Leigh Kimmel’s Reviews > Count to a Trillion > Status Update
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 258 of 364
Our protagonist returns to civilization, to a celebration. Finally meets the lovely Princess Rania, and is enthralled. A conversation about two kinds of freedom, whether to pursue one's base desires, or to realize one's potential. License or liberty, although the terms are not used. Struggling between disgust at desiring another man's woman and the feeling that the antagonist does not deserve so fine a lass.
— Sep 05, 2021 10:53AM
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Leigh’s Previous Updates
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 348 of 364
The new couple's honeymoon disrupted by the villain, who sets up a confrontation. The descent to the surface, the face-off and posturing.
— Sep 10, 2021 09:56AM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 327 of 364
Discussion of the implication of relativity to interstellar societies. To be truly spacefaring, a society must be able to keep promises made generations earlier. Their laws must be stable over thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The lightspeed barrier is effectively a selector for very long time preferences.
— Sep 09, 2021 04:16PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 310 of 364
The wedding and the flight to the space elevator, now largely abandoned. Our protagonist wants to refurbish it and get people out to space, to settling the whole Solar System like the future we were supposed to have.
— Sep 08, 2021 06:49PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 286 of 364
Our protagonist weds the Swan Princess, although the marriage is morganatic and his heirs will inherit none of her titles or authority. He begins his long-range plans, including cornering the market in biosuspension. It involves a lot of shady dealings, which he later comes to regret -- being smarter doesn't make one better, just better at rules-lawyering to game the system.
— Sep 07, 2021 12:41PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 220 of 364
The meeting with the rest of the surviving crew (the "away party") turns into a confrontation. With the help of the machine fork of the antagonist, our protagonist flees to a cabin in the Canadian wilderness and reads old-fashioned books with pages of pressed vegetable matter marked with chemical inks. Contemplating the information systems control of the regime the antagonist has established.
— Sep 04, 2021 02:52PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 196 of 364
The decoding of the segment that details the Monument-builders' plans for humanity once the tripwire has been crossed (namely, the star-mining of the Diamond Star, which is pretty clearly artificial). Compared with transporting Australian Aborigines to Ireland, but perhaps it's more akin to the Shakespeare Society transporting English sparrows, etc to the US.
— Sep 03, 2021 12:13PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 182 of 364
The secret of the creation of the Princess Rania -- except our protagonist is given two versions of some critical events, and neither passes the sniff test. What's the actual version behind the BS?
— Sep 02, 2021 03:55PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 158 of 364
The horrific secret of the Monument revealed -- the Diamond Star is a test. It's also a trap. Humanity is not being welcomed into the Galactic Commonwealth, but informed that it has reached the stage at which older and more powerful intelligences become interested in it, not as partners, but as raw material. Not "welcome to the stars" but "we own you."
— Sep 01, 2021 06:35PM
Leigh Kimmel
is on page 129 of 364
The machine emulation of the mind of the Master of the World. Our protagonist is on the brink of a discovery amidst this glorious machinery, but a moment of self-awareness breaks the mindstate that allows him to manipulate the streams of information.
— Aug 31, 2021 12:22PM
