Tag Archives: Ben Gold

Balance of Trade – Chapter 10

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Day 65
Standard Year 1118

Kinaveral

In which Mr Rumor has been doing the rounds.

I like “at sevens and eights”, which is presumably the same as “at sixes and sevens” only worse.

Mac Gold seems like an unpleasant fellow, and I wonder how much of the rumor he recounts is what Mr Rumor is actually saying and how much is him putting his own spin on it for his own purposes. (I mean, people do talk, and people who talk don’t always need encouragement to assume the worst, but based on what we’ve seen of him so far I wouldn’t put it past him.)

Balance of Trade – Chapter 2

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Day 32
Standard Year 1118

Gobelyn’s Market
Jethri’s Quarters

In which Jethri gets the bad news.

The downside of this being a re-read is that I’m mostly inspired to talk about the things that strike me new or different, so I don’t really have anything to say about the conversation between Jethri and his uncle, which hasn’t changed notably since last time I read it.

The sequence of Jethri and the calendar is a nice bit of characterization, both of Jethri the teenaged boy and Jethri the spacer who’s spent most of his life in a tin can and feels uncomfortable without a ceiling close over his head.

The calendar also offers a worldbuilding hook in itself, or perhaps I should say a worldbuilding bridge; the reader who is familiar with 21st-century Terran garage calendars will find things to recognise in certain aspects of it.

Speaking of which: The Gobelyn family are Terrans, a word which appears here for the first time this re-read.