@Zloth:
Ouch. You lost me at Kalgan, so I had to google it, but I admit that's a very clever choice
.
Although the real one wasn't... but you know the books, anyway. - You know they botched the first German translations of the trilogy? Really hard at that. It was before the time of word processing, and the translator obviosly did the translation on the fly - he hadn't read the book before he started. Couldn't have read it, because he made a very subjective choice by translating 'Mule' with 'Fuchs' , which means fox. And when he got to the end of the book, he actually had kinda ruined the plot because parts of it hinged on the meaning of that name
. Because going back and changing names obviously was impossible, he had to change the revelation scene, which turned out to have a '...huh...?' effect on readers. The publisher didn't top this with the third installment, but nearly so, by giving away the solution to the trilogy-spanning puzzle in the title. Yeah for sloppy translators.
Oh right, and they (publishers, not translators) spoiled the mystery of Captain Aesop (by Bob Shaw). Ha ha unfunny ha.
I kept thinking 'yeah, so what, it's obvious the baddies won't prevail, because of *the* fact' while reading the first of the stories in that book, and only when the revelation came at the end of the first story I noticed that *the* fact hadn't been mentioned in the story at all, just on the back of the book.
But enough SF book talk.
'Mister Shepard' is a wonderful name
. My ME Shepards are called Jaz (...well, she's the renegadish sociapath with the red crop. Ehehehehe.) and Joseph (not a fancy name, but there's nothing fancy to this glowing example of sweetness, anyway... apart from the pornstache. Since I based him off the Korean-looking preset char and had the audacity to choose the high and tight hairdo he ended up looking suspiciously like TCW's Boil).