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quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Doing this thread because others have failed to do so. Thread is about Mil-SciFi Fiction + Military Fiction in general.
Any kind of chat about quasi military fiction literature or quasi military science fiction literature or even quasi mil-themed manga is fine.
Key words being quasi-Military themed LITERATURE chat aka written/drawn works.

2nd post in this thread has genre series + genre author recommendations.

The Mil-SciFi + Mililtary Fiction genres are defined by lovely to mediocre writing, main characters doing horrific WarCrimes, cartoonishly evil villains/threats, and near immediate plot justification for any WarCrimes the main characters have done or about to do in the books. Even the best written and least formulaic Mil-fiction/Mil-SciFi book series have cartoonishly evil villains/threats with WarCrime escalation events going off because otherwise everything would be resolved in 50 pages.

Therefore each main character of a Mil-SciFi (and Military-Fiction) book series is usually Schrödinger's WarCriminal by at least the end of book two. Some authors overachieve though and hit that mark mid-Book 1.

Expect to see lots of David Weber, possibly John Ringo, definitely Tom Kratman, and other 'visionary' Baen Book Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction authors mentioned in this thread.
To populate the rest of this original post, re-quoting un-edited relevant posts from the last 15 pages or so of the 'The Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread: Read the OP, Bridge of Birds, and Murderbot' thread (already have 15+ after 3 pages). Spillover quotes may go into the next post.
Any relevant Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction posts not listed are from sheer laziness and apathy.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

I only read as much Weber as I did thanks to that discontinued BaenCD thing Baen Books used to do(it existed to drum up interest in ebooks before ebooks became mainstream reading options).
Most of the details of Weber's Honorverse have been forgotten (happily besides the Honor Harrington = textbook example of a Mary Sue Protagonist), no idea how everyone else is remembering all these random Weber things if they also all read any Abercrombie/Hamilton/Asher/Erikson/Brust/Scalzi/Bujold/Sanderson/LeGuin/Drake/Vinge, etc.

Proteus Jones posted:

I don't agree that Honorverse is "space opera". It's tedious Mil-SciFi at best.

When I think Space Opera, something like Green's Deathstalker series comes to mind.

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

the Honorverse is bad for so many reasons, not just Weber's awful politics (which can most charitably be called fascist). I mean he's not Kratman, but he's getting close (Am I the only poster who has read A Desert Called Peace? If you haven't, don't). For example the entire 'science' setup to make the only way for spaceships to fight each other be with large, close range broadsides is loving awful. Also devoting literally 100 pages in the first Honorverse novel to the politics of the Manticoran navy -- when you don't know who any of the characters are because there's no exposition.

Also, is Jerry Pournelle a creep? I have always had a suspicion reading the way he writes women (cringe).

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

also David Weber started a series with an ok concept -- humanity is attacked by a genocidal race of aliens who detect technology, and the last survivors are placed on a planet with a manufactured religion that suppresses technology -- and turned it into a 10 book and counting series about mid-17th century church politics and detailed descriptions of a semaphore system

he and Ringo also did a series about a prince who crash lands on an alien world with his marine bodyguard and spends 3 books genociding his way to freedom. lots of great descriptions about shooting unarmed civilians and why that's a good thing.

PupsOfWar posted:

ill admit i enjoyed the bits of the March Upcountry series where they were just sorta tackling the logistics of doing Pike+Shot tactics with ten-foot alien hexapods

overall though the only Weber I'd ever actually recommend to anyone is Path of the Fury
(the original one, not the awful extended edition)


dread empire's fall is good imho

it's probably bad if you're expecting it to deliver on swashbuckling space opera action, but when i read it i figured "oh, this is some sort of weird Comedy of Manners, wasn't expecting that but cool"

(also maybe a bit of satire of the modern western MIC)

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

the only good part of march upcountry was the prince's name. david weber isn't really that hard to understand, his entire worldview is 'the british colonial empire in the 1700 and 1800s was humanity's peak' and therefore any non-humans in his books are stand ins for colonized people that are being helped by the grace of humans because the white man's burden is real and good.

hannibal posted:

This is pretty much where I stand, I couldn't re-read those books these days but they were fun 20 years ago or whatever, and I tried.


