Gideon the Ninth

[jack]

I reread Gideon the Ninth and half way through Harrow the Ninth. I posted a lot of recap and musings on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10104135617416710&id=36912084

Should be public to everyone, but you can always comment here if you don't use Facebook

Comments

[jack]

The short story confirms the empire IS just constantly expanding, moving the population of all the non-house planets to newly conquered planets as the planets die. That's economically inefficient, no shit! Apparently depending on the resources of the newly conquered worlds to keep going. And it's less efficient the further from the centre the front gets. No wonder people hate them.

This really should have been obvious from them being an "empire".

The pyramid scheme nature implies that it might be hard to STOP expanding. After all, all the planets they have now are dying slowly.

But on top of that, there are several mentions of John being on a "crusade" and "no-one else needs to die for the sake of revenge", which implies that it's his pressure that keeps the empire expanding. Augustine and Mercy have discussed what they would do without John -- evacuate the house planets if they can, set up somewhere else, try to arrange a non-aggression peace with the rest of the galaxy.

They assume necromancy will slowly die in this case. Although that also raises the question, we assume John has some sort of infinite energy supply keeping dominicus going. But the power dynamics would make sense if HIS power came from the planets being flipping somehow, then he COULDN'T stop without letting necromancy die and losing his own power.