The Salvation War: Pantheocide Epilogue Up

[ANTIcarrot]

Can you give a good reason why not? <snip> 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.

Black holes cause pair production around themselves because of the stress they put on the volume immediately outside the event horizon.

I thought quantum fluctuations happened everywhere? If you can prove they only happen around black holes there's a nobel prize out there with your name on it! Blackholes simply give them the energy to become noticable. There's plenty of 'free' energy knocking about in hell, so the lack of gravity shouldn't be a problem.

Speaking of which, has it been established what shape the Minos gates are? Beyond 'not a normal portal'. Last time I read, the one in hell was described as a black wall completely filling a cave side to side. What happens if you dig inwards five yeards to the side of the cave? Do you hit another section of gate? Will humans emerge from that opening as well? If we examine the 'cut' at the back of the truck, is it completely flat, or curved? Does the edge contain radiactive atoms, made when iron and carbon were cut in half? Or does the minos gate only destroy matter in discrete atomic packets? If no one knew the answers to those questions before, they will very soon.

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.

Given his tendency to throw a hissy fit he might simply have ordered it destroyed. Or he might have built something grand, only to have it fall apart (or be picked apart) over the centuries. The gate closed a few hundred years ago, but he might have lost all interest long before that.

[wickeddyno]

Does the edge contain radiactive atoms, made when iron and carbon were cut in half? Or does the minos gate only destroy matter in discrete atomic packets?

Considering the average diameter of atomic nuclei (really really tiny), it seems to me to be very unlikely that one would happen to be exactly in the right place to be cut in half by the gate.

[impatrick4life]

Does the edge contain radiactive atoms, made when iron and carbon were cut in half? Or does the minos gate only destroy matter in discrete atomic packets?

Considering the average diameter of atomic nuclei (really really tiny), it seems to me to be very unlikely that one would happen to be exactly in the right place to be cut in half by the gate.

They wouldn't be cut in *half*, no, but as each individual particle went across what for lack of a better term we'll call an event horizon, it would be sheared in half. So you'd have an abundance of sub-atomic particles at the very fine edge (that is, the types with a half life of more than a couple of nanoseconds). I doubt you'd have any atoms cut in half, except for ones that somehow, thanks to the particle-wavelength duality, somehow managed to put themselves in the exact spot they would have needed to be in.

[Simon_Jester]

I thought quantum fluctuations happened everywhere? If you can prove they only happen around black holes there's a nobel prize out there with your name on it! Blackholes simply give them the energy to become noticable. There's plenty of 'free' energy knocking about in hell, so the lack of gravity shouldn't be a problem.

The ambient energy density in Hell isn't high enough to cause large-scale spontaneous pair production, or the place would be bathed in toasty-warm gamma rays all the time. Moreover, Hawking radiation is caused specifically by pair production triggered by the stresses due to the black hole, which is why it manages to steal energy from the hole. Since the presence of the Minos gate does not cause additional stress on the surrounding space (or at least there's no evidence of that), there's no reason for it to emit energy due to Hawking radiation.

The "particle pairs appear from nowhere and one particle gets sucked into the hole" analogy really isn't very accurate taken by itself, because you don't get permanent, non-virtual particles appearing normally. It doesn't take a black hole, but it does take intense fields of some kind to make it happen at noticeable levels.

Thus, again, there is no reason to expect Hawking radiation from the Minos Gate.

Does the edge contain radiactive atoms, made when iron and carbon were cut in half? Or does the minos gate only destroy matter in discrete atomic packets?

Given the radius of the nucleus compared to the number of atoms "on" the cross-section of the cut, there probably won't be many if any. What you will see a lot of (if the cut is sharp on nanometer distance scales) is surface ionization; there may be some nasty electrical discharges pumping into the severed end of the material when you haul it back out of the gate.

Given his tendency to throw a hissy fit he might simply have ordered it destroyed. Or he might have built something grand, only to have it fall apart (or be picked apart) over the centuries. The gate closed a few hundred years ago, but he might have lost all interest long before that.

Hmm. Distinctly possible.