The Safehold books had some interesting ideas but got really stretched thin. It's the same type of thing that affects stuff like Star Wars - the desire to explain every single character's backstory and play out multiple stories in this world. Which might be interesting if the stories came to some point of completion, but they end up being re-treads.

(Tangentally, this is why I don't like most MMO storylines/game design and much preferred games with campaigns and discrete missions. There's a story flow and an ending eventually.)

If you want a real treat, check out Weber's Dahak series. If you thought Honor was a Mary Sue wait until you read about the main character in those books. He wrote them just before the first Honor Harrington books so the feel is the same. Here, let me just paste the Wikipedia summary, it does a good job of laying it all out (pretty sure this is just the jacket cover text or something):

90s Cringe Rock posted:

Dahak's rad though because the premise is "the moon is an alien battleship." Shame about the development of that premise, because Weber, but it's better than Honor Harrington because instead of torpedo salvo spreadsheets, you get a giant spaceship that's been pretending to be the moon.

PupsOfWar posted:

there's clearly a demand in the public for fiction that simply presents expert people doing things expertly
hence The Martian becoming such a smash phenomenon

i think this is probably because in modernity we're all so alienated from the process of production & creation (like half of us have jobs that shouldn't exist or whose function we do not really understand, etc) that the mere premise of problem-solving thru skilled labor is as much of an escapist fantasy as looting temples and banging hot aliens/elves

whatever the reason, i would probably respect MilSF more as a subgenre if most of it consisted of harried staff officers trying to figure their way out of some thorny unglamorous technical conundrum, a la kj parker's 16 Ways

Kchama posted:

In other things I forgot about Honorverse: Did you know Honor is a high-ranking person in not one, not two, but THREE different nations? With the third coming out of nowhere because we're honestly suppose to believe that Honor's mother thought being the grandaughter of what amounts to the rulers of Beowulf (which Weber himself compared to being the President of the USA and their family) was some kind of bad thing.

The other two are, of course, being nobility in both Manticore and Grayson.

So she's royalty and double nobility.


I never got the obsession with these guys.

snergle posted:

awhile ago i found out there was a public library for ebooks and they had like 1000 free ebooks and there was a sci fi series that was really old. I wanna say 1930-1950. It was pulpy as gently caress and about this guy who is a buck rogers type and his wife was a secratary DR. They have children and those children eventually save the universe. half of the series follows the buck rogers type guy and his wife as they spy on an evil alien race and help form an alliance with many types of other aliens and the other half is the war against those aliens and it ends with the children telling their story. The children were twins i think as well but boy and girl. I remember it had this part where it went into huge detail about how they had ships that harnesses meteors and would launch them at planets to obliterate all life on them then the evil alien race made a ship that turn your sun into a black hole but the main character spyed on them? destroyed their data and took it back to earth where they secretly built the ships and those ships were able to get the evil people to pull back to their home galaxy. He ends up dying in the war and his children are the ones who eventually lead the spear head on the evil race. the evil race might of been robots now that i think about it.

what is this series its driving me insane

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

The older milscifi writers that I've read tend to fall into three categories.

Never served/medical issues forced early separation from armed forces, thus denying them the awesome life + careers they should have lived: Weber, Heinlein.
Served reluctantly via GI Bill/ROTC style educational gambits that backfired or joined to preempt soulless draft board assignment bingo: Cook(?), Drake.
Built their entire identity around military service/family legacy of service, tend to be utter gently caress-ups in life outside of government or military service: Ringo, Kratman.

