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Thanks, Don. It's an interesting idea. Mama does do organic (see below).

I eventually decided to include a bunch of tractor front loaders inside the warehouse to scoop/dump the dirt into the utility carts. It's the warehouse-scale version of that monstrosity in Kenny's picture. I was trying to avoid using them because I wanted the work to be backbreaking. What I eventually settled for was "exhausting". It's still a nasty Warming-exposed work environment with cooling fans blowing dirt everywhere, so the filth and discomfort level is about the same.

Funnily enough, it turned out Mama does ship organic stuff. After I started rewriting to incorporate everyone's feedback, I added a couple of extra guided missiles during the taxi chase. They end up plowing into one of Mama's trucks labelled Organic Fertilizer. Naturally, the truck expodes in the middle of rush hour traffic sending manure raining down on everyone below.

Don, I included a chase through a crowded open-air market in response to your suggestion for a more interesting escape from the spaceport. Also added a paragraph addressing your questions about the terraforming process, and a part where Leonardo is about to kick Joseph and Paul out of the cab when the hunters show up. Turns out he lost his boys to his ex-wife so he finally decides to help them. Plus, let's face it, he's the crazed cabbie. He'd probably do it for kicks.

K, if you're reading, I added your suggestion of the pizza drone. Awesome! The cab buzzes past it and the drone gets whacked by a guided missile, exploding into "a fiery ball of metal, plastic, and mozzarella". :-)  I also gave the cab's AI a personality, so it's less like HAL, and made it smarter than 3PO, except that Leonardo keeps hitting it with his fist on the dashboard. It keeps resetting, eventually frying the altimeter, so the AI doesn't know precisely how low they are to the ground when that moment comes.

Thanks to all for your suggestions. I love the result.
Dirk

Thanks, Tom. I agree option "a" seems better. Unless I can think of something else, I'm going to go with it. I think I have a little more leeway since it's space opera rather than hard-core sci-fi, so "entertainment" is also a factor, hence the many plotholes in the Star Wars series. I try to stamp out as many of them as I can, so I appreciate the help.

These days, a real sci-fi story set 2000 years in the future would be forced to pretty much automate everything, probably also excluding the insane flying taxi ride that takes place later in the chapter as the slaves try to escape. Self-driving vehicles are only about 10-20 years away, so I wonder what will happen to taxi and bus drivers at that point. Not to mention speeding tickets (a major source of revenue for some towns). A vehicle could pick up passengers, drive them where they want to go, accept Apple Pay, and then continue on to wherever the dispatcher programs it to go next. I've been on airport tramways that were fully automated almost ten years ago. I did wonder with those what happens when someone gets stuck halfway through a closing door. Yikes!

Dirk

What a monster! Topsoil, however, is only a few feet deep, at most, but let's assume there is machinery at the digging site. I assumed so when I wrote the scene, but didn't bother to write about it, since it was outside Joseph's POV. You still need a way to get it in and out of a cargo hold. Hence, the canvas utility carts. It's really about the most cost-efficient way of getting it from a dirt pile in the warehouse, dumped there by dumptrucks, into the ship by either slaves digging vs robots digging that are maintained by humans. I also considered some form of tractor front loaders (baby brothers to the one in your picture) to lift the dirt from inside the warehouse and dump it into the carts that are then pushed into the cargo hold by slaves. I probably have to include them.

Any other suggestions on real back-breaking work that cheap slaves could do?

Thanks.
Dirk

You're right, of course. I'm thinking perhaps the AI tries to warn him (e.g., "Leonardo, I --") and he commands it to shut up and keep going. Come to think of it, 3PO did make multiple attempts to warn Han about the hyperdrive.

I also need a way to lose those guided missiles.

One thing that helps is that this is the notorious Crazy Cabbie, so I can make stuff up for his cab that wouldn't normally exist on a regular vehicle, like suicidio mode.

I can think of several chapter mods to address your points. I'll have to play with it.

Thanks.
Dirk

Following are three uses of "means" I found after scouring the Internet. They both use quotes for the defined word(s).

    The Latin verb "duco" means "to lead," "to consider," or "to prolong."
    Another common Latin expression you might come across is sic transit gloria mundi. It means “thus passes the glory of the world.”
    Booth is said to have shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!” He meant “that’s what tyrants get;” literally, “Thus always to tyrants.”

Using the above examples would result in the following in my conversation between Joseph and Leonardo:

    It means "Your mother was inseminated by a Greek."
    It means "bitch."

I also use quotes for things like:

    Joseph Windsor was four years old the first time he heard "God" speaking to him.

In this case, the quotes are used because the author of the sentence (a religious scholar from the distant future) wants to emphasize that it may not really have been God that Joseph heard.

Dirk

The only reason I would might avoid exotic would be because it's more telling than showing. I got similar feedback for using the term sultry without actually showing anything. The fixed version "shows" quite a bit. :-)

Dirk

Maybe something slightly annoying on the Reviews screen, reminding people how many reviews they haven't responded to.

One nice-to-have that may have been mentioned already would be the ability to go from a posted review to the next chapter in someone's book, if there is one. I use the reviews tabs to see what the last review was I gave each author and then proceed from there. For regular reviews posted, it's pretty easy, since clicking on the posted review takes you to the book's posting view where you can select the next chapter and read from there. For inline reviews, however, you need to click on the most recent review's author, then scroll to/click on the author's postings, then scroll to/click on the book, before being allowed to select the next chapter, at which point one mouses to/clicks on Leave Inline Review. Less clicking and scrolling would be great. Right now, all of the links in the Inline Posted tab take you to the review, except for the author link.

Thanks.
Dirk

Hi Sol. Would TNBW Free still be non-points group? If not, how should we post so that free members see our work? I currently post to TNBW Premium and TNBW Free on the assumption that free members can't see Premium posts.

Are my assumptions incorrect?

Thanks.
Dirk