actually, they didn't win easily. Six of them took down a single daemon by surprise by that was it. They couldn't do much of anything until they got supplied with modern weaponry. It was still stressed (as late as the showdown along the Styx) that, without their modern weapons, humans could not fight daemons on even terms. I had one amusing suggestion by the way, that at the end of the series, when all the fighting is over, the real Heaven opens and all the tanks, guns, aircraft etc, get translated to heaven (since they did all the work) and the humans are left behind.

Don't quite remember: in all the scenes where the 2nd-Lifers are fighting daemons without modern weaponry, do any of them die? It may be effective to show at least one or two biting it due to daemons being really hard to take down in melee even if you have a squad against just one. Or even just a throwaway line about how they saw a pair of demon guards and decided to hide instead of fight b/c it's hard enough to fight just one.

[GrayAnderson]

Stuart,
For the record, I wasn't complaining about it being Lovecraftian. It's just an interesting take on mythology, that's all (something that I do enjoy). If anything, it's interesting seeing what happens when humans actually have a fighting chance against the Old Ones.

And...that idea about all of the equipment translating would be amusing.

Jusu,
I'm also a practicing Catholic. I think the difference between most Catholics on the one hand and a lot of fundamentalist Protestants on the other is best told through the story of when a bunch of Atheists opened up a "rapture pet insurance" company. The idea was that you pay $100, and if the rapture comes, they'll make sure that your pet(s) who are left behind get given new homes for the duration. Reactions they tended to get from those of a faith:
-Catholics said it was hilarious and got a good laugh.
-Fundies either bought the insurance or told them they were going to Hell (usually in overblown terms). Or possibly both; you never know.

When it comes to attitudes on the subject, I think that shows it all right there.

[Stuart]

What's the current date in the story?

Late October 2010. Just before the mid-term elections (that's deliberate or you'd have to wait for the last part until then).

[Stuart]

Going back, I don't agree with most criticisms of this piece (as they're founded on assumptions about supernaturals that this story expressedly points out aren't necessarily always true), but I do believe you could do better in showing supply problems beyond having people talk about them. Maybe an infantry guy running out of new rounds and having to switch back to the old m-16 rounds, or something along the lines of combat units having to make do with less efficient/effective tools b/c there are not enough of the new effective stuff to go around.

To some extent that's done; there's mentions of tanks getting APDS ammunition which is not that effective against daemons in place of HEAT and HEAD rounds. In the printed version, its stepped up a bit more with mention of the British brigade being stalled for lack of fuel and ammunition. Plus some other bits.

Don't quite remember: in all the scenes where the 2nd-Lifers are fighting daemons without modern weaponry, do any of them die? It may be effective to show at least one or two biting it due to daemons being really hard to take down in melee even if you have a squad against just one. Or even just a throwaway line about how they saw a pair of demon guards and decided to hide instead of fight b/c it's hard enough to fight just one.

There is only the one major incident; there are several (uincluding the famous battle of the mall) where humans get ripped up because they don't have suitable weapons.

[kulervo]

If it is not your territory, it is not bound by your laws is rule of thumb.
If it is not your territory, you cannot readily declare your laws to apply. If it is your territory and your laws apply, be ready to start running your own version of welfare system there as well (as those tend to apply to ALL of your territories).

Agree.

Absolutely, positively, Second Lifers cannot sue First Lifers in American state courts. Well maybe they can, they will just lose. Most state courts have provisions like Illinois Supreme Court Rule 203. Which states that any plaintiff may be required to be in the state/county for depositions. Second Lifers cannot be deposed in Illinois, they can't be in Illinois. So if they sue, attorneys for the first lifer make all kinds of motions and ta-da! case is dismissed.

I would also point out that most jurisdictional rules mean that Second Lifers cannot be sued by First Lifers in State Court. You have to be in the state, or have a relationship to the state...

I would suggest a modification of 28 U.S.C. §1332(a) will be required, and possibly a Constitutional Amendment of Article III, § 2.

Second Lifers cannot appear in front of Congress, cannot BE members of Congress, cannot work or perform duties in this world. Most of their contracts are now voided. Including employment contracts.

As for the penal system... I can imagine Earth treating parts of Hell like a penal colony. In the end Death penalties are just intended to remove the criminal from society. We have lots of better ways to punish people. It's even permanent and self enforcing. If they try to come back they die.

[Simon_Jester]

[Rereads]

...The Museum ship fleet had not done well from the war. Mostly, they were too old and too far gone to bring back into commission the way Turner Joy had been brought back. Some had been stripped for spare parts, others of useful equipment. All had been neglected in the driving urgency to concentrate every effort on the ships that could help win the war. Olympia had sunk at her moorings...

Well, at least this I think she could understand. Urgency is a far, far better excuse than laziness.

[Gogyra]

Stuart,
For the record, I wasn't complaining about it being Lovecraftian. It's just an interesting take on mythology, that's all (something that I do enjoy). If anything, it's interesting seeing what happens when humans actually have a fighting chance against the Old Ones.