[wickeddyno]

Now that I think about it, if this really does follow an 'event horizon' model then it would have to emit some Hawking radiation (but a very small, probably undetectable amount). What makes Hawking radiation at a black hole is when a virtual particle-antiparticle appears randomly due to a quantum fluctuation, and that pair is very close to the black hole, such that the energy of one member of the particle pair is enough to allow it to escape, but the other is just a little closer to the black hole and falls into it. Normally virtual particles have no net energy, because the particle and antiparticle annihilate each other in a very short time and return the energy state to zero. But since the particles can't annihilate each other anymore due to one being pulled away from the other, the escaping particle steals a little energy from the mass of the black hole, and goes out as radiation. In this case, what would be required is that one of the particle-antiparticle pair goes past the gate's boundary during the very brief time when they are in existence, but then can't return, and the other particle happens not to follow it. Then the particle that remains in existence on this side of the gate would have to steal energy from the gate itself, and if the gate doesn't cause things that go through it to cease to exist, then the particle on the other side would as well.

Of course, in all of this we have to remember that subatomic particles, even atomic nuclei, are NOT just very small billiard balls. They do not occupy fixed points, but instead are more like a cloud of probabilities. So the question of whether a particle has passed through the 'event horizon' of the gate is something that is more confusing than a simple question of 'where is the atom'?

edit: clarified that I meant a very small amount of radiation

[Junghalli]

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).

I see what you're saying, but there's a big spectrum between being perfectly well-adjusted and being catatonic. My problem with the general portrayal of Hell inmates in TSW isn't so much that they're functional (that's pretty much a necessity for the story) but that you don't really get the impression that their experiences have effected them much. Somebody can be technically functional enough to pick up a gun and fight but still have serious issues.

[Habeed]

There's many ways the phenomena of the HEMMITT could be explained. A hard science fiction explanation is as follows :

The other side of the Minos portal is the flat plate of a molecular constructor/deconstructor. Every atom of the plate is part of a complex machine that can rapidly build or take apart any physical object at the atomic level. Advanced beings somehow collect the 'souls' of the dead of earth and their automated machinery builds them a new body for their second life. Among other changes, obviously second life humans have their full life memories restored (so if they had dementia at the end of life they get the missing memories back), their bodies restored to a servicable state, made to exist without requiring food, and many other changes. To do this without unexplainable magic would require advanced technology that we can barely conceive of. (one big problem is conservation of matter : where do the humans pulled out of the rivers of not-lava get the atoms to regenerate their missing eyes and ears?)

Back a HEMMITT into the flat plate, and the machine removes the atoms of the intrusion and holds the HEMMITT up until you put it into gear to go forwards. Simple.

Another comment : giving the death penalty to second-life humans is a bad idea. The reason, besides all of the problems with the death penalty now, is that it's unreasonable to think that second-life humans won't get a third life elsewhere.

Obviously, the very existence of second-life humans means that humans have 'souls' separate from their physical bodies that store all of the experiences a human encounters in their life. It is unreasonable to think that killing the physical body of a second life human would destroy this soul, and most likely they would wake up elsewhere, probably in a still higher dimension than the one containing these bubble worlds.

Also, murder is not as much of a crime in a world where you KNOW that almost everyone who ever died is still alive somewhere else. A reasonable punishment would be a certain number of years in Hell undergoing some type of punishment.

Granted, some people will be in trouble : if you gave Hitler a "light" sentence of 20 years per murder he would be in Hell a very long time.

[kulervo]

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.

Help me out here. How can a first lifer 'treat' a second lifer at all? Second lifers are already establishing their own governments. Second Lifers CANNOT come to Earth. They are now citizens of Hell, not citizens of the United States. How do we guarantee them rights?

Admittedly we have a big honking army in Hell and Heaven, but eventually Hell will begin administering itself. I imagine Earth having ambassadors and so forth, even inspecting Hell. But in the end I imagine Second Life interests diverging from First Life. I cite the dead soldiers of the Curbstomp.

As to killing Second Lifers... Do you really imagine that Second Lifers are going to allow gangs of first lifers to hunt second lifers? Or Second Lifers? Administering permanent death? On the orders of what First Life judge? From any corrupt government? And I don't imagine Caesar is going to look fondly on executions of his citizens by ANYONE.

The best move would be a clean break. Second Lifers move on. They can't sue or be sued. They trade with us, they communicate with us, but that's most of it.

[Seggybop]

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...

