League of Superheroes: CFRB Tour Wrap-up

Ansric: We made it through a week-long blog tour. Any closing thoughts?

Rod/Titan: I'm kinda surprised how many people took KidChat seriously about Genie's age. She isn't seven. All you have to do is look at what's said about the protests at Gibbroek's to get a general idea how old she'd really be.

Allen/Tachyon: Which is the kind of thing only Rod would bother doing.

Rod: Because I'm the only one here with brains.

Ansric: The topic does come up more in Genie at Large, along with a few other details about the events of League of Superheroes. One thing that has surprised me is that some people—not on this tour, so much—don't seem to realize that Genie was actually alive. Perhaps that's because of Gibbroek's remarks: he wouldn't have thought her alive anyway.

Charlie/Micromegas: I don't think people realize how life and death are viewed by a lot of doctors. For example, one of the major reasons that death keeps being more and more broadly defined is simply that you generally can't use organs from a corpse, even a fresh one. So they just say that someone is as good as dead and keep him alive until they've harvested the organs. So from Gibbroek's perspective, Genie was as good as dead, and he harvested some parts. Her heart may not have been beating at that point, but her brain was okay.

Tom/Darklight: Doctors are pretty scary these days.

Charlie: Not all of them. But it's hard to dedicate yourself to life and healing when you reject the Author of Life.

Ansric: Another point is that people seem to assume that you're all the same age. There isn't a major spread, but you're not exactly quadruplets, either. Charlie is the oldest, then Allen, then Tom, then Rod. And Charlie's almost a year older than Rod. If it hadn't been for the home-schooling scheme, you wouldn't have grown up together.

Tom: And now you're getting into stuff that we didn't really understand ourselves until later. I keep telling you that it's important to keep things in sequence. I mean, at this point--during LoS—I knew that the Davies family had been in the area the longest, followed by the Peterses and Taylors, and we showed up just as things were getting interesting. But the details—that Mr. Taylor led Mr. and Mrs. Davies to the Lord and helped get them together to begin with, that Mrs. Peters went to the wall and even beyond it to save Rod's life, that Dad was stung by some academic bait-and-switch that positioned him to intervene at another dark time in Rod's life and bring our families together--we didn't know any of that until our climactic encounter with Nathan Scott in Genie Reborn. I wish they'd told us, but I understand why they didn't. Sometimes kids talk when they shouldn't, and it was a precarious balance. But I didn't go into that in LoS. I tried to avoid anything I didn't know at the time.

Ansric: Clarice, any comments?

Clarice/Goodcheer: I think I like the next story better.

Ansric: Because it's when the others start taking you seriously?

Clarice: Sort of. But Genie's more like Genie, too.

Ansric: And in Genie at Large we also see the early signs of the horror that finally emerges in Unity Six.

Clarice: I didn't like what happened in Unity Six. There should have been another way.

Ansric: But it enabled you to guide Tom and Charlie in Anchor Point.

Tom: So we did something stupid--

Ansric: That made everything turn out right. I quote:

I have thought long and hard about that ever since—especially once I found out what we actually did. I still think that I would’ve done it, even knowing what would come of it. We were Genie’s friends, and she needed us. If helping her opened Pandora’s box a little wider, well, so be it.—Anchor Point

I've said that the tagline for the origin series would be the lot of you screaming "Genie!" in unison. But your desperate attempts to save her aren't the true focus even of the origin series. Hope is the focus of the series as a whole, along with God, of course. But Clarice is far more important than anyone originally imagined. Last call for comments.

Rod: It's a pretty good story, even though Tom didn't explain the physics as much as he should've. I mean, invisibility isn't that hard: You just bend the light through hyperspace--

Allen: And hit the temporal pause button on the mouth before we all fall asleep. I thought the balance was pretty good on exposition. The hacking was oversimplified, of course.

Tom: Pause yourself this time.

Charlie: There's less emphasis on prayer in this story than in the later ones. But it's a good start.

Ansric: I think we'll leave it there. I'm overdue on some reviews and general posting, but we'll revisit the League later.

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