The middle narrative is ‘the action narrative’. It embraces military science fiction, and also hard science fiction. These aren’t necessarily my favourite sub-genres. However, I’ve read enough about why dogfights with small fighters wouldn’t really make sense in space combat. Essentially, it is too dangerous, because as soon as you are hit, you are dead (you can parachute out in airplane combat. And one shot doesn’t necessarily wreck the whole system). I took a leaf from ‘Legends of the Galactic Empire’ (which still had ships taking multiple hits!) and had ships far apart from each other, launching volleys of laser fire from distance (the speed of light being, as you might know, quite fast. I also saw something about ‘could laser beams be reflected by mirrors?’ (No, is the short answer).
Don’t worry, if pew pew big space battles are not your thing, there are only two of them. And technology fetishism is acknowledged by the characters in the story. Also, it occurred to me that, if you take the principle of ‘one hit just about does it’, then necessarily the battles are quite short. Strategy thus becomes crucial. This principle actually applies to naval combat too (if your battleship is hit head on, you likely have to bugger off or abandon ship).
Anyway, the vast majority of the writing actually concerns how the characters deal with the military events. And then, of course, there are the whole other two narratives with plenty of other stuff happening.
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Is there too much going on? Maybe. You tell me. But you have to read it first.