I don't want to turn this into some kind of death penalty argument (though I'll say I'm against it, fwiw) but I find the idea of executing second-life humans to be especially abhorrent. In the real world you can argue that keeping people imprisoned for life is a waste of civic resources, that it's best not to leave them alive in case they could potentially escape, etc. However, second life humans don't require any support to live and it's rather trivial to exile them to places where they won't cause trouble again (empty bubble worlds would be an obvious choice).

Condemning them to FINAL DEATH or SUPERHELL seems pointlessly vindictive and inhumane, especially in a context where we have a huge group of beings who have committed worse crimes than any human could have ever hoped to, yet are being let off for the sake of future peace.

[Habeed]

And again, murder in a world where you know that the victim is STILL ALIVE and in good health is not the same crime as we see it today. Every person who has ever been murdered, save a few, is still alive in Hell somewhere. Once liberated, they can be reunited with their loved ones.

In this world, a murder did cause a lot of crime and grief and would have caused the victim to be tortured in Hell longer than if they had lived to the end of their natural life. So a murderer should be punished with imprisonment or torture in Hell - but NOT given the death penalty a second time.

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...

I don't want to turn this into some kind of death penalty argument (though I'll say I'm against it, fwiw) but I find the idea of executing second-life humans to be especially abhorrent. In the real world you can argue that keeping people imprisoned for life is a waste of civic resources, that it's best not to leave them alive in case they could potentially escape, etc. However, second life humans don't require any support to live and it's rather trivial to exile them to places where they won't cause trouble again (empty bubble worlds would be an obvious choice).

Condemning them to FINAL DEATH or SUPERHELL seems pointlessly vindictive and inhumane, especially in a context where we have a huge group of beings who have committed worse crimes than any human could have ever hoped to, yet are being let off for the sake of future peace.

[Pelranius]

The thing that worries me about executing second lifers is that where do they go?

I don't want them spilling the beans on Universes One and Two to say, Nyalatherop.

[wickeddyno]

Obviously, the very existence of second-life humans means that humans have 'souls' separate from their physical bodies that store all of the experiences a human encounters in their life. It is unreasonable to think that killing the physical body of a second life human would destroy this soul, and most likely they would wake up elsewhere, probably in a still higher dimension than the one containing these bubble worlds.

Occam's razor: which of the two requires more un-evidenced assumptions?

1) A mysterious technology/magic somehow records the body and mental state of a human being upon hir death, and creates a near-duplicate, except with systematic changes that produce the known differences between first- and second-life humans. This process is entirely material, and if it did not occur, human beings would cease to exist upon death.

2) A mysterious technology/magic somehow records the body state of a human being upon hir death, and creates a near-duplicate, except with systematic changes that produce the known differences between first- and second-life humans. This process then also captures a substance known as the 'soul' of that human being, which is a natural but immaterial entity (for which we have no direct evidence) produced from the natural, first-life human body, and includes a perfect record of all memories and personality traits that existed in the first-life human brain. This 'soul' was released from the first-life body at death, and is matched with and anchored to the correct body in every single case, with 0% error. No souls are lost or have incomplete memories.

We could also consider a third explanation:

3) A mysterious technology/magic invariably, whenever a human dies, captures a substance known as the 'soul', which is a natural but immaterial entity (for which we have no direct evidence) produced from the natural, first-life human body, and includes a perfect record of all memories and personality traits that existed in the first-life human brain, and at least some record of the body as well, which is used by the technology/magic to produce a near-duplicate body, except with systematic changes that produce the known differences between first- and second-life humans. This occurs every time a death occurs with 0% error. No souls are lost, none have incomplete memory or body records.

Now, I don't object to any of these explanations in principle. Stuart is the author and world-builder, and he can decide which of these three explanations he likes the best, or come up with one I didn't think of. But at the present time, the first explanation fits all the facts he's given us, and is the simplest.

[TithonusSyndrome]

So, despite "centuries of plotting" or whatever, everyone still seems to insist that Michael's plot was conceived exclusively to spare angelkind from the wrath of humanity and that he's an all-around good guy instead of a common dirty little self-aggrandizing coup leader in the grand tradition of Latin America. Are we now intended to believe that Michael gazed upon the Thirty Years War, went "holy shit, these people are only too soon to invade Heaven", and started plotting a backup plan? I somehow doubt that angels are that prescient, even given the extra juice their brain chemistry may have.

