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| Cover art by Julie Bell |
| LODESTAR Michael Flynn New York: TOR, March 2000 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-312-86137-0 | 365pp. | HC | $24.95 | |
| Page 31: | "No one throws up a laager unless they're trying to hide something behind it." |
| Laager: the defensive perimeter around an encampment, as when pioneers drew their wagons up into a circle. |
| Page 32: | "He knew he could worm through Leo's laager, but he was no longer sure he could do it without leaving tracks." |
| Capitalization: S/B "LEO's laager". |
| Page 49: | "Did you see who brought it?" "No, miss. Shall I put it with the others?" |
| Since this refers to Mariesa, S/B "No, ma'am." |
| Page 103: | "Chris could claim the takeover of Leo Station as his worry now..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "LEO Station". This mistake occurs throughout the book. It may be due to an automated spell checker. |
| Page 120: | The marching songs, like: "I don't know, but I've been told Outer space is mighty cold." |
| How come no "Am I right or wrong?" |
| Page 123: | "A satellite's perigee," she said suddenly, "is three hundred klicks above mean sea level." |
| Terminology: S/B "MSL" for brevity, and because that acronym is common practice in aviation. |
| Page 128: | "Computer games were popular—especially flight sims—and so was surfing and trolling." |
| Number error: S/B "were". |
| Page 134: | "Neither of them were surprised when Lonzo Sulbertson showed up..." |
| Number error: S/B "was". |
| Page 135: | "...Hobie thought as he floated from the lock of the Artie Shaw into LEO Station's Westport." |
| Flynn is naming his ships after jazzmen now? And here the station's name is properly capitalized. |
| Page 138: | "They used solar mirros to melt ore and magnetic molds to shape the material..." |
| Spelling: S/B "mirrors". (Unless this is Flynn's imagined future slang, like "todds" for toddlers or "goggs" for goggles.) |
| Page 141: | "Now I got a two-day turnaround for maintenance while they load up some potassium flouride invoiced to Selene Industries." |
| Spelling: S/B "potassium fluoride". |
| Page 143: | "The Pegasus rep on the sceening committee imitated a clam..." |
| Spelling: S/B "screening". |
| Page 187: | "She caught Jimmy's eye and smiled, and Jimmy beamed back and she walked right up to him and planted a big one right on his hips. Later, her tongue told him." |
| Corporeal geography error: S/B "his lips". Unless the servants are far more sophisticated than it appears. |
| Page 191: | "He walked to the window, where pulled the curtain a little to one side and looked out..." |
| Missing word: S/B "where he pulled". |
| Page 208: | "Maybe someday they could work the 'reverse macdonald' and she could ''remember' data by 'wondering' the question. But that way (if the rumors were true) lay crippling agnosia." |
| Definition: S/B "agnosia" is a lack of knowledge; ignorance. This is a different threat than Poul Anderson touched on in The Avatar. It is the tendency for people to learn nothing since "it's all in the computer." BTW, "macdonald" is a punning reference to Old Macdonald: "e-i-e-i-o" Or EIEI/O — Encephalic Interface for Electronic Input/Output. |
| Page 226: | "She couldn't be so four-oh-four, could she?" |
| I call this overly obscure, twice over: S/B "404", not spelled out; and the significance of the numbers as indicating missing knowledge wouldn't register with many readers. |
| Page 227: | "They spent that entire evening in client-server mode, and Jimmy's bandwidth expanded so much that he thought that never again would plugging in be as sweet and satisfying." |
| No agnosia there... |
| Page 228: | "Good advice, and apposite, given the venue; namely, a 'brodyazhka'in the Sargasso Sea." |
| Punctuation, definition: S/B "the venue: namely, a" and 'brodyazhka' is ???. |
| Page 228: | "Six imagos circled the table, though only four were active. The other two algored on automatic." |
| One of these days there'll be a new politician that everyone can point at and call wooden. |
| Page 271: | "She occupied his space, moving inside the Schwarzschild radius of the lips." |
| I'll leave the definition for readers to look up. |
| Page 282: | "The Co-op projected an image of on-the-edge netwalkers—as kick as a tie-dyed, jean-faded, granola-munching Northwester..." |
| This probably should be "Northwesterner" (and "faded-jeans" rather than "jean-faded.) |
| Page 288: | "Encryption and security prevents law enforcement from monitoring the activities of terrorists and organized criminals." |
| Number error: S/B "prevent". |
| Page 298: | "He rubbed his wife's body to speed the drying and smelled the rich, earthiness of her flesh." |
| Extra comma: S/B "the rich earthiness". |
| Page 288: | "Encryption and security prevents law enforcement from monitoring the activities of terrorists and organized criminals." |
| Number error: S/B "prevent". |
| Page 332: | "This part is a judgment call. A hunch. Nineteen years on the street [...] you learn when to play a hunch." |
| What he's trying to say is that he just played a hunch: a lucky guess. Sometimes... <ahem> |
| Page 340: | "Mariesa's response was forestalled by her cell phone. ''Excuse me,' she said, and pressed the stud on her wrist strap. 'Mariesa here,' she told the tracy. People called it that, she had heard, because the automatic link between 911 and the GPS meant that, in case of trouble, you could be 'traced'..." |
| No, that's not the reason for the name. It's from a comic strip created by Chester Gould... |
| Page 342: | "'All' included [...] vice presidents from Boeing-MD, Lockheed-Martin, and, Rockwell-Grumman..." |
| Well, two out of three isn't bad — "MD" standing for McDonnell-Douglas. However, Boeing absorbed the faltering competitor in 1997, much as it had done earlier with parts of Rockwell International. Flynn should have known these things, since the novel was published in 2000. But the sense of aerospace consolidation is right; if only he had written "Northrop-Grumman." |
| Page 343: | "Everyone knew how many false alrms there had been over the decades." |
| Missing letter: S/B "false alarms". |
| Page 343: | "Asteroid 2004AS will impact the Earth in six years. That is, unless no further course changes occur." |
| S/B "unless further course changes occur". |
| Page 343: | "Asteroid 2004AS will impact the Earth in six years. That is, unless no further course changes occur." |
| S/B "unless further course changes occur". |
| Page 345: | "A host of other task lines tributaried off of those." |
| This is not a real word, but it's legitimate use of poetic license. |
| Page 343: | "And his eyes gleamed unholy eager." |
| I think they must have been wholly eager. But I would word it as "gleamed with unholy eagerness". |
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