Seeing Voices (Patreon)

I'm really enjoying Seeing Voices right now.  It's about how American Sign Language (and learning it young) can rewire the brain.  Children develop a spacial competence that follows them into adult life and creates a different way of seeing the world.  I'm so fascinated by this, and I can't help thinking that many of these visual competencies would greatly benefit pilots.

I'm thinking that Maya's non-asshole shipmate (Hiram) might have grown up on a world where many deaf people set up, much like Martha's Vineyard was originally a haven for the deaf, and that ASL is the standard language. So, even if he isn't deaf, he would have that altered and improved sense of space.  That would also mean that ASL would be a pretty standard language around the colonies where pilots are more important since they can't afford computers to handle the tricky navigation. And I hope it's clear from that first chapter that Tiamat and her Artificial Intelligence are not really a reliable choice.  The whole AI program is a failed experiment. 

I'm amusing myself by thinking of Liam's whole war from the perspective of the colonies.  Many of these planets would have been settled by cohesive groups (like the deaf community).  Unth's planet was the most militant.  They rejected everything related to Earth, including Earth names.  So while Earth could have controlled the other colonies through economic pressure and trade embargoes, Unth's world world hated Earth so much that the only way to shut down the violence was war. And once Earth started attacking colonies, the violence escalated.

But first I want to get The Witness done and edited so I can start getting books out through a publisher again.  Writers write, but Loose Id's closure threw me so badly that I haven't been putting my heart into the publishing end of that truism. Time to change that.