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Kchama posted:I don't remember any of those books being any good. I think I only read In Death Ground, and likewise I don't remember it being very good, but one thing I did like was a really strong "oh poo poo, everything's hosed, we're all going to die" feeling through the book. It was like an early episode of the BSG reboot.
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Jun 8, 2019 21:09
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Kchama posted:
They're really not, though I suppose they have a few interesting moments. And a lot of missiles.
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Jun 8, 2019 21:11
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Kchama posted:Relatedly, he settled with the Star Control creators earlier today. Looks like he got the Trademark, in exchange for basically dropping everything else. Not a victory for Wardell. Any links on this? The Star Control series games were ground-breakingly amazing when they first came out but not sure how playable or fun they are circa 2019 without nostalgia goggles. Sticking by my comment that GBS is Weber's favorite game though. And coincidentally, was reading something written by an entirely different Weber (Max), but it still gave me David Weber Honor Harrington flashbacks due to the subject matter about State legitimated monopolies on violence (aka Honor Harrington, Schrödinger's WarCriminal). quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 22:17
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FuturePastNow posted:The Starfire novels- Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option, and Insurrection (don't ever read Insurrection) were, incidentally, my first introduction to Weber's writing. You can really tell they're a novelization of a game. ive read the Starfire novels but don't remember which one was which, meaning im now in a furor trying to recall why Insurrection is worse than the others NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Any links on this? I replayed the open-source SC2 version about...6 years ago? And thought it held up fine always been a bit sad that the format has never been duplicated (so far as im aware) PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 22:38
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PupsOfWar posted:ive read the Starfire novels but don't remember which one was which, meaning im now in a furor trying to recall why Insurrection is worse than the others It was the first one written, but the last chronologically, and it makes the least sense. The others aren't exactly pinnacles of characterization, but there are a few interesting people and aliens in them.
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Jun 8, 2019 23:06
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Any links on this? https://www.reddit.com/r/starcontrol/comments/by25ut/settlement_reached/ Here! There's not a lot of hard facts beyond Stardock's awful FAQ going away instantly and P&F no longer contesting the Star Control trademark, though. Star Control 2 was pretty good, even today. Star Control Origins is just a poor knockoff. Also I still hate Wardel for threatening the open-source project to try and get them to sign over the rights P&F gave them as a round-about way to steal the franchise. Also I think talking about Schrodinger's War Criminal is a good topic for Weberchat. I remember Storm from the Shadows having a dumb war criminal subplot going on where the Havenite was considered the war criminal for returning fire when the Manticorean ambushed the rescue teams coming to save the crew of the supposedly disabled Manticorean ship. Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 23:48
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https://twitter.com/Dogar_And_Kazon/status/1137486824182444032
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Jun 9, 2019 00:00
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As the person who came up with that term, Schrödinger's WarCriminal, if there ever is a dedicated milfiction or milscifi thread, I demand the title be "Honor Harrington, Schrödinger's WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction Thread"
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Jun 9, 2019 01:00
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:As the person who came up with that term, Schrödinger's WarCriminal, if there ever is a dedicated milfiction or milscifi thread, I demand the title be "Honor Harrington, Schrödinger's WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction Thread" I support you in your endeavor in making that thread.
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Jun 9, 2019 01:45
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:As the person who came up with that term, Schrödinger's WarCriminal, if there ever is a dedicated milfiction or milscifi thread, I demand the title be "Honor Harrington, Schrödinger's WarCriminal: the Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction Thread" Isn't it our duty, each of us, as a goon, to create great threads, with such titles, and frankly, once you have a title like that, the OP just writes itself?
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Jun 9, 2019 04:16
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Rob S. Pierre Did Nothing Wrong
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Jun 9, 2019 04:38
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I really hope they are able to make some kinda sequel now.
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Jun 9, 2019 11:20
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Kchama posted:I support you in your endeavor in making that thread. pseudanonymous posted:Isn't it our duty, each of us, as a goon, to create great threads, with such titles, and frankly, once you have a title like that, the OP just writes itself? Give me some time to think about it, delving back into that genre is why I gave up on reading anything except non-fiction for a few years and still flat out refuse to touch 95% of the fantasy genre. My ideal way of reading fantasy is with a 12 foot fiberglass pole that's prodding another person using a 10 foot aluminum gripper-pole to turn the pages of the book/magazine/ebook-reader containing fantasy genre material. However, I did create the List your Top 5 Mary Sue Characters in a SciFi/Fantasy series thread, in which I ranked Honor Harrington #1 with a bullet, and graciously let two of the top 5 slots empty for other posters to nominate stuff...thread appears to be still open for some reason.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:23
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Give me some time to think about it, delving back into that genre is why I gave up on reading anything except non-fiction for a few years and still flat out refuse to touch 95% of the fantasy genre. My ideal way of reading fantasy is with a 12 foot fiberglass pole that's prodding another person using a 10 foot aluminum gripper-pole to turn the pages of the book/magazine/ebook-reader containing fantasy genre material. Well, i prefer to keep reality out of my fantasy/sci-fi. Makes reading much more enjoyable. Any form of real life associations are imo kinda pointless based on this. This especially applies to “hard sci-fi” where the tediousness and endless repetition of science is thrown out of the window for the sake of a story.
