That's a bit unfair.  Nicodemus is said to be a super swordsman that only two Knights had survived.  Murphy defeated him.  Unless you think their fight outside the Carpenter house was staged on the off chance she might misuse the Sword.

I would have said: 
That, sir, is a facile argument... And also woefully esoteric.

If y'all are going to bring up that new Cinderella movie, then Helena Bonham Carter comes to mind.  Besides the fact that I'm in love with her, HBC is awesome enough to pull off Cavendish.

I expect they have lighting powered on the same power the airships get from the mists with their nets.  At least for the common areas.

I don't normally do fan-casting in my head, but from the first scene with Sycorax Cavendish, I saw and heard her as Michelle Gomez, specifically in her role as "Missy" in recent episodes of Doctor Who. I know the book has been in the planning stages for a while, so it almost certainly wasn't intentional. I was probably also influenced by "Sycorax" being a name used in Doctor Who (originally from Shakespeare, yes, I know). I'm wondering if anybody else saw her that way?

I like her as the Mistress.  She might be good as a Cavendish, but I wonder if it's too constrained for her.  Is Cavendish a brunette?

Helen Mirren might be interesting as a Cavendish too.

Polydactyl cats with opposable "thumbs" on their front paws are not uncommon in the real world. The polydactyal gene is considered dominant, but its expression is variable such that the number of extra toes produced and whether or not they're opposable can vary. There are likely other still to be identified genes that effect its expression.

The hypothesis that this series takes place in a human colony world where technology has regressed, perhaps due to the "iron rot", at least in part, sounds like a good one to me. I must also admit to being curious how "the enemy" factors into this world's history and development.

Well, the enemy could be native to the world.

The setting is interesting.  Jim's story telling is also interesting as he has managed to nearly avoid any form of exposition regarding this world leaving it all up to us to infer it from the narrative.

I think that "steam punk" is also a misnomer. Except for some ships having steam engines, and very few at all in this book having them, there was a distinct lack of steam. Except for the goggles, clothes and social setting, there's not much in common with most earth-based steam punk I've brushed up against.

It's not just meat that's grown in vats, but the crystals too, who knows what else is grown in vats?  As posted above, it seems like it's just big blobs of boneless meat with a leather casing.

The various levels of the spires are called "habbles" (sp?).  It seems that you have huge spires built to allow people to live off the surface of this planet.  I would conjecture that the habbles are the habitat tiers of the spires.


The warrior caste are genetically modified.  Possible the cats were too. (If someone wanted to give cat enhancements to humans, why not give cats human like intelligence too?  For proof of concept, or because they could, or because the mad geneticist in question was a crazy cat-person who wanted their conversations to be more meaningful...)

Probably this planet was colonised.  Genetically modified plants and modifying your live stock to not actually need to graze, or poop or move sounds good for a colony ship, and later on this world where the ground is not very hospitable.  For some reason, they've back slid, maybe they're not quite neo-barbs, but they're a shadow of what the original colonists were...

One instance that goes to show Harry might have a more than normal gift: When he calls Uriel "Uri" and Uriel freaks out. He says something along the lines of don't attempt to familiarize his name with an nickname, because it is part of his nature and purpose. Uriel means "Light of God" and Harry was calling him "Light" (Hebrew)

"Light of God" is a more modern, Judeo-Christian interpretation to the meaning of the name.  Before what was to become Judaism became the monotheism it became, angels were powerful beings, perhaps even gods themselves in some contexts or even personages.

Any way, with Judaism and Christianity came the One God, the God of Hosts.  And the Hosts included the choirs of angels, so so all the names with suffixes of 'el and 'ah (or 'yah), came to mean "of God," although there were rules at one time about the vowel that preceded 'el indicating a distinction from God.  e.g. Michael use to mean "who is like God" but is now often translated as "kindness of God".

So yeah, Uriel's name means "Light of God" now.   Judeo-Christianity is somewhat polarised when it comes to angels; either they're part of God's Hosts, or they are Fallen... of if you were to look at if from a proto-Semitic angle, if the being wasn't "of God" and not Fallen, then the being was a god(-like being) in its own right.


The point I've tried to make before is that Uriel's anger was probably outrage at the abhorrent concept of himself not being "of God."


What I find interesting is the way in which the Powers of the DV's Never Never mirror the history of (non-fictional) real world mythologies/religious beliefs (and the religious beliefs of he past are today's mythologies).   Names may not have the flashy power, here, that they do in Jim's DV but, wow, we certainly use and alter them in ways that amount to power.




BTW:
Sorry, about any confusing inconsistency with capitalisation of the word "god."  While I failed as a Christian, my RC education prepared me to be an excellent agnostic.  I try to use a lower-case "g" for any fictional god, or real world mythological god (not currently worshipped by a large enough group that I'm afraid of being hunted down by them), I still retain a compulsion to capitalise the "g" when referring to God in all His varied denominations extant in the "real world."

The spelling thing and the Golden Rule, I just can't seem to break myself of those two things. 

Well, those two things and taking the Lord's name in vain, or religious curses/oaths when suddenly hurt or surprised.  Oh, and looking for someone to plead for help or blame in moments of solitary angst, and the occasional "thank God!" after a near-miss.

Yeah, that's it, that's all of them, except maybe the compulsion to genuflect in church.  And a fondness for rosaries.
Okay, I'm still a Catholic in all but the faith.  So it's really conflicting.