[Tiwaz]

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.

And second lifers are expected to just suck it up? They have all the duties their former first life nations imposed on them (like military service) but reduced benefits?

Yay! That is SO going to work out well. If you want to keep second lifers in your ranks, as soldiers pilots or whatever... You have to give them absolute equal treatment.

And, as said, pension is only one part of problem. How many unemployment checks you would have to mail to Hell if you demanded that person is same in 2nd and 1st life?
Or voting. Give it some time and you will have bigger voter base in second than first life.

Or are you going to deny them these rights? Sure you could!
It is not that these things could not be done, but what kind of situation it creates between First and Second life people. It would be form of Apartheid, which tends to create lots of bad blood in the underdogs.

There does not have to be ANY legal connection between first and second life of person. We have corpse of guy rotting in grave, that person is dead as rock.

Nothing demands us to consider person which popped out from magic gate few hours later as same person. By not considering that person same who died a while ago, you solve all those issues.
This appears to be the attitude taken by governments in the story, which is why governments are also averse of war losses. Those losses have high chance to flock to Caesar, making him all the more dangerous player in Hell.

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.

So? They died. Death penalty is just that, you kill someone and that's it.

There is even issue that in our Earth, if you survived the execution for some reason... You might have been acquitted.

Let's say they do not commit suicide. You successfully execute someone. What then? They STILL go to Hell, or Heaven. No idea how gates work.

What then? Hmm?

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.

And what do you think New Rome would do to guy who went in killing spree in their country?

Romans were REALLY good at coming up with gruesome ways to die. Some of which might actually be survivable for second lifer... Just very, very painful.

It's not like Hell has no governments and laws, they simply are not governments (and quite possibly not laws) of Earth.

[GrayAnderson]

Tiwaz/Brovane: You could easily see a shift to a "guaranteed payout" period system. I know that the life insurance policy I have IRL can be converted to an annuity with a guaranteed payout period of ten years. An easy "out" would be to have pensions simply pay until 125 or thereabouts (a bit past the current human maximum, guaranteeing coverage for the rest of your life and giving you a small start in wherever you end up). You'd probably have to slash benefits (or with the likely post-war inflation you'll see, hold them steady and let inflation fix the problem) to make scales that assume an average death age of 70-85 work (mind you, these scales work with the assumption not of "LE at birth" but "LE at age of vesting" or "LE at age of retirement" or some variation thereof.

As to Hell, there is probably at least some land that is technically "allordal" (that is, not owned by anyone or any government); granted, it would probably revert to Abigor's government, but there would seem to be a lot of areas theoretically ruled by him that aren't functionally so, and some "outlying lands" probably don't have a demon presiding over them. In other words, there are places for people to run to (at least for now).

I think I've said this before, but there may be some limited recriminalization of suicide (for attempts to dodge contracts, etc.); at the very least, civil penalties may re-emerge.

By the way, Stuart, as the story is ending in 2010, just what happened with the Estate Tax in-universe (seeing as IRL Congress hasn't been able to deal with it effectively even without a major war to distract everyone, etc.)? My bet is on it remaining unresolved (the GOP is, IRL, quite intransigent on tax issues, and I think you'd run the risk, barring a fix before too long, of people getting attorneys to come up with prepackaged estates that can be filed in something like 24 hours while they transfer their assets to New Rome or some other state in Hell (which might, say, assess a fee of 5% or 10% to "secure" your liquid assets for you in an account)...and once the assets go out, it's going to be very hard to get people to hand the money back over unless you want to have Infernal Revenue Service agents (staffed by demons but paid by the US Gov't, of course...nothing new about that, right?) running all over Hell.

Given that the processing system has to deal with potentially 500,000 people or more coming in on a bad day, and that people with arrangements seem to have everything easily sorted out when they get there with the "receiving" state, the infrastructure is probably not good enough to prevent "leakage". And this is not to mention that with Heaven thrown in now, cross-checking people who end up at one instead of the other is going to be a pain (especially as someone who dies in a secluded environment might show up at one of the gates before they're missed on Earth...which brings to mind an interesting phone call. "Bobby, how's your trip going?" "Well, we ran into an avalanche, so I'm calling you from Heaven. I'll have to talk quick, though; the long distance charges are hell."), as it's easier to know to look for someone than to have them show up and sort things back out from there.