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Jun 9, 2019 13:47
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Cardiac posted:Well, i prefer to keep reality out of my fantasy/sci-fi. Makes reading much more enjoyable. I think you mean 'soft sci-fi'? Hard sci-fi is where the tediousness and endless repetition of science is forced in no matter how it fucks up the story (or the author straight up doesn't know science). Like lol, Weber even got dinged there because until his fans said something apparently his ships would have to be made out of styrofoam to weigh as little as they do compared to how big the ships are.
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Jun 9, 2019 14:06
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PupsOfWar posted:ive read the Starfire novels but don't remember which one was which, meaning im now in a furor trying to recall why Insurrection is worse than the others It was a civil war between freedom-loving Libertarian frontier worlds versus the Big Government core worlds. The details worked out exactly like you'd think Weber would use that structure.
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Jun 9, 2019 14:55
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mllaneza posted:It was a civil war between freedom-loving Libertarian frontier worlds versus the Big Government core worlds. The details worked out exactly like you'd think Weber would use that structure. Oh man wasn't there a terrible book series that had the 'Freedom-Loving Libertarian World' that was the best ever? It was... Freehold, by Michael Z Williamson, wasn't it!
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Jun 9, 2019 15:18
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Kchama posted:Oh man wasn't there a terrible book series that had the 'Freedom-Loving Libertarian World' that was the best ever? It was... Freehold, by Michael Z Williamson, wasn't it! Ah yes, the one with the planet of freedom-loving Wicca libertarians invaded by the evil socialist Earth. Also notable as being part of the series where (a) the "good guys" rant for a while about how disgusting it is that terrorists are deliberately targeting civilians, and (b) said good guys deliberately crash a spaceship onto a major city, killing millions. But it's millions of socialism supporting civilians, so that's ok then.
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Jun 9, 2019 16:49
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Hobnob posted:
iirc it was worse than that - they launched a full-scale kinetic bomardment of Earth and killed several billion people, justifiable in the name of Freedom etc. another williamson novel featured this amazingly discordant moment where the good guys pop the sunroof on their vehicle so their sniper can headshot a child that was yelling at their convoy, and this is played for laughs in tone and description it was kinda like the scene from The Things They Carried where Azar blow up Lavender's dog with a claymore, only it's assumed you're in on the joke with Azar edit: oh poo poo freehold has a sequel out this year PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 9, 2019 |
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Jun 9, 2019 19:05
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PupsOfWar posted:iirc it was worse than that - they launched a full-scale kinetic bomardment of Earth and killed several billion people, justifiable in the name of Freedom etc. I'm pretty sure that was The Weapon, where after they 5 billion murder terrorist attacked Earth for being Imperialist Taxxers, they started going around conquering planets and brutalizing their populations and also planting hypernukes on the planets of all of their 'allies' to hold them hostage and conquer the moment them being unconquered becomes unprofitable. And they're the Freedom Loving Heroes.
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Jun 9, 2019 19:21
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Kchama, PupsofWar, Hobnob, mllaneza: I nominate anyone of you 4 to make the Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction thread. Your retention of milscifi/milfiction warcrime details from poo poo mil-scifi stories is impressive and exponentially vast in scope in comparison to my own. I usually end up immediately regretting literacy + me being best buddies when touching milscifi/milfiction stories. Anyway, gave the Exegeneis of Philip K. Dick a shot. Much craziness + mental illness + visions in it, think the only mental issues PKD didn't seemingly experience was multiple-personalities and violent psychotic breaks. If PKD had lived to see the Internet in it's present form, just trying to imagine what blend of modern conspiracy theories PKD would have fixated on (all of them?).
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Jun 9, 2019 19:52
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*touches finger to nose* i'm not certain there is demand for a dedicated MilSF/MilFic thread unless people are getting super annoyed with the SFF thread's periodic Weber/Ringo/etc detours there was a Space Opera thread for a while which, despite being nominally larger in scope than MilSF, was still not able to coexist with the SFF thread moreover terrible MilSF as a subgenre is frequently discussed in the kindle unlimited thread
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Jun 9, 2019 21:25
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PupsOfWar posted:*touches finger to nose* i'm not certain there is demand for a dedicated MilSF/MilFic thread I mean even if it doesn't live forever, won't the forum be a better forum, if the thread lives ever? Also, it'd be a resource, if people are looking, they could be directed therein.
