Debatable Space
Author: Philip Palmer
Release: January 7, 2008
Publisher: Orbit
Genre: Science Fiction, Space Opera
ISBN-10: 0316018929
ISBN-13: 978-0316018920
Main Character(s): Flanagan, Lena
Synopsis: Flanagan (who is, for want of a better word, a pirate) has a plan. It seems relatively simple: kidnap Lena, the Cheo’s daughter, demand a vast ransom for her safe return, sit back and wait.
Only the Cheo, despotic ruler of the known universe, isn’t playing ball. Flanagan and his crew have seen this before, of course, but since they’ve learned a few tricks from the bad old days and since they know something about Lena that should make the plan foolproof, the Cheo’s defiance is a major setback. It is a situation that calls for extreme measures.
Luckily, Flanagan has considerable experience in this area . . .
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Finding Future Pirate Treasure in the pages of Debatable Space
Quotes and Lines
I have had three best friends in the course of my whole life. I wish it had been more.
The job I took wasn’t much different to my research work – I became a research fellow in the college where I had previously been a DPhil student. But the horizons of my world shifted. I was introduced to bureaucracy, university politics, and the entire microcosm of tedious make-work.
I found this heady, exhilarating stuff. For me, the joy of these ideas colliding together was greater than any amount of partying or alcoholic stimulation or even orgasm. I was high on ideas. I lusted on abstractions . . .
I never wanted to live for ever. But there’s a good chance that I will.
When the moment of my death comes, as it inevitably will, honour and lament my demise, in those precious minutes or even hours before you, too, have to die.
It is an extraordinary event, war most bloody and barbarous. Legions clash and lasers flare and bombs shatter and hulls impact inwards and bodies are sundered and friend and internal organs are compressed and blood emerges from nostrils and space itself is shocked at the sheer atrocity of man’s atrocious cruelty to man, is that too many atrocious?
I do not know who I am, or why I did what I did. I am merely a forward arrow through time.
I marvel at the motiveless self-destructive malignancy of human kind.