Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20160518042528/@comment-25626-20160724211953

Turtle Fan wrote: I haven't gotten to FO yet, but I did like BA, even if most of the POVs struggled to find something useful to do. I'm wondering if HT should try mid-level POVs: instead of bomber crew members, how about the base commanders who send them out on their missions? Ship captains, senior civil servants. People who are closer to momentous decisions, but aren't actually making those decisions themselves. People like Heinrich Jager, for instance, or Irving Morrell before he became an army group commander in GWII--back when it was actually appropriate for him to get as close to the fighting as he continued doing later on.

There are also people like Sam Yeager or Flora Hamburger or Liu Han, who start out as ordinary schlubs and very quickly advance to more nearly-central roles in events by serendipitous circumstances that don't strain credibility too badly and build on factors that were already a part of the character's bio. I wish HT could rediscover how to write those characters. Alistair Walsh looked to be heading that way, but, well--

We see some of that more in FO. A couple of characters, by attrition and circumstance both, seem like they'll be rather more important in the world by the end of Vol 3. The three on that short list seem to be Marian Staley, Boris Gribkov, Ihor Shevchenko, and Cade Curtis.