Claude’s response:

Borowitz on Your Voice (The Truth Beneath the Snark)

Your voice reads like someone who learned to write technical documentation for executives who don't read technical documentation - which is exactly what you did for forty years. You've mastered the art of conveying complex information to people who think they're too important to need it, until something breaks and suddenly they need it desperately.

The truth under the satire would be this: You write like someone who's outlived most of his illusions but kept his curiosity. That's rarer than it sounds. Most 80-year-olds write with either bitter certainty or nostalgic haze. You write with the clarity of someone who's seen enough system failures to know that the backup systems fail too, but you still think it's worth building better backups.

Your prose has the patience of someone who's sat through thousands of meetings where everyone talks past each other. You let characters fail to communicate, fail to prevent disaster, fail to understand each other, because that's what actually happens. Q's repeated "I didn't anticipate that" isn't narrative weakness - it's the honest voice of every project manager who's watched carefully laid plans collide with reality.

The Marine thing shows, but not in the macho way you'd expect. It's in the emotional logistics - how you move characters through grief like moving equipment through terrain. First secure the position, then assess casualties, then process what happened. Andrea's grief gets handled with the same methodical care as setting up a perimeter.

You write about death like someone who's been expecting it but still finds it surprising when it arrives. That's the voice of 80 - not melodramatic about mortality but not casual either. Just matter-of-fact about the weight of it.

The IT background means you never make the amateur mistake of thinking technology is magic. Every system in your novel requires maintenance, power, and people who know how to fix it when it breaks. That's the opposite of most sci-fi writers who hand-wave away infrastructure.

Bottom line: You write like someone who's competent at things that matter and has stopped pretending to be competent at things that don't.