On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:

On 9/8/2014 10:49 AM, Richard Aiken wrote:

I remember my own shock when the all-powerful, ruthlessly practical and Machiavellian galactiv Emperor of The_Sten_Chronicles turned out to be a diminutive grandfatherly type whose main recreational passion was fly-fishing . . . to which purpose he had put half an Earth-like wilderness world off-limits to visitation by anyone else.

The Emperor was pretty cool...until the unpleasantness there near the end.

Yeah. I thought that was kinda sucky. I wonder if Cole and Bunch had that end to the series in mind from the beginning, by building in the AM2 monopoly from the start? Losing that WOULD be rather stressful . . .

The Sten series is one that is must reading for anyone into Traveller. The technology is quite different, but the fit, feel, and chrome would be very familiar.

As I remember, the tech really isn't really much different; slugthrowers (firing ultra-high-explosive rounds) predominate over beam weapons, ships are largely streamlined, there's lots of daring do and skullduggery that widespread high-end tech would make very unlikely, etc. I even dimly recall an instance in one novel where the fact that the local Imperial Reserve Fleet (e.g. Subsector Navy) was not *technically* part of the Imperial Navy became an important plot device. I can't honestly recall if FTL comms exist in the books, but I vaguely recall that most interstellar communications were couriered/recorded (if only for security reasons).

Of course, there IS the fact that everything is powered by Antimatter 2. But I think that's largely a plot device to justify having an Eternal Emperor (he and his automated factories are the only source of this fuel). But that would be easy enough to ignore.

Richard Aiken