Otter's Rock

First, are you by any chance a devotee of Golden Age literary science fiction, as well as of LMB? Because there is a strong trend in that era for authors to start their stories with a revolutionizing technology, explained in a scientifically plausible way, and which then drives the story. (In this case, that is the frames.) They were also filled with a great deal of talking, of telling-instead-of-showing, but done in the most thoughtful manner possible. There is also an underlying understanding of the world as harmonious, of the perfect being humanly possible, of a faith in goodness and truth and virtue as being always triumphant, a kind of innocent simplicity that is the product of a pre-Vietnam Americanism. They are also very stylized. When reading this story, I had the most curious feeling of reading one of those stories. This novel feels like them, both in obvious structural ways and in its inherent optimism. It was oddly like reading, say, one of Asimov's Robot stories.

Second, while you tie things up neater than I think LMB herself would ever choose to do, you have her characters, settings, and underlying themes down cold, for which I salute you. The melding of her tone and that of the Golden Age is odd in places, but ultimately works, perhaps because LMB herself is in many ways shaped by authors before her. She is more subtle in her themes, at times, and while she lifts up truth and justice and goodness as the earlier authors did, she does so in a way that makes clear that for her, their value comes in the striving for them, that they can never be won without cost, that perfection is impossible but should still be sought. The only way the melding of the two understandings is possible so seamlessly in a work without pain is that the pain has already happened; you have woven in the pain from all the earlier works (both what is shown and not shown) and used that as the emotional framework of your story.

I'm not sure if I have explained myself as coherently as I would like. But this is a major accomplishment, and I salute you.