ANTIcarrot wrote:mbeau wrote:
Fel actually said more-or-less what I did in the Prologue:
I think you might be missing my point. I'm not claiming Fel said otherwise, I am saying that I'm not sure Fel took sufficient care to separating 'what he knew' and 'what his characters believe.'
Not really. Because Fel is writing the story, what he thinks that the characters know, is what the characters know. If he wants to make it the same as what he (Fel) believes, or if he wants to set it at some other point, that is his decision.
[/quote]The greatest mystery to humanity at the time would not have been 'what do we do now' or 'can we fight back' but '
why in hells name do they want with our planet if they can build ships like that?!'[/quote]
After a while and after some thought. However, the initial reaction to having a couple immense ships appear in orbit would be "What can we do to ensure that we don't get turned into so much squishy stuff underneath their boots."
It can't be mineral wealth, as Earth is a pittance in comparison to the asteroid belt. It can’t be for biological wealth, because they'd just come down and grab whatever DNA they wanted to without bothering to say hello. The only possibly rational reasons they would want Earth is the one unique resource that Earth posses in the entire solar system. An intact biosphere.
There are other reasons. They may want organic materials (wood, etc. They may want slaves/cannon fodder/test subjects. Hell, they may want to turn this into a private zoo or pleasure planet. When you add that to the fact that when they (the Faey) appeared, there would have been no knowledge about them at all, any guesses about what they (the humans) *should* have thought is a complete guess.
[/quote]Which is in fact exactly what the Faey do want.[/quote]
Hindsight, after reading the story.
With that realisation comes another one: If they want it so badly to come all this way they’re hardly likely to risk destroying it, are they? So they can’t use nukes or anything similar. So they have to use conventional weapons, or their equivalent. And we might have a chance.
You are using the hindsight that you get from reading the story to provide knowledge to the world leaders at the time the Faey first arrived. They wouldn't have known that Earth was going to become a farm planet to provide food. All they knew was that a couple ships showed up out of nowhere and we were told: Easy way or hard way??
Plus, when you consider the amount of the planet that is *not* covered by densely populated cities, they could easily nuke the cities and leave them glowing parking lots and it would only be the loss of a small percentage of the cultivatable land. The small numbers of people that are left behind would also pose no real threat to the Faey.
After all, human military experience teaches that a primitive enemy at the end of a short supply line can sometimes defeat an advanced enemy at the end of a long supply line.
Again you appear to be using hindsight and your knowledge from the story to provide information to the human leaders that they had no way of knowing. There would have been no info saying how far earth is from their base or how long it would take them to get here. No knowledge of their technological level, nor of what they wanted from the earth.
Any competent science advisor (assuming there are competent non-telepathic humans in Fel’s world - despite his reluctance to actually portray them) will have told a world leader that the apparent mass of the ships cannot be used as an indication of their actual size or capacity. A civilisation that can build ‘warp drives’ might be able to build ‘tractor beams’ as well, and as an explanation that is much more reasonable explanation than ships that big.
Using the science that existed at the start of the series, humans didn't know about warp drive. No tri-phased plasma, no telepathy. All they had was current human tech. The science advisors would have given them "They are massive enough to affect the tides, and we don't know why."
Science advisors advise based on the science of the day. In todays science, warp drives and tractor beams are still very much in the realm of science fiction. Sure, some people at NASA might be working on it, but it is all theoretical for the enxt significant while, barring any sudden scientific breakthrough.
Speaking of those two massive ships... If they’re in a 370km orbit, to affect the tides by shear mass they’d need to have something like 1/1,000,000th mass of the moon, which in a simple cylinder 3200m long and 1200m wide works out to a density of two hundred thousand metric tons per cubic meter.
Seeing as how Fel doesn't give any information about how far above the earth the ships were, nor how much the tides shifted, any speculations are really, well, speculations. Combine that with the fact that Fel has admitted that the first 10 chapters were written as a distraction and that he didn't do the same amount of research for that as he normally does...
Which is not to say such ships couldn’t be built, but sooner or later any competent race that’s not composed of complete and utter morons is going to work out that five of those cubic meters has enough material to build an O’Neil colonies, and the ship contains enough mass to build 700 million of them. At which point you don’t need farming worlds.
Not really. Just because something is very dense doesn't mean that you can stretch it out to something paper-thin and still retain it's structural integrity when faced with vacuum, micrometeorites, solar wind, radiation. Let alone the weight of the stuff you would have to put in it to make it viable.
Logically, the leaders of the world would conclude that the Faey are bluffing, or at least not telling the whole truth.
Logically the world leaders would assume that these creatures have space travel. When you are attacking a defended position, conventional wisdom says that you require at least 3 times the numbers when you have technological parity. There is an unknown technological gap that exists, and that gives the invaders a huge force-multiplier.
(Just like I’ve concluded (And I’m not alone in this) that Fel is not telling us the whole truth, and left out a large chunk of exposition explaining what really happened.)
It is the prologue. The humans have to surrender quickly and without a fight so that the story can get moving so that Jason has free, uninhibited access to Faey Technology. That the Faey are there as a police force, and not as a force that is in the middle of invading. There has to be only a little resentment of the Faey and not a whoile lot of resistance to them. That is the direction that Fel wanted the story to go, so that is why it went down the way it did.
And of course Fel left a bunch of stuff out. It is really unimportant to the story.
And until they find out more the world leaders (in a reasonable world) are going to tell the Faey where they can stick their request for surrender. As we’re proving on this board people think and react in different ways. At least some of them should have the brains and guts to do that.
In your opinion. I think that the world leaders would have said "If we are all dead, we can't fight back."
There are other reasons they should not just surrender. Fel does not give a reason why they do the exact opposite.
The reasons are there, you just don't like them.
All stories require some suspension of disbelief, but I think Subjugation requires much more than it needs to, and possibly more than is reasonable.
I don't think so. I had no problem with my suspnsion of disbelief in this story.