Category three people can be amazing to be around, just to Malazan style WITNESS the amazingly stupid life choices they make. Talking about going above and beyond the normal military-idiot stuff like "bought a blinged out car/truck whose monthly loan payments are ONLY $700+"(their monthly pay is $1030), or marrying a stripper/local girl to escape military barracks life.

C.M. Kruger posted:

I've never actually finished The Forever War because I kinda find the whole "Grandpa's vision of the hellish future where the UN NWO forces everybody to be gay and mixed race!" offputting.


at that moment 350 18% APR Mustangs with aftermarket sunroofs fired from a dealership located outside the base gate breached the Bosun's point defenses and slammed into the bank accounts of the ship's enlisted, ravening bomb-pumped lasers burning away their credit ratings.

darnon posted:

I kind of like Forever Peace more for 'the government will break and dehumanize you' plot beat as it had more going on than just that with its Dan Brown thriller Christian apocalypse cult destroying the universe by letting another Big Bang accidentally happen and mind-link remote control soldier bots (and mostly footnote remote aircraft) which end up being the key for world peace via just communicatin' with one another maaan. I may be biased since I read 'All My Sins Remembered' years after Peace so it feels more like the derivative work even when Peace was already hitting a lot of the same notes as Forever War.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

What always bothers me about Honor Harrington is that she's narratively perfect: whatever choices she makes, for whatever reason, it turns out afterwards that her enemies we're perfectly evil and everything she did was therefore justifiable.

Also everything is always perfect for her as a special flower. Everyone else has to work at it: she does everything perfect the first time by instinct. Her magical space cat is uniquely specially magical. So on, so forth.

She can't actually make a mistake. The universe shifts to accommodate.

Also godammit Rob s Pierre

PupsOfWar posted:

imo the biggest indictment of Weber as an author is that Honor builds up this large ensemble of consistent supporting characters - her household retainers and the junior officers she consistently works with - yet there is never, ever any interesting personal drama among them

I could accept any number of bad dry battle scenes if he...wrote...stories
most authors have things they'll go on a weird over-detailed tangent about, so in theory I've no objections if Weber wants to spend 16 pages talking about missile logistics
when geraldine brooks taks a detour to talk about how gables were shaped in house construction in the 1660s it's fine imho

weber however is uniquely uninterested in doing anything else
it's a singular phenomenon i have never encountered in any other novelist

for instance in book1 there's a bit of tension set up between Honor and McKeon
McKeon's sort of an interesting, ambiguous figure there...older officer, competent but unremarkable career, suddenly finds his fortunes welded to this younger upstart who he resents.
This is a bit humdrum but it's a solid foundation if you're gonna build some sort of arc.

However, it then proceeds to not come up at all for the rest of the series
nor is any similar underlying tension set up with any other supporting character

several books later when McKeon gets exploded it's like..."alistair my buddy, I get that this is meant to be sad but you really haven't done anything in like 7,000 pages other than be in the background of staff meetings"



i appreciate all of our shared contempt for books weve all clearly read at least several of for some reason

occamsnailfile posted:

I was once talking to a guy who didn't think the Honorverse was political. I mentioned the scene in which the only self-identified "Liberal" character in the series proceeded to make a strawman declaration about how the two warring Christian fanatic groups should "just make peace" and kept refusing to engage a proper military solution until Honor punched him in the mouth. He didn't think that was a political statement, just that one guy being an rear end in a top hat.

So it is very possible to completely ignore Weber's lovely politics, especially if you personally believe political problems can be solved by just shooting the right bad mans.

FuturePastNow posted:

The People's Republic of Haven was definitely the most fun and interesting thing in those books. If Rob S. Pierre doesn't make you smile, I don't know what to say. The petty bickering of Oscar and Cordelia. And Citizen Admiral Cluster Bomb.

PupsOfWar posted:

dang we had an entire 3-page honorverse chat without mentioning the Space Mormons' magical Instant Shipbuilding Infrastructure powers

The original thread title inspiration post.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

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).

