Thanks for the feedback unadopted. I set out not to violate or ignore the imperatives of story structure but I did set out to outright sabotage some of the more common tropes of current hard SF. Specifically there are no mass quantities of blood, guts, and death and no gratuitous killing off of characters simply to generate conflict. And there are few if any dystopian themes as all. The central macguffin is, as far as I'm aware, unique and I had a lot of fun exploring it plus the secondary macguffin revealed in the last third of the piece was loads of writing fun. The last trope I attempted to subvert in The Purest Sea is how to make a story interesting without fierce implacable villains. This is a tough one to sidestep, in this genre especially. Any success in that particular endeavor is for others to judge.
In the second tome I opened up the stage dramatically and it is somewhat more conventional but, I hope, equally entertaining. The third volume has been even more fun to work on and concerns an interesting aspect of the idea of the "Gestalt", as I call it, which informs the last of the first volume and much of the second. The working title is The Prometheus Project.
I am retired and don't really need the money so this series of tomes is not expected to be a remunerative project unless lightning strikes several times in the same spot. I have however been reading science fiction since the mid 1950s and a better way to prep for actually writing it I can't imagine. All that reading, and the reading of perhaps ten thousand other books of wide ranging subject matter, including the classics, has, I hope, given me a modest organic feel for story structure and for knowing when something sounds awkward or strained. I will admit that my literary models are Heinlein and Asimov, for whatever that is worth.