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Jun 9, 2019 21:29
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The trouble I've got is that the only milsci-fi I've been reading lately is Warhammer stuff and that already has a thread.
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Jun 9, 2019 21:33
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Taking milsf away from the KU thread means leaving the forum with a dedicated litrpg thread. You really want to create that?
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Jun 9, 2019 21:37
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Taking milsf away from the KU thread means leaving the forum with a dedicated litrpg thread. You really want to create that? Sure, why not? Dedicated litrpg thread for those who litrpg I have no idea what litrpg is, larping or cosplay but with words? In theory more threads equals more users dropping $10 to argue with idiots-whom-are-wrong online once google's search spiders re-crawl the SomethingAwful forums. BTW, summarized extracts from Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation" essay inspired the Schrödinger's WarCriminal concept, if anyone else wants to dig deeper and define the many ways milscifi + warcrimes go hand in hand.
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Jun 10, 2019 04:12
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Kchama posted:Oh man wasn't there a terrible book series that had the 'Freedom-Loving Libertarian World' that was the best ever? It was... Freehold, by Michael Z Williamson, wasn't it! Pretty solid page-turning thrillers with absolutely appaling politics and social commentary. I finally managed to convince my publisher that the world does not need a Ripple Creek RPG and that we didn't want to be associated with someone that Baen's Bar calls "Mad Mike". He's transphobic, advocates violence against people with different political views, and I was going to charge my publisher a $1 surcharge per instance of the b-word if I had to read any more than the Ripple Creek trilogy. I feel good about getting him to back down over that. NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Kchama, PupsofWar, Hobnob, mllaneza: I nominate anyone of you 4 to make the Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction thread. Your retention of milscifi/milfiction warcrime details from poo poo mil-scifi stories is impressive and exponentially vast in scope in comparison to my own. I usually end up immediately regretting literacy + me being best buddies when touching milscifi/milfiction stories. Not it ! My OP would be mostly "don't read these books".
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Jun 10, 2019 04:30
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Sure, why not? Dedicated litrpg thread for those who litrpg I have no idea what litrpg is, larping or cosplay but with words? Imagine a narrative Let's Play but about the author's personal concept of the perfect World of Warcraft clone, the author narrates every sword strike and stat change, the protagonist has somehow hacked the game or whatever to make all their stats 999, and they've consumed way too much bad anime about enslaving women. It's basically the genre fiction of late capitalism. NoNostalgia4Grover posted:In theory more threads equals more users dropping $10 to argue with idiots-whom-are-wrong online once google's search spiders re-crawl the SomethingAwful forums. I'd suggest expanding it to general military literature as well, since then we can talk about related stuff like Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea", Larteguy's "The Centurions", or Sven "Stolen (Nazi) Valor" Hassel's nihilist war porn, the latter of which somehow manages to be less repugnant than half the stuff Baen MilSF authors poo poo out from what I saw skimming a pirated copy of "Legion of the Damned." (because like hell I'm going to give money to a dead Nazi's estate) C.M. Kruger fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 06:09
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C.M. Kruger posted:I'd suggest expanding it to general military literature as well, since then we can talk about related stuff like Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea", Larteguy's "The Centurions", or Sven "Stolen (Nazi) Valor" Hassel's nihilist war porn, the latter of which somehow manages to be less repugnant than half the stuff Baen MilSF authors poo poo out from what I saw skimming a pirated copy of "Legion of the Damned." (because like hell I'm going to give money to a dead Nazi's estate) Add in McLean's "HMS Ulysses" and Forrester's "The General". I don't plan on doing the OP, but I'll post in that thread like a man possessed.
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Jun 10, 2019 06:37
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mllaneza posted:Add in McLean's "HMS Ulysses" and Forrester's "The General". The Flashman books count? What about the Aubrey/Maturin stuff? Or is that too “literary”?
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Jun 10, 2019 09:09
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navyjack posted:The Flashman books count? What about the Aubrey/Maturin stuff? Or is that too “literary”?
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Jun 10, 2019 09:28
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anilEhilated posted:They're too "good". I gave the Flashman books a hard pass right after I came across the phrase "I had seldom found it necessary to rape a woman" in chapter 1 of book 1.
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Jun 10, 2019 10:16
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Yeah, that would be a hard application of the brakes for me as well.