June 27 2019 update:

Kchama posted:

I didn't really have anything of value. The OP actually got all the good stuff I was gonna quote and a few more besides.

I did have a Manticorean War Crime that Honor wasn't involved with, but I haven't read the Honorverse in forever so my memory isn't great. I just remember this because it made me throw away the book and quit Honorverse forever.

It was in... Storm From the Shadows subseries. Honor's friend is in command of a fleet that gets attacked by a Haven fleet and is defeated and signals surrender and evacuating the ships. When the Haven fleet closed in to pick up the lifeboats, she suddenly changes her mind on surrendering and orders an all-out attack on the Haven ships and catches them off-guard, destroying a bunch of them. The Haven ships return fire and wipe out what's left of the Manticorean fleet. It then cuts to Honor's friend waking up (as the Haven admiral stopped the counterattack immediately and STILL picked up all the survivors) in a prestigious position in Haven and it turning out that they deemed their admiral to be a War Criminal and punished them and absolved Honor's friend of all crimes.

After this I threw my book away and was freed from my curse of needing to finish a series so I can rightfully trash-talk it.




June 29 2019 UPDATE: Military Fiction genre re-quotes finally added to OP, along with a bunch of series recommendations from various posters.



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!

Hobnob posted:

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.

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.

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

Kchama posted:

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.

C.M. Kruger posted:

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.


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)

mllaneza posted:

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.

mllaneza posted:

There's already a thread for Aubrey/Maturin. It could use a greater readership.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3393240

PupsOfWar posted:

there are at least 3 other sci-fi series i can think of that are based on the Aubrey-Maturin In Space premise, all of em better than weber's output

one of those (drake's Lt. Leary) is even published by baen!

ToxicFrog posted:

I bailed on Leary/RCN a few books in when it became clear that (a) Adele was an unstoppable superweapon and (b) Drake only remembers that about half the time.

What are the other two you're thinking of?

PupsOfWar posted:

1 - the Man of War series (which iiirc originated as a self-published internet thing before getting published normally)
2 - colin greenland's old nautically-oriented space operas that I forget the series name of

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Generally speaking, the sense seems to be that if the author is writing it with one hand while the other types about gun barrels, it's Mil-SF. Space War Porn.

Though even that doesn't quite work. Scalzi has been very explicit about his intent to write mil-sf with Old Man's War because he saw it was selling.

Clark Nova posted:

My criteria is mostly a list of poo poo I don't want to read, but for me it's a fetishistic obsession with weaponry - OR - right-wing politics which are proven to be True and Correct by murdering the poo poo out of a bunch of those people - OR - worship of the US military.

It's actually kind of impressive that Scalzi managed to implement the third without the first two

navyjack posted:

There’s Feintuch’s Seafort Saga which has spaceships that take months alone in deep space to get anywhere and you get space cancer if you make a bunch of trips beginning after puberty, so the officers all start as like 11 year olds. Lets them shoehorn all that Royal Navy Rocks and Shoals discipline like caning and poo poo. They’re pretty bad but I read them all anyway.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Association with Weber is a tertiary at best annoyance, the A-M series setting [Napoleonic Wars era] + nautical naval fiction in general are way-way-way down on my reading preference list.

Thinking about it more, my main dislike with Napoleonic Wars historical fiction is that most of the genre seems to be exclusively long running series about British heroes fighting the French (with the British command structure being just as deadly and possibly worse than the French menace). Ie, the Sharpe series, the HornBlower series, Aubrey–Maturin series, etc:
Is there any goddamn French or Italian or Austrian or Russian viewpoint Napoleonic Wars fiction series out there at all? Anything beyond brief mentions in Dumas's work/ Les Miz/etc, or epic one book efforts like War and Peace?

Selachian posted:

Well, there's Arthur Conan Doyle's The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, which is a collection of humorous short stories about a French officer. Gerard is a cocky, swaggering rear end in a top hat, a bit like Flashman but nowhere near as much of a coward and creep.

