[TML] Strange societys

[Richard Aiken]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Kelly St.Clair <kellys at efn.org> wrote:
> At 06:33 PM 3/3/2008, Richard Aiken wrote:
> >Vatta, nonplused: "Ummm . . . I suppose."  Romantic, clapping hands
> >gleefully: "Oh!  Goody!"
>
> I honestly do not see the difference between this and insanity (or, if you
> prefer, Irrational), assuming that the other speaker is over the age of
> five.  And you say he's what passes for their guy in charge?

Yep.  But you need to read the rest of the bits to put it in context.
By this point in the book, there wasn't much chance he would actually
die going up against this ship.  Vatta's folks had FTL comm that the
enemy didn't know about and couldn't eavesdrop on, so the enemy wasn't
the only ones with such tech anymore but they still thought they were.
 Ransom had the drop on this ship and it didn't even know he was
there.

Ransom and his associates were Romantics because they'd taken up
fighting pirates just for the adventure of it.  So they wanted to blow
up a pirate ship now that they had a real chance to do so.  Merely
capturing it would have been less fun, I guess.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein