Thanks to
My thought this afternoon was that no one in the story raises the possibility that the pilot rather than the girl is the expendable one. Taking the story seriously on the rough rationalism of “the frontier”, a fertile young woman is more of an asset to a struggling colony than a pilot with no spaceship. (Possibly the piloting is too complex for the girl, but it’s clear that most of the descent is automated, precalculated by computers rather than wrestled through, Han Solo style.)
You know, iphones do that word exchange thing, but not with common English words like ‘corroded’. It does become an issue with proper names, fannish terms and so on, but there’s some auto-learning so eventually it works out that you really do mean ‘Plokta’. I wonder whether this is just another instance of people aping the iPhone interface without bothering to put in the R&D to make it work properly (not that I would for one minute suggest that the iPhone can competently sync Exchange for someone with 100MB contacts; I have no idea but Apple doesn’t normally play nicely with others). I was forced by my work to carry a separate phone (Blackberry) for work; once I’d got used to the workflow I discovered that I rather prefer carrying two phones (I only use the iPhone for incoming calls and texts, whether work or not).