There's a lot that's already been said about this series elsewhere, but I want to highlight something I think it does really damn well: giving a sense of the overall world without going too far via the Project STURMGESTALT asides.

For example, "That this usually cost only a life or two per machine per conflict was individually difficult for the Perpetual Liberation General Committee to swallow" does a lot to illuminate the Perpetual Liberation Republic. The very casual way that the sky-high fatality rate for pilots is presented speaks volumes about the cavalier attitude towards human life that Project STURMGESTALT had; even if the General Committee is presented as being less sanguine about the resultant deaths, the project not only went on but was rolled out en masse, becoming the Perpetual Liberation Army's superweapon. Referring to pilots as "biological processors", as the Chapter II asides do, not only further speaks to that cavalier attitude but also reveals a deliberate dehumanization of the pilots in that the project refuses to even call them pilots. 

Of course, STURMGESTALT is subject to ethical review, as the excerpt at the end of Chapter III shows. But the ethics expressed are rather sparse. The Perpetual Liberation Republic disavows child soldiers and test-tube pilots for ethical reasons... but those ethical reasons also have legal backing to them, and permanently installing a pilot into an S-MAG is turned down primarily on practical grounds. The ethics of hardwiring an association between vicious slaughter and intense pleasure into a person's psyche is never examined, nor whether or not directly implanting one person's memories into another's mind to the point they even walk the same is flirting with overwriting personalities. And that's before we get into the flagrantly unethical (if extremely hot) systematic abuse of pilots revealed in the side stories. That's rather revealing about what the PLR is willing to do in order to achieve their perpetual liberation. We get the sense that Perpetual Liberation Thought holds that the ends justify almost any means without this ever being directly expressed.

To make a long story short, each chapter manages to say a lot without saying much, and that's always a hallmark of excellent writing. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where the next few chapters lead.

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