Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'whole book spoilers'.
-
What is Detritus, and is it alive? I’ve not seen a lot of talk about the planet itself yet, which for me is a bigger part of the mystery about what’s going on. After the climactic battle the ‘debris field’ aligned to give our hero a clear pathway into space, almost if she was being encouraged (or fated) to go up there. She notes that this happening for her, in the same way it did a decade previously for her father, is incredibly unlikely. Does that imply that something was watching, and did it intentionally? In the PC strategy game ‘Endless Legends’, the backstory involves various races competing to escape a dying planet, which is also alive and aware of their plight in a sort of mother-eathy way. It would be cool if Detritus was a mechanical version of this; a vast form of machine intelligence built by humans centuries ago that on some level is also trying to protect them from extinction (this is similar to the dystopian manga ‘Blame!’ in which out-of-control building machines have turned the earth into one giant megastructure, extending out beyond the orbit of the moon). We’re given few clues to what Detritus was. A planet-sized orbital shell of shipyards, defensive planets and habitats, with light-emitting panels mounted below to re-create the solar light blocked by the multiple levels of orbiting platforms. The resources required to build such a facility would be vast, and the work of centuries to complete. An industrial site of this magnitude couldn’t be sustained by the resources of the planet below; it’s more likely to have been the centre of a vast network of systems providing metals and rare elements; a centralised bastion for a galactic empire capable of producing fleets of ships. The timeline of events with the war and the Defiant arriving on Detritus seems left intentionally vague, but it seems that the planet’s infrastructure was built and abandoned long before the war, that M-Bot arrived at some point before or during the war, and that the Defiant arrived towards its end. I’m guessing that humans didn’t build the planet, simply due to the resources involved and time required against the fact that they were already fighting the entire galaxy. I think that M-Bot was sent to scout the planet for useful resources to use in the war effort; that may explain his configuration as a long-range stealth recon fighter. The planet was a known facility built by some long-gone ancient race of aliens, largely avoided due to its automated defences. M-Bot was disabled during the survey and crashed onto the surface. With his self-repair features offline, the pilot decided to go and explore the planet to search for a means of survival (and is never heard of again). Thoughts?