I wouldn't really consider a setting where the humans curbstomp the Old Ones to be Lovecraftian at all. The whole point of Lovecraftian horror is not just that reality is bleak, but that humanity is truly insignificant: despite all of our scientific and technological advances, we're still just a bunch of smelly apes occupying part of the surface of a single planet. The Old Ones aren't evil aliens scheming to invade the earth - they're beings so far beyond humans that our civilization is entirely inconsequential to most of them.

[Jamesfirecat]

If it is not your territory, it is not bound by your laws is rule of thumb.
If it is not your territory, you cannot readily declare your laws to apply. If it is your territory and your laws apply, be ready to start running your own version of welfare system there as well (as those tend to apply to ALL of your territories).

As for the penal system... I can imagine Earth treating parts of Hell like a penal colony. In the end Death penalties are just intended to remove the criminal from society. We have lots of better ways to punish people. It's even permanent and self enforcing. If they try to come back they die.

I disagree with this part very, VERY hard.

If someone does something horrific enough to warrant the death penalty, I'm sure that precautions will be taken so that when they emerge from the Minos Gate people will be waiting to kill them again in a humane but effective manner. Given the regenerative abilities of second life humans I imagine the Guillotine might make a comeback.

It might even be possible to identify the bodies so that they can be killed a second time in hell before they even wake up again from the rebirth process...

That or we'll figure out how to control the flow between Heaven and Hell and make sure that only people who we want to kill again get sent to one of them.

It just makes more sense for the Death Penalty to carry over to a second killing in Hell/Heaven than to use it as a premature way to send someone to their second life...

Besides I don't think we'd make many friends among second lifers if we keep dumping the worst of the worst on them just because we don't want to deal with them...

(Insert Australia joke here...)

[Bayonet]

IIRC (perhaps Thanas can help here) the Roman tax collection system worked by a tax collector buying the right to collect taxes from a specific area. He then had to collect those taxes and kept the proceeds with the difference between the amount he spent to buy the position and the amount he collected being his profit on the deal. So, to him, somebody who was defaulting on his taxes was a very personal crime.

That's my understanding. It wound up very personal for the collectee, which is why they were so unpopular.

[Simon_Jester]

IIRC (perhaps Thanas can help here) the Roman tax collection system worked by a tax collector buying the right to collect taxes from a specific area. He then had to collect those taxes and kept the proceeds with the difference between the amount he spent to buy the position and the amount he collected being his profit on the deal. So, to him, somebody who was defaulting on his taxes was a very personal crime.

That's my understanding. It wound up very personal for the collectee, which is why they were so unpopular.

True. The problem isn't so much that it's unrealistic as that it doesn't convey the right overtone to the audience. Tax evasion is one of the least unpopular of all crimes, and the idea that someone could be crucified for failure to pay the excise tax on liquor give the reader (well, maybe just me) a certain sense of being... alienated from the narrative, I guess. I got the same effect from the cocaine.

It's not that those things could not happen, or could not have happened, it's that I don't think they are good tools for evoking the kind of image the author is trying to evoke. Likewise for there being no major architecture around the Heaven Minos Gate- on a reread there are gates, but apparently not particularly large ones. And given Yahweh's obsession with monumental buildings, it beggars my imagination that he wouldn't build something nice and big at the point where newly arrived Second Lifers first see his domain.

[Razor One]

If it is not your territory, it is not bound by your laws is rule of thumb.
If it is not your territory, you cannot readily declare your laws to apply. If it is your territory and your laws apply, be ready to start running your own version of welfare system there as well (as those tend to apply to ALL of your territories).

As for the penal system... I can imagine Earth treating parts of Hell like a penal colony. In the end Death penalties are just intended to remove the criminal from society. We have lots of better ways to punish people. It's even permanent and self enforcing. If they try to come back they die.

I disagree with this part very, VERY hard.

If someone does something horrific enough to warrant the death penalty, I'm sure that precautions will be taken so that when they emerge from the Minos Gate people will be waiting to kill them again in a humane but effective manner. Given the regenerative abilities of second life humans I imagine the Guillotine might make a comeback.

It might even be possible to identify the bodies so that they can be killed a second time in hell before they even wake up again from the rebirth process...

That or we'll figure out how to control the flow between Heaven and Hell and make sure that only people who we want to kill again get sent to one of them.

It just makes more sense for the Death Penalty to carry over to a second killing in Hell/Heaven than to use it as a premature way to send someone to their second life...

Besides I don't think we'd make many friends among second lifers if we keep dumping the worst of the worst on them just because we don't want to deal with them...

(Insert Australia joke here...)

Even if you didn't punish people after their first life death, there's nothing stopping the victims of a heinous murderer from banding together and meting out their own justice.

Of course, if First Lifers want to maintain the loyalty of of Second Lifers, they better damn well treat them as equal citizens with equal rights or, as someone rightfully mentioned above, risk alienating them and pushing them towards New Rome.

As to the Australia joke, England tended to use all its colonies as convict dumping grounds, which really comes as no surprise since the crimes for which people were sentenced to transportation abroad consisted mostly of petty crimes. If you did something serious, you got the noose and they were none to shy about its use at the time.