Release date for Commonweal #5, A Mist of Grit and Splinters, is Friday, 17 January, 2020
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| Book cover for Comonweal #5, A Mist of Grit and Splinters |
Egalitarian heroic fantasy. The first Creek standard-captain known to history, certain curious facts concerning the graul people, and an operational test of the Line's altered doctrine.
Google Play
Books2Read (Kobo, Apple, and the other Draft2Digital targets)
Pre-order is live now on Google Play; it should start going live for Kobo, Apple, and the other Draft2Digital targets under that Books2Read link over the next several days/first week of 2020.
Better a bit late than never. I hope you are satisfied with it. The rest of us are spectators.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, I preordered mine earlier this month.
Be well and carry on.
+D.C. I don't actively hate it, which is generally positive at this stage of the process.
ReplyDeleteThis was an annoyance of a book to write; I can only hope it won't be as annoying to read.
And you've reminded me to go turn the preview on, since this is the post-quality-reader text now available.
Looking forward to it. Only 16 more days.
ReplyDelete-JReynolds
Preordered. I wonder if I can reread Bad Days, Deliver, and Banner all in the next eight days?
ReplyDeleteWell, I finished it in more or less one sitting. The countdown to the invasion heightened suspense.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't answer the question that I had from Under One Banner: What happened to those civilians from Reems who were caught in the Waste? You mention that someone is talking to them, but that "To absorb thirty thousands of the remnant of Reems was not obviously within our present capacity..."
I know that the Commonweal can be (indeed, must be) ruthless and pragmatic, so they were probably left there, or told to go back to where they came from. Still, a hard choice to make.
-JReynolds
+JReynolds Those ~30 thousand displaced folks are quarantined on some long gravel bar near-islands in Edge Creek. (There's a proper geology term for the thing in a braided channel that's not channel and not always an island, but I don't presently recall it.) There's some language teachers and some medical researchers there with them; it's going to take about fifteen years to handle the epidemiology aspects of things so it's possible to offer them citizenship.
ReplyDeleteThis is completely not either Slow or Duckling's concern so they don't mention it. I expect the presence of the Equatorial clade will show up in Six somewhere.
Thanks for the info! Good to know that the Commonweal is more welcoming than Australia or the USA at the moment. We have to take our victories where we can.
ReplyDelete-JReynolds
How does a society with the levels of technology described in the book transport a quarter million troops plus support elements? I don't have a lot of comparisons, since Amphibious assault historically is relatively new, but given the level of organization of the armies, I decided to use 18th century corollaries.
ReplyDeleteIn that frame, 32k soldiers transported by the English to invade the american colonies in 1776 required over three hundred ships because they just couldn't get that big, needed to include their kit, and had to have enough provisions on board to feed whoever was there during the thirty day trip.
Assuming it was done by conventional means and not by magic the total number of ships involved in the Sea People's invasion would exceed the total navies of every major european power ca. 1780.
This isn't even to mention the enormous challenging of mustering that many troops after being broken up into such small units, and in what geographical area. In many ways that's the bigger challenge.
Are the ships bigger? Did they use magic to move giant barges?
I just finished the book, and loved it.
ReplyDelete+ship-tech Unknown -- The Sea-People are more-less vaguely height-of-power Numenor; they've had a lot of practice at this. In terms of moving soldiers, I suspect they sleeping-beauty them; load them into bunks and put them into enchanted sleep. They're certainly not 1780s tech in general and you can safely suppose the ships are much larger than the ~2000 tons of a strictly-wooden ship-rigged sailing vessel.
ReplyDelete+loved it Unknown -- yay! Glad you liked it.
Numenor, eh? That's heavy mojo.
ReplyDeleteRaises no end of questions, but the one that comes up for me is whether or not the Commonweal would consider a navy to be in violation of their principles about fighting beyond their borders. It's not really dominion...Because good golly move an artillery brigade or two onto a flotilla, start patrolling the shores at the mouth of the Misty River, and a large number of problems having to do with fighting a force that large once they reach land literally sink out of sight.
+Daniel O'Neil that's not the sort of answer for out here in searchable-and-index land; I'd recommend the Commonweal Google Group.
ReplyDelete+Daniel O'Neil
ReplyDeleteand a large number of problems having to do with fighting a force that large once they reach land literally sink out of sight.
I see what you did there.
The problem (I think) is that the Commonweal doesn't have a sea port, and can't just take one, since conquest is literally antithetical to their existence. So they have to wait for the Sea People's next move.
-JReynolds
Wait, the Commonweal Google Group still exists? When I try to go there, I get the forbidding "Google+ is no longer available for consumer (personal) and brand accounts" page.
ReplyDeleteIf there's still a clubhouse somewhere, please let me in. I enjoyed the book and have questions!
+Tyrone the Google Plus version does not; the Google Group does.
ReplyDelete(You do have to ask to be included and wait while a harried human somewhere finds a moment to go click the thing as needs clicking; it's not instant.)