Seeking answers on John M. Ford plots

[drcpunk]

I have finished rereading The Last Hot Time. I reread Growing Up Weightless not that long ago. I'm still trying to figure out a few things.



For The Last Hot Time:

Okay, I get that Kitsune was in love with Phasia. That's why she tried to make a deal with Whisper. What did she think she was trading and for what?

Who tried to kill Doc in the explosion? Kitune? Whisper? Patrise?

Why? To keep Doc from curing Phasia, presumably, but why would any of these people think he could do that?

What are the removed bullets et alia good for? Doc uses the removed arrowhead from Whisper as part of the cure for Phasia, right? How does that work?

What is Doc's reflection?

What is the Word of Worsds? Why must it be whispered in darkness? How does it help Phasia?

How does Doc cure Phasia? Why might he almost have died?

Why is Patrise stepping down? How is what he does tied to Phasia? Does her glamour somehow extend to him? Is this why no one asked Birdsong the questions he thought he should be asked?

For Growing Up Weightless

Who killed the dead guy? Why?

What is the Earth agent up to, the one Ballantine warns against?

What is Earth up to?

What did Lynch Ballantine mean when he quoted O'Brien about the object of torture being torture?

What did Mike Ford mean when he described Ballantine's eyes as evil? What was Ballantine up to, anyway?

Comments

[avram]

It’s been too long since I read either of those books for me to even guess at answers, but I’ve reread Nineteen Eighty-Four pretty recently, and a bunch of other Orwell as well, and bits of real-world history and current politics, so I understand about torture: Torture is never just about getting information out of somebody. It’s about forcing compliance, totally dominating someone.

There’s a bit early in Cory Doctorow’s new book, Little Brother, where the protagonist (who’s been imprisoned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time just after a big terrorist attack in San Francisco) is being interrogated by an agent of Homeland Security. The agent asks him for detailed information about how the bombs were placed, saying that if he provides this information he’ll be released.

Now, that’s an obvious mindfuck. The only way he could know about the bombs is if he was a terrorist, in which case they’d obviously never release him. It highlights that the agent isn’t so much interested in getting information out of him as she’s interested in demonstrating her control over him. She can tell obvious, nonsensical lies to his face, and he can’t call her on it because she also controls whether he’ll ever see the outside world again.

The speech O’Brien gives to Winston spells this out:

’[…] The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. […] We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

[…]

‘All this is a digression,’ he added in a different tone. ‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I get all that, but not how it applies to Earth and Luna in Growing Up Weightless.