Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, May 8, 2023.
I love Aitana’s unquestioning positivist and support of her parents here. 🙂
Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, May 8, 2023.
I love Aitana’s unquestioning positivist and support of her parents here. 🙂
He really zapped them because they were going to hurt him after he said he was a pacifish.
The expressions on Aitana’s face are wonderfully drawn in panels 4 and 5. We don’t need any speech bubbles to know what she’s thinking and feeling.
In Robert Heinlein’s “Citizen of the Galaxy” (in part homage to Kipling’s “Kim”), the hero Thorby is returned to his family (his parents having been eliminated by pirates) and finds himself describing to his aunt and uncle how he thwarted another pirate attack on his rescuer’s starship. His relations are visibly distressed, but Thorby, having been sold into slavery by pirates himself, is not apologetic. He describes how he used a multi-megaton atomic bomb to destroy the pirates and their ship. His aunt and uncle forbid him to talk about the incident in the future. As it turns out, this is not a disconnected incident, and has significant consequences.
While I can empathize with the wish of pacifists to see war eliminated, when a pirate vessel has a paralysis ray trained on your ship until the A-bomb takes them out, I can’t put pacifism above enslavement. And if Nogg was not particularly gentle with Javier and Raquel, the middle of a naval engagement is not the time, nor the command bridge of a ship engaged with an enemy the place to suggest surrender is preferable to offing Stribs. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.
I agree with Pete. There has been much written about war and the justification for ordinary citizens, when serving in the military, to kill an enemy, another human being.
Buried lede: spaceships are carpeted!
But they can still rug you the wrong way.