Oh, thank ghod

The alpha reader reports, on preliminary read, that Chapter 1 is not a horrible world-building info-dumped mess, but instead is very interesting, with a nicely-distributed measure of world-building that raises curiosity without overwhelming. Also, she felt quite bad for my poor messed-up main character, and flagged several of my favorite bits as especially good lines.

(I am glad I cut the two paragraphs of world-building that I did, however. That might well have tipped the balance, and one of them will work better later anyway.)

There's still the proper full-critique read to come, of course, but at least now I can stop worrying that I'm going to have to torch the whole thing and start entirely from scratch. Whew.