Alicornutopia

SPOILERS FOR EFFULGENCE: SUPERLUMINAL FOLLOW

...Wow. You weren't kidding about the spoilers. I was not expecting anything like that to be a thing at all.

Yep. Those are some extremely massive spoilers. But as someone who is not spoiler averse, this pleases me!

Also I now really want Bothari to be a bugbear and go bugbearing around with Lynn, so they can be all grumpy and tragic and moderately homicidal together.

That is definitely not what I was expecting. I had assumed that Nika was a Plant Bell. (Bluebell?)

A plant-fairy bell like Katie or Astrid would have demonstrated the hair color changing characteristic and been discovered at a thirtieth-century routine checkup.

Ohhh Miles' crush on Cam is ridiculously adorable <3. (Also Cam is ridiculously adorable in general).

How do thirtieth-century geneticists not know about creatures? Are they genetically human, lending support to Incandescence Max’s theory about creature origins? Or do all the geneticists, including an entire caste in a society that recently had a war, know about this and yet it failed to become public knowledge? I have a hard time believing my only other hypothesis, they still don’t know what all the genes do, to be even slightly plausible.

Inquire this in Spoilerland and ye shall be answered.

My (as of this writing) unspoiled guess would be that the magical disguise is able to fool genetic analysis. I'm not sure how that would interfere with genetic engineering, though; presumably the same way as a winged deer driving a car and typing on a keyboard and such.

I am surprised by Cam's inability to create things already in motion. Assuming the soletta weighs much more than he does, it ought to be cheaper to bring himself up to the desired velocity, create the soletta, and then decelerate again.

For what value of "cheaper"?

Fuel, certainly, which doesn’t matter. Probably time until the array is operational. I assume the array would have thrusters anyway for maneuvering, but could have used smaller ones.