A Different Direction

Yesterday over to the Peninsula to visit with my brother and his wife. Back late (do not take the Port Townsend-Winslow Ferry, we had a 2.5 hour wait in Pt. Townsend. We would have gotten home sooner by going back to Kingston). But the time wasn't totally wasted. As we sat I got a chance to really think about Firestar.

I was faced with a dilemma. Was there anything that was the central problem of the story? Was there a must that only Corey could do. There were a couple of valid suggestions, genomes, scouting, and so on. Most of those involved extensive rewriting, not only with Firestar, but then with Setosha and Lexeon. It might even have serious repercussions with Boabdil and Engage the Enemy More Closely. I'm viewing these as one large story with multiple segments. Thus a different must than I had intended for Corey Andersen ripples through the rest of the stories.

While waiting in Edmonds for the ferry I reviewed my themes. This is something I picked up at PNWA from Ed Penz. And one of the themes is that tactical and strategic skill are discrete things. Actually there are three, operational being the third. A person can be skilled at one and not the other. Look at the campaign (1653-54) between Turenne and the Great Conde. Conde won battle after battle; he was clearly the superior tactician. But Turenne set up the strategic and operational situation so Conde's victories did not matter. Now that does not mean that strategic skill trumps operational, which trumps tactical. They do, but only to a point. A good tactician can turn a strategic situation completely on its head. That happened in the Napoleonic wars from time to time.

Corey is a tactical genius, but she is untutored. In the words used in the book she is a natural tactician. She doesn't know why she does certain things, she just knows they will work. There is a scene in Firestar where Corey turns the carrier de Ruyter into an attack while positioning two ships to the rear with orders to fire up de Ruyter's stern. This results in mauling two Idenux cruisers. She knew it would work; it was only much later did she learn why. And for those who read this and wonder what she saw, it has to do with target overshoot and target fixation, getting into the psychology of the opponent; a good tactician gets inside his opponent's head.

So what did I do with this? In a battle Corey accidentally discovers how to defeat the Idenux. It is not a clever maneuver, I won't have any of that. In a war lasting 30 years you can bet that somebody has tried out virtually every maneuver possible. Instead she develops a combined arms approach using fighters and ships working together.

At one time the US Navy was a surface war navy. Even submarines were really torpedo boats that could go underwater for brief times, and they hunted the vessels on the surface, not other submarines. But after Pearl Harbor, and the events of 1942, that changed. Air began to dominate, and there were fewer and fewer surface battles. Soon the air arm in the Navy began to dominate the higher ranks. The submarine force didn't suffer from this, going their own route. But the surface warfare specialists basically were shut out of the career paths.

Something similar happened in the Families Navy. They went with carriers because of the flexibility of fighters. But ships have their own power, and their own career paths. In the Families Navy fighter crew have their own ranks and promotion path, but they eventually have to go to Command & Staff School and get a regular rank. The whole system would be set up to give rank to those with ship experience because there would be this belief that fighter pilots would not have the requisite ship maneuvering experience. Those that tried to get this experience would run into a lot of resistance.

Corey discovers a middle way, combining the flexibility of fighters with the power of the ships. She proves this in combat, which means it can't be explained away or shuffled out of sight. Combat has a way of doing that. She knows that the Families are outnumbered and are losing the numbers war against the Idenux (though she doesn't know why). The Families are at full stretch, and every year finds them facing more Idenux. They've already lost one colony, and are shutting another one down. And then she sees a way to turn this around.

So who are her opponents? The 'establishment' of the Families Navy. There are bureaucracies that would accept defeat rather than admit that they were wrong. So she has to prove this. She has help (she is sent to Command & Staff so she can learn how to use big ships), but she is shuffled off to a post where she can be 'lost'. She comes out of that with honors, so she is finally put in a position to use her skill, knowledge, and teach it to others. But her opponents, relying upon an alliance with the People's Star Kingdom to go the 'big ship' route for an upcoming critical battle, try to have her Family recall her. This forces Corey to face a question: which has primacy, her Family, or the Navy?

On the face of it this is an easy decision. But in the context of the Families it is not. She might be an officer in the Navy, but she is known as Family Red Ridges, and heretofore the Family has come first, at least for most people. So she has this dilemma, which she must face down as a second threat. She makes some choices that close out the story. Oh, and there's a big fight.

That's different than what I originally wrote, and yet a uses a lot of what I already had. Her must is to change and entire establishment, through word and deed. It's a daunting task, and will take everything she has to do it, and make her a different person at the end than she was at the beginning. And that is the story.

That just leaves reworking what I have.