Shark_Force wrote:Killer Cyborg wrote:XI 11
Challenges
An individual traveler and small groups, in particular, are likely to be "buzzed" by a lone Warrior or Hunter swooping down on the character(s), forcing him to duck or get bumped, brushed or pushed to the ground. If the character(s) being buzzed take no action against his antagonist and continues to keep moving, the Warrior will stop after a minute or two and let him/them continue. However, such an unwanted intruder or group may be challenged by one particular Warrior or Hunter while the rest of his squad (and probably scores of other Xiticix) watch from above. This may, or may not, be a fight to the death, but even if it is, the others will not join the battle unless they too are attacked or other humanoids join the battle. When the one on one battle is done, the others fly away. If the Warrior lost, they depart with the corpse of their fallen comrade in their arms, and the travelers are allowed to continue on their journey. If the Warrior wins, he may challenge another member of the group, or fly away (with his squad) triumphant and happy. What the Xiticix prove from such challenges is not clear. Presumably it is that this is their land and they are willing to defend it to the death.
Thankfully, a group of non-Xiticix is seldom challenged more than once every 10 hours, and the battle is typically one on one with everybody else as spectators. However, if other members of the traveling group join the battle, it will become a free-for-all, with the other Xiticix jumping in to teach the "cheaters" a lesson.
Such skirmishes turn into battles as previously described.
"small groups" is not perfectly defined, but i suspect 300,000 people is not what they had in mind.
Which "they" are you talking about?
The writers?
That would appear to be Kevin Siembeida; he's the author of the book. I don't know if his name is on the SoT series, but I can certainly believe that when he wrote this part of this part of XI, he did indeed have in mind that one day a CS army with unusually high numbers would exploit this behavior.
I mean, he knew back in 1990 that Tolkeen was going to be wiped off the map by the CS. The man plots things ahead. By the time XI was written, KS'd had roughly a decade in order to mull over how events would play out. I don't think that it is at all implausible that when he wrote XI--that when he wrote this passage specifically--that he was deliberately setting up the scene where Holmes' army would disappear into the hivelands, only to emerge later to win the day.
The main problem is that--if that's what he was doing at all--he did not do it very well.
In writing, that kind of thing is difficult, because you're not just trying to fool the readers, you're trying to do it a certain way. You have to craft the rules of your setting in such a way that you set up the future event without giving away the upcoming twist.
It's a bit like a stand-up comic routine where the comedian makes an early joke with a highlighted punchline that the audience will remember, then he moves on to other jokes for a while. Maybe he'll drop in a reference at some point over a long set, just to get another laugh, as well as to remind the audience that the punchline exists. By the time he gets to his final routine, ideally, the audience will have that punchline in the back of their minds, but they won't be thinking about it. They'll have the knowledge necessary for the line to be funny, even hilarious, but the comedian will approach his impending final delivery of that punchline from an oblique angle, and the audience won't see it coming.
They'll either have no idea where the story is going, or they'll be following a false trail, thinking that they know where the story is going, but they don't.
So when the punchline resurfaces, it's unexpected, but it makes perfect sense in a well-crafted routine,
because the comedian has done all the work of setting everything up thoroughly in advance.
You see a similar pattern in science fiction and fantasy all the time.
The writer sets up the rules of the universe, and lays down the rules so firmly that the audience believes those rules as if they were fact. Then, later on in the story, the rules are flipped upside down for an amazing and climactic moment.
If the story was well-written, and if everything was laid out well, then this can work beautifully.
But if it wasn't laid out well, then it flops, and instead of something that makes sense, you end up with a suspension-of-disbelief-breaking deus ex machina moment.
I think that the basic plot idea of Holmes' trip through the hivelands
could have worked... it just
didn't work, because it wasn't well-written enough.
RPG books can be a tricky format to try that kind of writing at all, and while KS has a beautiful imagination, the art of
writing is ultimately about communicating your imagination clearly to the audience, of writing with such precision that everybody reading your work is taking essentially the same journey, and of making certain that the journey is roughly the one that you want them to go on.
But Palladium's game books are NOT that kind of thing, and they are NOT written with the necessary level of clarity necessary to pull this level of storytelling off.
Moreover, Holmes' act hinged on the the passage that I described, so any understanding on the part of the readers hinged on not only reading this specific passage, but also on interpreting and understanding that passage in such a way that Holmes' re-emergence fits the readers' mental view of the in-game reality.
All of which--given the wide span of Rifts books overall, and the lack of significant highlighting of this passage at any time previous to the SoT books--adds up to a MAJOR plot point revolving around a little-read and little-understood passage that can be interpreted a number of ways.
TL;DR version:
I think that KS intended the quoted XI passage to set up Holmes' victory, but that he didn't do it very well.