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Jun 10, 2019 12:10
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Usually I'm fairly tolerant of protagonists being assholes, but hooooooo boy does Flashman push the boundary beyond the pale, through the doors, down the block and into the sea. He probably makes a good representation of what a particularly vainglorious, dickish, testosterony British soldier of his day pictured as a rad dud, but even making profoundly broad allowances for a different culture of different ages, Flash is an indisputable shitloaf to anyone and everyone nearly all the time. I pushed through the first book vaguely hoping he would get a heroic asskicking or fall down some stairs or something, but no luck.
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Jun 10, 2019 12:40
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All the 40K fans who read Flashman after hearing that Ciaphas Cain is based on him are in for a bit of a shock, yeah. Flashman is a complex, nuanced character, with layers, and every single complex nuanced layer is a piece of poo poo. Pretty fun if you're into reading a whole series of books praying this next one is the one where the author brutally murders the protagonist.
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Jun 10, 2019 12:45
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I had some mil sci-fi take a hard left into "its Jesus" on me. https://www.amazon.com/Hells-Rejects-Chaos-Covenant-Book-ebook/dp/B06W52T6X8 I wish i could un-read that series.
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Jun 10, 2019 13:30
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C.M. Kruger posted:I'd suggest expanding it to general military literature as well, since then we can talk about related stuff like Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea", Larteguy's "The Centurions", or Sven "Stolen (Nazi) Valor" Hassel's nihilist war porn, the latter of which somehow manages to be less repugnant than half the stuff Baen MilSF authors poo poo out from what I saw skimming a pirated copy of "Legion of the Damned." (because like hell I'm going to give money to a dead Nazi's estate) I stopped adding mil-fiction to my usual mil-scifi/mil-fiction genre definition thread suggestions because a) it breaks up the flow of the sentence b) mil-scifi stuff tends to grab peoples attention + post away about poo poo they are while mil-fiction makes them run (rightly) the gently caress away c) I got tired of using slashes d) no idea if slashes actually work in thread titles. General military-literature fiction tends to segue into fantasy genre style "Chosen One" main characters/"Manifest Destinies"/power-tripping fantasies pretty easily. Especially since as fantasy + especially military-fiction series progress, cartoonishly evil threats are required again and again for the good-guys to fight against over and over. That formula is hard to not-see once you've read way-too-deeply into the fantasy + military literature-fiction genres. navyjack posted:The Flashman books count? What about the Aubrey/Maturin stuff? Or is that too "literary"? I'd say "gently caress NO" to the flashman books in a general Military-Literature fiction/Mil-SciFi thread. George MacDonald Fraser was very skilled at stringing entertaining series of words together, however the Flashman novels are 30% decently researched character studies of Victorian-era historical figures/world historical events of the Victorian era, and 70% LitRPG style descriptions of the main character bouncing around loving various historical women and interacting with those Victorian era historical figures/historical events I mentioned already. Aubrey/Maturin stuff: the subject matter (Napoleonic Wars nautical fiction) keeps me away so I really can't comment. Ie, Bad association with David Weber's magnum opus series. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Jun 10, 2019 |
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Jun 10, 2019 13:42
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90s Cringe Rock posted:All the 40K fans who read Flashman after hearing that Ciaphas Cain is based on him are in for a bit of a shock, yeah. Flashman is a complex, nuanced character, with layers, and every single complex nuanced layer is a piece of poo poo. My problem is the opposite - I tried Flashman, went "no thanks" and hearing Ciaphas Cain get compared to that means I haven't tried it yet. I'd be down for some comedy 40k, but not Flashman.
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Jun 10, 2019 13:45
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mllaneza posted:Pretty solid page-turning thrillers with absolutely appaling politics and social commentary. I finally managed to convince my publisher that the world does not need a Ripple Creek RPG and that we didn't want to be associated with someone that Baen's Bar calls "Mad Mike". He's transphobic, advocates violence against people with different political views, and I was going to charge my publisher a $1 surcharge per instance of the b-word if I had to read any more than the Ripple Creek trilogy. I feel good about getting him to back down over that. The only thing I know about Williamson is that he was on Twitter making jokes about the Charleston church shooting before the bodies were even cold. That quite effectively killed any slight desire I might have had to give him any of my money. I like the Flashman books myself, and Fraser does make him a bit less of an rear end in a top hat after the first book, but yeah, there's no point where Flashy is actually ever a good person.
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Jun 10, 2019 13:46
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StrixNebulosa posted:My problem is the opposite - I tried Flashman, went "no thanks" and hearing Ciaphas Cain get compared to that means I haven't tried it yet. I'd be down for some comedy 40k, but not Flashman. That's weird as I can't think of anything even like Flashman in Ciaphas Cain.
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Jun 10, 2019 13:56
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