I just wanted to drop you a note to say thank you for writing this ridiculously good novel. I believe it took you some time but for this reader at least, it was time well spent. Good gen, novel-length gen that doesn't shortchange relationships, is such a rare thing of beauty in any fandom.
It would take longer than the Dreamwidth comment limit to state everything I liked about it, so I am going to confine myself to mentioning just a few things.
As someone who reads far more fanfic than is strictly right or proper, I very much appreciated the attention you gave to plotting tightly and crafting great cliffhangers. There are a number of good writers in fandom and a number of natural storytellers, but fewer people who can plot and write well and tell a compelling story. I thought this hung together really well and, best of all, I never guessed what was coming.
The themes of identity, memory, objective truth and the nature of ascension/descension played out in your story better than in the show, where they seemed so keen to steady the ship in season seven that Daniel's return was completed in record time and with relatively little consequence. Here, I enjoyed the fact that Sam's return created almost as much turmoil as her departure. Daniel may have found Sam in Satya but he was left unsure how to deal with the Sam who emerged from Satya -- any more than Sam herself could make sense of it. Furthermore I am glad that you had the courage to exit your story in a hopeful but by no means resolved place.
Perhaps my favourite aspects were the characterisations of Jack And Teal'c. Teal'c firstly: while he didn't appear in the story as much as Jack and Daniel, he had a few moments that truly stood out to me. The first was the discussion with Daniel about the value of a warrior's death, where there's such a profound disconnect between them; the second, the conversation with Jack about anger and ritual at the funeral; and the third the conversation with Bra'tac where he can scarcely describe Sam's importance to him because the Goa'uld insistence on male fighters has stripped the Jaffa of the needful words.
As for Jack... ah, Jack. This characterisation worked really well for me. Jack, armoured in anger and trying to forge his way through yet more grief, but too sick to be able to block it out the way he did when Daniel ascended. I like the way you portrayed him as utterly burdened by the guilt that he failed to protect his team, and by a love he neither understands nor wants to acknowledge fully.
I have no idea whether the science was accurate. I studied politics, I work in an arty field and the nearest I come to scientific knowledge is reading New Scientist on the train, but it worked well enough for me. More importantly, it made Sam feel like an astrophysicist rather than the identikit white coat boffin who "does science" of many stories (and often the show itself). The Sam that SG-1 lost seemed real and flawed, valuable and loved. You could see why this Sam would be so widely mourned.
I liked the way that the story was shaped around the subtraction of Sam from the SGC world and the way that affected Jack, Daniel and Teal'c, like negative space in an artwork.
And most of all, I keep coming back to that image at the end of Chapter Three -- which reminded me of my favourite parts of the Danny Boyle film Sunshine (before it went into total bollocks overdrive in the final third) -- where the scientific meets the numinous, and Sam stares into a killing sun.
Thanks for a hell of a ride.
(PS Read all your other SG-1 stories, loved them also, will be starting on the Who ones next, as I've loved that fandom very much since I was a child.)
Long story short: this is great
It would take longer than the Dreamwidth comment limit to state everything I liked about it, so I am going to confine myself to mentioning just a few things.
As someone who reads far more fanfic than is strictly right or proper, I very much appreciated the attention you gave to plotting tightly and crafting great cliffhangers. There are a number of good writers in fandom and a number of natural storytellers, but fewer people who can plot and write well and tell a compelling story. I thought this hung together really well and, best of all, I never guessed what was coming.
The themes of identity, memory, objective truth and the nature of ascension/descension played out in your story better than in the show, where they seemed so keen to steady the ship in season seven that Daniel's return was completed in record time and with relatively little consequence. Here, I enjoyed the fact that Sam's return created almost as much turmoil as her departure. Daniel may have found Sam in Satya but he was left unsure how to deal with the Sam who emerged from Satya -- any more than Sam herself could make sense of it. Furthermore I am glad that you had the courage to exit your story in a hopeful but by no means resolved place.
Perhaps my favourite aspects were the characterisations of Jack And Teal'c. Teal'c firstly: while he didn't appear in the story as much as Jack and Daniel, he had a few moments that truly stood out to me. The first was the discussion with Daniel about the value of a warrior's death, where there's such a profound disconnect between them; the second, the conversation with Jack about anger and ritual at the funeral; and the third the conversation with Bra'tac where he can scarcely describe Sam's importance to him because the Goa'uld insistence on male fighters has stripped the Jaffa of the needful words.
As for Jack... ah, Jack. This characterisation worked really well for me. Jack, armoured in anger and trying to forge his way through yet more grief, but too sick to be able to block it out the way he did when Daniel ascended. I like the way you portrayed him as utterly burdened by the guilt that he failed to protect his team, and by a love he neither understands nor wants to acknowledge fully.
I have no idea whether the science was accurate. I studied politics, I work in an arty field and the nearest I come to scientific knowledge is reading New Scientist on the train, but it worked well enough for me. More importantly, it made Sam feel like an astrophysicist rather than the identikit white coat boffin who "does science" of many stories (and often the show itself). The Sam that SG-1 lost seemed real and flawed, valuable and loved. You could see why this Sam would be so widely mourned.
I liked the way that the story was shaped around the subtraction of Sam from the SGC world and the way that affected Jack, Daniel and Teal'c, like negative space in an artwork.
And most of all, I keep coming back to that image at the end of Chapter Three -- which reminded me of my favourite parts of the Danny Boyle film Sunshine (before it went into total bollocks overdrive in the final third) -- where the scientific meets the numinous, and Sam stares into a killing sun.
Thanks for a hell of a ride.
(PS Read all your other SG-1 stories, loved them also, will be starting on the Who ones next, as I've loved that fandom very much since I was a child.)