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Every character in the story, save the Veteran, either dies a pointless death or ends up in a state of suffering worse than that in which they started, and I get the impression that the narrator has no more compassion for them than does the Veteran. The people are just literary object, to be killed as is expedient, and who cares about them anyway? Their lives are petty against the backdrop of the Veteran's war.
Miéville does the same sort of thing. He builds these full lives for his characters, makes them seem real, makes you care about them, and then dismisses them to death and despair with a shrug, moves on.
I feel like I've devoted a lot of space to complaining. That's because my complaint is strange, and it seems like might need some explaining to make sense to others. The length of the complaint does not equate to disparagement of the story. This story is certainly of high quality.
But (to me at least) it isn't fun. I keep thinking of a mother holding her baby out of the water, and I feel a need for that image to be justified somehow, for it to mean something. But it doesn't. That leaves a bitter aftertaste, and I'm not sure if intriguing fantasy is sweet enough to balance it.
Tweedy - I feel like you totally misinterpreted the story. As far as I could tell, it's a story *about* how human lives are not meaningless - the veteran may not really care about the people he's killing, directly and indirectly - for him they're just backdrop - but the story condemns this view - in a subtle, non-explicit way - rather than share it.
I didn't feel like the story condemned anybody or any view. The Veteran's actions seemed to be neither justified nor condemned. He just did what he did because it's what suited him, and the other characters did what suited them, and that's that. Amoral.
The Veteran suffers no rebuke and feels no guilt.
Oh, and Mr. Tweedy, I must say that I have been most impressed by your posts, here and elsewhere. I don't always agree with what you say [though I often do], but you always make me think.