Now, when I finished writing Pride & Planetoids and was running it through automations and all that jazz, my parents were in the process of moving. They didn’t end up beta reading it the way they do most of my books. When they did read it after it released, Dad asked me: “Why would Terra be willing to let Albion pack up a fleet of resource-rich asteroids and fly them off to the Copernicus system? These rocks sit in a region of space that Terra claims sovereignty over and merely leases to Albion. What’s in it for Terra to allow the exodus at all?”

To answer that, I have to unpack some ideas that are deep in the background of the setting, and not really explained by the characters in the book. Elizabeth Bennet, William Darcy, and Effie Price don’t pay attention to these ideas for the same reason that fish don’t pay attention to water.