Now an accountant at Boeing, she has traveled the world, been in the U.S. Army, and has read widely on myriad subjects from Chinese history and philosophy to dark fantasy. It occurred to me after I read An Exchange of Hostages and Prisoner of Conscience that I had agreed to come into a little room with you and shut the door, and I got a bit nervous. May I direct you to the author photo in the back of the book, of a rather fluffy, pleasant person who would never hurt anyone. All joking aside, your books are set against a dark, brutal, totalitarian background. One of the criticisms that I got from a very respected science fiction writer about the book was that the system was impossibly closed and repressive.
Nobody can live like that.
Andrej is put into in an environment that has been specifically constructed to be as controlling as possible, to force a profound alteration in what normal people do of their own free will. And for this reason, Fleet Orientation Station Medical, where the first book takes place, is even more tight and claustrophobic than when the story moves out past that stage and goes out into the fleet, out in the galaxy. Many totalitarian governments in the past century have shown the same behavior that happens in my books. As the system gets too big, it loses control. As it loses control, it becomes more and more repressive.