Finally, as to Michael: I don't think he necessarily "knew" what was going to happen, but if Yahweh and Satan had played around with worlds for, say, an average of 500 years before moving on (or if his next project was coming too slowly), I think he might have been able to guess that "this is probably not going to end well" once the gates were shut and humans had gunpowder in decent quantities, not to mention the exponential population growth issue.

[Ascaloth]

Something just occurred to me.

IIRC, back in Armageddon??, it was claimed that the Minos Gate was disgorging "newborn" 2nd-Lifers at a rate of 3 per second, or one every 3 seconds (whichever one is the case, not like it matters). So, question.

How the Hell did DIMO(N) back that damned HEMTT up to the damned Gate without the latter vomiting 2nd-Lifers all over its cargo bed, or worse still, under its rear wheels?

[GrayAnderson]

*laughs at that thought*
That's going to depend on the size of the portal: If said portal is 20 feet across, we have an issue. If it's 200 feet across, we don't (you can assume the bodies come in at the center and they backed up near the sides, or that there's some sort of "backup detection system" in place to prevent bodies from disgorging when things are blocked.

And to check, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. Assuming 3 a second gives you 259,200 people per day...something seems just a shade too low about that figure. 4 a second gives you 345,600 per day; 5 gives you 432,000 per day. So there is a lot of traffic coming out. Let me say that I feel a bit sorry for the file clerk there in the week or so after The Message; assuming you drop a billion people in that week (the 15-20% of humanity figure gives you something like this), you're going to have over a thousand humans per second (1653.44 to be exact)...enough to swamp almost any infrastructure the demons might have had, and frankly almost assuredly enough to back up behind the portal. And this is assuming a steady pace (there was probably a peak in there of a phenomenal number. Assuming one second for a person to come through, and assuming an average body size of one foot by two feet, you'd need 3200 sq ft just to get the bodies through, or a portal ten feet high and as wide as a football field (or three stories high and 100 ft wide...).

-------------------------------------------------

Another question for Stuart, and one that I wouldn't mind a PM to answer if he doesn't want to put it out in public: Originally, the series was Armageddon, War in Heaven, and Pantheocide. Obviously, the middle one got dropped or re-titled. How was the story set up different from the current one (in general details; I don't need specifics, but I am curious if just titles were rearranged or if the story looked different)?

[Edward Yee]

This appears to be the attitude taken by governments in the story, which is why governments are also averse of war losses. Those losses have high chance to flock to Caesar, making him all the more dangerous player in Hell.

And as Petraeus stated, THIS is the in-universe reason why he was granted the nuclear option.

[Ascaloth]

How the Hell did DIMO(N) back that damned HEMTT up to the damned Gate without the latter vomiting 2nd-Lifers all over its cargo bed, or worse still, under its rear wheels?

DIMO(N) Rep: Alright, back it in slowly
HEMTT Driver: Aye aye sir, backing it in now.
*2nd-Lifer drops from the Minos Gate, and gets crushed by the rear wheels*
HEMTT Driver: D'oh!

[Deebles]

And to check, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. Assuming 3 a second gives you 259,200 people per day...something seems just a shade too low about that figure.

Actualy, 3 a second would be a 65% increase or so on the current rate:

Deaths
Year 56,167,829
Month 4,680,652
Day 153,884
Hour 6,412
Minute 107
Second 1.8
-------------------------------------------------

(From http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/pcwe ).

Now... some of that increase from 1.8 to 3 might come from angelic attacks and heaven-mandated disasters, some from ongoing hostilities in Hell, and some from the general disruption to vital services, food shortages etc. But on the whole, I'd say 3 a second is a tad high, especially since following the die-off from the Message, there'll be less people left to die. Unless it counts the unborn, of course...

(Although yes, the week following the Message would be an entirely different story)

[Habeed]

Obviously, the very existence of second-life humans means that humans have 'souls' separate from their physical bodies that store all of the experiences a human encounters in their life. It is unreasonable to think that killing the physical body of a second life human would destroy this soul, and most likely they would wake up elsewhere, probably in a still higher dimension than the one containing these bubble worlds.

Occam's razor: which of the two requires more un-evidenced assumptions?

1) A mysterious technology/magic somehow records the body and mental state of a human being upon hir death, and creates a near-duplicate, except with systematic changes that produce the known differences between first- and second-life humans. This process is entirely material, and if it did not occur, human beings would cease to exist upon death.

This wouldn't work.

1. At which phase of death? A human can be brain dead, with all mental state variables erased, and still be breathing and their heart running. There can even be cultured cells alive from that person years after death.

2. If a person goes from completely alive to ashes in a fraction of a second, it's difficult to see how this technology could work. The casualties from the nuclear blast earlier in this book all survived their death.

The simplest explanation is that something is recording a person's memories throughout their entire life, and advanced technology allows one to access this 'backup log' and do everything we observe in this book. I've decided to call that 'something' a soul because it is an existing and well understood concept.

[Stuart]

How the Hell did DIMO(N) back that damned HEMTT up to the damned Gate without the latter vomiting 2nd-Lifers all over its cargo bed, or worse still, under its rear wheels?

Very, very carefully? Actually, there's a blocking detection system so the bodies get re-routed around the obstructions.

Another question for Stuart, and one that I wouldn't mind a PM to answer if he doesn't want to put it out in public: Originally, the series was Armageddon, War in Heaven, and Pantheocide. Obviously, the middle one got dropped or re-titled. How was the story set up different from the current one (in general details; I don't need specifics, but I am curious if just titles were rearranged or if the story looked different)?

The original trilogy titles were

TSW: Armageddon
TSW: Pantheocide
TSW: The Lords of War.

The last could well end up being retitled The Salvation War: Ooops.

So, despite "centuries of plotting" or whatever, everyone still seems to insist that Michael's plot was conceived exclusively to spare angelkind from the wrath of humanity and that he's an all-around good guy instead of a common dirty little self-aggrandizing coup leader in the grand tradition of Latin America. Are we now intended to believe that Michael gazed upon the Thirty Years War, went "holy shit, these people are only too soon to invade Heaven", and started plotting a backup plan? I somehow doubt that angels are that prescient, even given the extra juice their brain chemistry may have.

I've tried to portray Michael as somebody whose motivations are so mixed up and complex that he's lost track of them. He started off being the Yahweh loyalist to end all Yahweh loyalists, then he saw humans beginning to ask questions and did so himself. That process led him to see what heaven was really like and desire to do something about it. He's the ultimate gray character in which good and bad, positive and negative etc etc are all so mixed up that they've become indistinguisable. He wanted to replace Yahweh sure, but his reasons for doing so varied from personal self-aggrandizement to genuinely wanting what was best for the Angelic Host. As is the way of the world though, he's convinced himself that he was acting for the greater good and he's charismatic enough to have convinced most of the people around him that was the case. Napoleon wouldn't be a bad role model here - or perhaps Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord would be more appropriate.

I see what you're saying, but there's a big spectrum between being perfectly well-adjusted and being catatonic. My problem with the general portrayal of Hell inmates in TSW isn't so much that they're functional (that's pretty much a necessity for the story) but that you don't really get the impression that their experiences have effected them much. Somebody can be technically functional enough to pick up a gun and fight but still have serious issues.

That's an issue I intend to pick up in the next book. The bit about Robert E Lee becoming the man in charge of the veterans rehabilitation center was intended to be setting the stage for that. I'd point out, it's made clear that Jade Kim does have severe issues as the result of her treatment in Hell and they're not resolved by a long way.

[Ascaloth]

Very, very carefully? Actually, there's a blocking detection system so the bodies get re-routed around the obstructions.

Blocking detection system? Wha? Has this been mentioned somewhere in the chapters before? What kind of system is it? Human or 3rd-level universe?

[Stuart]

Blocking detection system? Wha? Has this been mentioned somewhere in the chapters before? What kind of system is it? Human or 3rd-level universe?

No, it hasn't. Treat it as a spoiler. Although the fact that nobpdy did get squishy under the rear of the truck is a piece of data.

[Ascaloth]

No, it hasn't. Treat it as a spoiler. Although the fact that nobpdy did get squishy under the rear of the truck is a piece of data.

Oooookay. Just be prepared for a Fridge Logic entry to appear under the Salvation War article on TVTropes when the dead-tree version of this comes out, Stuart. You know the fundies are always waiting for the smallest opportunity to rag on TSW.