Gluten Freeman posted:

Django Wexler's The Thousand Names series is basically a fantasy French Revolution and then Napoleonic Wars series if you're interested in that.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

Mil-scifi, about the only troop-perspective series I ever got along with was Kloos’ Frontlines books, and I’m still only three books into it. They turn up on the cheap kindle lists pretty regular if you wanted to give them a look-over.

I was unfortunate enough to pick up a couple of Ringo’s Posleen paperback books ages back at a 2nd hand market and frankly lmao :o:

occamsnailfile posted:

1632 is much rougher than the later ones in the series I think--Eric Flint's real talent is as a collaborator rather than a writer in his own right. He's managed to assemble a lot of interesting historical writers to build the Ring of Fire universe but what I've read of his own prose was fairly weak, with some Baen-typical black and white heroes and villains type plotting. I still like and read the RoF books as a guilty pleasure though, since they're ultimately about building a society and making it better for everyone.

C.M. Kruger posted:

Legend says that to get published by Baen you need to first write a 5 book science fiction adaption about either Belisarius or the Anabasis.






DISCUSS!!

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Apr 16, 2020

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quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Recommended Mil-SciFi + Military-Fiction book series from people who've read too much bad Mil-SciFi + Mil-Fiction
Warning: Tastes may vary but these recommended series should have minimal straw-men opponents and lower than average amounts of Hard Men doing Hard Choices....these are Military Fiction + Mil-SciFi books after all.


quote:

Jack2142 wrote on Jul 2, 2019 15:04:
Not going to suggest any of the Belisarius Clone series. I liked the General Series, but on reflection I don't want to stick my neck out for it unless I re-read it sometime.

Black Company (series)
by Glen Cook while not Mil-Scifi it is Mil-Fantasy and I think fits the theme you want. I mean its a series with the premise that they are a mercenary company that is hired to work for the villain in a standard fantasy story. Also has a good storyline where the first book sort of built up an uber lone wolf badass soldier, but then deconstructed it in the succeeding novels to make him a pretty huge fuckup and pathetic person. To not spoil too much, but the Company while clearly competent is not invincible and they do lose fights, and have set backs.

Valor Confederation by Tanya Huff. I think this is interesting since it is very clearly a Mil-Scifi series about a Space Marine Commander, but unlike most of the genre the writer is a woman and the protagonist is a lady as well. The book series had some decent action scenes and some interesting hooks. The first in the series suffers a bit from being Rourke's Drift / Zulu in space, but the next couple of books have a bit more interesting scenario's. Since this genre is overwhelmingly male it makes this kind of just interesting as an anomaly in authorship.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Then of course Forever War probably deserves an honorable mention.

Starship Troopers is, at least, explicitly anti-racist (just speciesist).

Ender's Game is, despite many flaws, a well told story. Probably just as well Card never wrote any sequels though.

Also the Lost Fleet series (Xenophon in Spaaaace) isn't horrible.

Ninurta posted:

So, I have a few MilSF recommendations, now that I've cleansed.

First, Kam Hurley's The Light Brigade came out earlier this year, and is an okay take on Forever War/Starship Troopers. Set a hundred-couple hundred years from now, Earth goes to hell thanks to climate change and Corporate wars. Just as Earth begins to recover it gets attacked by Mars in an event that kills over 500,000 people in Buenos Aires instantly. As a result, We Go To War and, oh yeah, the soldiers are teleported/beamed from Earth to Mars and yes, there are teleporter errors. I enjoyed it overall, Kam is a pretty good author and her prose tends to be snappy. If you want a longer war/series you can check out her Belle Dam series as well.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...rom_search=true

My second recommendation would be from Frank Chadwick, Chain of Command, which is space navy vs space navy in a relativistic battle over a single space system. It is set in the same universe as his novels How Dark the World Becomes and Come the Revolution where Humanity reaches the stars and finds out that space is full, get in line. Near space is dominated by a very Capitalist, Cartel-like species that are still aligned by nation-state and while they have a proto-Space UN it's about as hosed up as our current global system. Chadwick started as a game designer for GDW so Chain of Command sort of crosses off all of the check marks of overcoming adversity but I found it a good, quick read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...rom_search=true

Those are my two most recent MilSF reads that I found worth talking about/recommending. I also finished Yoon Ha Lee's Revenant Gun but it's been a few years since that was published and was discussed in the SF thread. Good book, good conclusion to the trilogy.


