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What I esp liked about the story was I found the saga compelling enough that I impatiently looked for the next installment to see what would happen next.
I found the ending, while surprising, to be very much an outcome that could occur in RL.
I found the characters, although some seemed a little too weird, to be very similar to some of the folks I knew or had known &, of course, I found the 'far flung star empire' setting to be very appealling.

Don't know if you recall but I usually sent off an email after just about every installment regarding inconsistencies but you almost always were able to explain them away by pointing out text w/i the chapters that I had either forgotten or hadn't fully grasped.

In the end, since it had been posted as a serial, I was surprised when it all wrapped up but I still remember it as being a very 'travelleresque' tale.

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On Fri, 5/22/15, Jim Vassilakos <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] What is the moral?
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Friday, May 22, 2015, 6:15 PM

 Regarding the Harrison
 Chapters:
 Thanks to
 Phil for his kind comments. I started this novel back in
 high school and finished it while I was in college, and
 although I was somewhat proud of it at the time, it wasn’t
 long before I began to regard it as being mostly garbage.
 There are numerous problems with it, so many that I
 indefinitely delayed doing a rewrite.
 Part of the problem is that I was
 pantsing it (as in writing from the seat of my pants sans
 outline) all the way through, so the plot is a bit twisted
 to the point of occasionally being irritatingly absurd. The
 other problem is that my conception of technology was
 grounded in what I imagined to be possible back in the 1980s
 and early 90s, and for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to
 imagine... well, cellphones, just as one
 example.
 When you get
 into the details of future technology, you find that they
 really drive what is possible as well as what’s inevitable
 in terms of establishing the setting. It’s sort of
 frustrating actually, because looking back in retrospect, I
 had enough knowledge that I should have been able to craft a
 really interesting story with some important themes. After
 all, I knew about Moore’s Law. I knew that data storage
 and CPU cycles were getting cheaper every year. I knew that
 cameras were getting smaller and that everything was
 becoming connected through networks. So why couldn’t I
 imagine a world where governments have their citizens under
 constant surveillance? Actually, the issue of privacy and
 surveillance did enter into the novel in one of the early
 chapters, but I didn't work through the obvious
 implications.
 Once the
 technology is there, it will be used by whoever has access
 to it, and there will be profound social ramifications. The
 whole point of science fiction is that we are supposed to be
 exploring these ideas before they become a reality. Instead,
 we seem to be busy fighting Zhodanis or Klingons or the dark
 side of the Force. In any case, I sort of feel like the
 novel was a failure mainly because I didn’t explore the
 most obvious moral issue that was sitting there right in
 front of me. For whatever reason, I couldn’t see it.
 It’s wasn't so much a failure of imagination as simply
 a failure of logic.
 For those who are interested even
 after this long, self-flagellating rant, some kind person
 put it online here: http://www.coris.org.uk/jdc/RPG/Fiction/Harrison/index.html

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