I particularly liked the opening meta narrative of the first 9 or so chapters, it compelled me to keep reading to find out what was going to happen. I also liked Elaines initial conversation with the Queen about the place of morality and how you linked this humanity.

I must confess to becoming a bit lost when I reached Elaines letter to herself; it took a good 20 minutes to go through it and work out what you were saying , but I think I finally grasped it; enough to see the story through anyway.

The characters seemed to me to be well developed, I felt “onside” with Elaine throughout the story, intrigued by some of her actions and impressed by her problem solving abilities (especially the init hash file decode sequence, I certainly wouldnt have thought of that). I also thought you portrayed Gill quite well, although the attatchment to his plight was not as strong as that of Elaines. I think this was largely because he was not focused on until later in the story, and even then his motives are clouded.

I thought you wrote about the settings well, I could visualise the throneroom and Elaines conversations with the Queen as well as the totemlab quite clearly. Because the story is short, I think having most of the story take place in the same setting was a good idea as one develops a clear and constant picture of the setting, and can focus more on the interactions of the various characters with that relatively constant base.

If I were to offer a criticism I would say that at times the narrative dealing with more global parts of the story ie – the explanation of the formation of the Totem co-op, and the development of opposition to it seemed to me to be somewhat disjointed from the story. That was why I liked Bly’s side part, as it seemed to give a more tangible explanation for the same phenomena. On the other hand, in hindsight I cannot think of a better way to convey the depth of information without detracting from what I considered to be strong points – the addition of a lot of extra characters in the form of various world leaders would dilute the simple (and because of that) strong character set; and would inevitably involve drawing the story away from the Academy setting.

Of course as they say, a mans likes and dislikes are a reflection of his own tastes and experience and I am hardly a veteran science fiction buff, let alone someone who reads a lot of novels, so you could say my critique is a little je jeune.

In any case it was a very pleasant way to spend a Friday evening (and a sixth of saturday morning; it took me 5 hours to read!) Congratulations on composing a great story.