TheGreatEvilKing posted:

OP, please link this from the OP. Apparently Weber himself read it and was very sad.




My own take on the subject is that you need to read something terrible before you are truly able to appreciate something good........therefore:
Read as many of the Sten Chronicles books as you can stand.
The most interesting man in the world Universe aka The Eternal Emperor doesn't show up until Sten book 2 though, however the Scottish stereotype sidekick also shows up in Sten book 2 and never gets killed off :scotland:.











quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Oct 5, 2019

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

after Starfire failed to take off, david weber missed his true destiny of writing GURPS splatbooks

The_White_Crane
May 10, 2008
I read the first ten or so Honor Harrington books when I was younger and the political implications weren't so apparent to me and thought they were 'okay'. I couldn't go back to them now.

I think of all the MilSF I've ever read (which isn't much, honestly) the Rogue Squadron books were actually some of my favourites, particularly the last two or three that actually focus on Wraith Squadron, who were a quite charming band of gently caress-ups.
Oh, and inasmuch as they're "sci-fi about the military" (though they don't really meet the thread's criteria) the Phule's Company series by Robert Asprin.

The_White_Crane fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Jun 26, 2019

Drone Jett
Feb 21, 2017

by Fluffdaddy
College Slice
Honor Harrington is a bad character, but I'm not sure what war crimes she ever committed. Is being so good and perfect that you always win a crime?

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

Drone Jett posted:

Honor Harrington is a bad character, but I'm not sure what war crimes she ever committed. Is being so good and perfect that you always win a crime?

Honor Harrington can't commit a war crime because any war crime she committed would be retroactively discovered to have been Actually Good and Cool the Whole Time afterwards.

If Harrington firebombed Dresden, it would turn out later that either Dresden was uninhabited at the time OR was inhabited only by vacationing Auschwitz guards.

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

one can observe either the scope or the severity of Honor's war crimes, but one cannot observe both simultaneously

if either the scope or the severity of war crime becomes known, the other forever becomes unknown

Jack2142
Jul 17, 2014

Shitposting in Seattle

I think I mentioned this in the other thread, but the General Series by SM Stirling and Drake.

It is one of the better entries in the genre imo because while the main character wins a lot and is clearly smart he does suffer defeats, and at least to me at the time there did seem to be an aura of will this actually work? Or moments where he makes a mistake and someone else has to fix it / save the day. Also it has goofy sci-fi things like the planet having no horses so everyone rides giant thousand pound Rottweilers essentially. If you haven't read it I would recommend checking it out as a mil-scifi book.

The books are essentially a very loose retelling of Belisarius, which spawned imo an inferior version set in an alternate history, that I think more people have read, that even as someone who like Roman history & Byzantine stuff comes across as really weird and fanwanking. (just lol at Byzantium being the origin of meritocracy wtf?)

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
If you can handle 40K madness Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books are good Mil SF and he takes some welcome jabs at the horrific authoritarian atrocities the Imperium of Man commits. Sometimes Gaunt himself is a little too perfect feeling, but he pays for his actions and the years definitely leave their mark on him.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Jack2142 posted:

I think I mentioned this in the other thread, but the General Series by SM Stirling and Drake.

