If I'd received RW Cole's manuscript in my slushpile, I like to think I'd have been more forgiving than were the publishers of the day. Although I'm not letting him get away with total phantasy, as we spell that in 1900.
My first editorial command is to tone down the Joseph Chamberlain racism. No seriously: we're fighting an alien empire, so let's don't talk all this rot about the Anglo Saxon superiority here at home. At the very least we want this thing translated into French and maybe even into Spanish. Hell: why not Japanese? We'll just remove this stuff about changing Earth's rotation.
Since this book agrees that gravity-monkeying is Bad, I'll order Cole not to do any of it over Earth nor anywhere sub-4-AU. This can foreshadow the mess at Jupiter. Everyone in "2236" fires their ecliptic-bound roggets from the tropics or as close as they can, just like we do in 2022.
Cole can keep his cities at Neptune but they are floating-cities, over an eternal cold blue storm. The navy docks at a station orbiting Triton; bulk of it, NTL4/5. Cole can even throw in some astronomical in-jokes as he names the admiral, "de Verrier".
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