Posted By Kerrick on 2/9/2014 3:52:16 PM
Jim: They didn't replace the panels... they patched them back together (which, in my mind, is the worse offense). I still can't believe that bomb was somehow powerful enough to shatter armaglass without completely obliterating the chamber itself.

Sorry Kerrick but it does say on p207

"...Inside the floor had been patched... ...damaged tiles replaced with new ones... ...located somewhere in the redoubt, maybe plucked off the walls of another room."

 

Jim

******SPOILERS*********

 

 

This has to be the best goof though...

 Doc and J.B decide to split up to go and talk to the other group members  near the books conclusion...

page 260 J.B goes to talk with Mildred and Ricky, things go wrong and he pulls Jaks pistol out to stop them.

Meanwhile...

page 274 Doc goes to speak with Jak and pulls out Jaks pistol once more to hand it back...

 

 Jim

Jim: I was talking about the armaglass, not the floor. Patching the floor with new tiles wouldn't be a big deal, except the mat-trans is noted as being metal with a bunch of those things like the Star Trek teleporters (the name escapes me at the moment).

Re: the pistol: I missed that one.

Check me on this but I thought eating anything that was Red Hot Radioactive would kill you dead in just days .
The idea that Royal jelly would give someone super speed and super strength is a good one, but not even close to being anyway real.
Bees do make Royal Jelly but it is used to turn a baby/larva worker into a Queen. I don't know of any other use for it .
There was a lot of goofs in this story but even so I liked the idea of a cut off society coping and adapting to life alone. We don't know just how hard it is to repair a mat trans unit . This is not the first time we have seen one repaired in this series. JB fixed that one on the Iceberg gate ,so they could get away before it sank.

Regarding the characters not behaving like themselves - that was a feature and not a bug. It's not that the author didn't know how to write the characters, it's that the entire point was that they all behaved very unlike themselves without anyone but J.B. noticing. They made a point of never surrendering their weapons, they were allowed to carry them throughout their initial encounter and then later on voluntarily placed them in unlocked boxes inside their own living quarters. I thought that aspect of the story was very well done, as was the challenge that J.B. faced in the final act trying to convince his friends that they were not themselves.

Regarding the radioactive honey and royal jelly - in a series where radiation led to things like Stickies and Scabbies, Water Beetle People, giant mutated snakes and spiders and all the rest, I don't expect a whole lot of hard science in the plot setups. I'm willing to accept the honey and the jelly as the MacGuffins they are.

Regarding the guns, I got nuthin'. I know virtually nothing about guns, so that stuff sails right by me. I appreciate how annoying it must be if there are grossly inaccurate things about the weapons, I feel the same way about how computers are used on most tv shows and movies.

I finished this last night and it was a good story just not a good DL story. Plenty of good story but perhaps just not enough action. The characters were out of character but as Ron said they were supposed to be due to eating the "Royal Jelly".
One part I really enjoyed was Krysty and Ryan actually thinking(and doing) about settling down. One of the things that has annoyed me about some of the DL novels is that you never know what the "Gang" are thinking about other than "wow that cat in the RV has got a Ma Deuce" or " I'm a goona kill that guy" leading to them coming across as cardboard cut-outs of people where as in this novel they actually seemed human if albeit ZombieBeePeople.
The "Melissa's" were cool, it was good to see a story with out yet another boring Ryan shot everything perfectly story. I would like to see more stories with the companions having to go gun less and use their unarmed combat savvy and cunning to bring down the legions of stickies or Giant Man Eating Budgies that is coming to eat them.
All in all not bad, not a stinker but just needed a bit of tweaking.

One of the things I really liked about this story was we get to see things from JB's point of view.
He was the odd man out in this story.
I feel it was because his chosen area of expertise was not needed, and he couldn't fit in anywhere else . I liked that he never gave up on his friends or tried to run out/escape without them.
The one thing I didn't like about JB in this book is he seemed to be able to survive against every Melissa he fought against without getting so badly beat up that he couldn't walk or function . These sec women were supposed to be super fast & strong I guess JB is also a superman.