It is one of the better entries in the genre imo because while the main character wins a lot and is clearly smart he does suffer defeats, and at least to me at the time there did seem to be an aura of will this actually work? Or moments where he makes a mistake and someone else has to fix it / save the day. Also it has goofy sci-fi things like the planet having no horses so everyone rides giant thousand pound Rottweilers essentially. If you haven't read it I would recommend checking it out as a mil-scifi book.

The books are essentially a very loose retelling of Belisarius, which spawned imo an inferior version set in an alternate history, that I think more people have read, that even as someone who like Roman history & Byzantine stuff comes across as really weird and fanwanking. (just lol at Byzantium being the origin of meritocracy wtf?)

This the mil-scifi series with the giant wardogs? And, the REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED giving the main character perfect aim with whatever he touches? And, the main characters wife who *ahem* "face 2 face brokers diplomatic treaties *ahem* aka bangs anyone/anywhere/anytime to further her husbands career, with high court fashion being pre-Fall polyester jumpsuits?

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

This the mil-scifi series with the giant wardogs? And, the REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED giving the main character perfect aim with whatever he touches? And, the main characters wife who *ahem* "face 2 face brokers diplomatic treaties, with high court fashion being pre-Fall polyester jumpsuits?

this is a realm of author personal life speculation i would normally find distasteful
but otoh this is the MilSF thread about for awful people, by awful people and about awful people, so here goes

i suspect from his oeuvre that eric flint has a mild cuckoldry fetish he is ashamed of, and that this is why the flint/drake belisarius series and the stirling/drake take opposing stances on belisarius's family life. The Flint/Drake series sticks resolutely with "Procopius was a big dumb awful liar!", whereas the Stirling/Drake series takes the alternative stance "Procopius was right about a lot of things, but Swinging is fine, it's cool don't worry about it"

I'm not trying to evoke cuckoldry fetish in the modern nazi meme sense, but in the original sense - it's a device Flint re-uses often enough to make me think he is interested in the topic

(For anyone unfamiliar with the history we're referring to, one of the main surviving sources on the Byzantium of justinian and belisarius's time is the Secret History, a volume of tabloid journalism produced by justinian's court chronicler wherein the empress, Theodora, and belisarius's wife, Antonina, were presented as depraved sex witches. I read it on Gutenberg a long time ago but the Gutenberg link is down now for some reason.)

Arcsquad12 posted:

If you can handle 40K madness Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books are good Mil SF and he takes some welcome jabs at the horrific authoritarian atrocities the Imperium of Man commits. Sometimes Gaunt himself is a little too perfect feeling, but he pays for his actions and the years definitely leave their mark on him.

i like a lot of abnett's work and if the thread survives long enough to reach a "what if MilSF, but good?" place, im sure he will come up often

for early tone setting purposes though i feel it is best to stick with dunking on terrible baen and baen-adjacent losers

abnett is too chill a dude to be welcome in this hell world as of yet

Ninurta
Sep 19, 2007
What the HELL? That's my cutting board.

Arcsquad12 posted:

If you can handle 40K madness Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books are good Mil SF and he takes some welcome jabs at the horrific authoritarian atrocities the Imperium of Man commits. Sometimes Gaunt himself is a little too perfect feeling, but he pays for his actions and the years definitely leave their mark on him.

For a quick non-WH40K Abnett book I would recommend Embedded. A reporter get's VR chipped into a soldier to report from the frontlines and things go horribly wrong. I found it a nice, quick read. Plus, there's nary a wet leopard growl to be found.

https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Dan-Abnett-ebook/dp/B004J4WLQY/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Embedded+abnett&qid=1561581391&s=gateway&sr=8-1

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

i also remember the General series (stirling/drake belisarius) having a gay couple i thought was decent representation at the time

like, in terms of being actual important-type characters as opposed to the blink-and-you-miss-em background gay couples you see in most books of this genre, when you see em at all

Jack2142
Jul 17, 2014

Shitposting in Seattle

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

This the mil-scifi series with the giant wardogs? And, the REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED giving the main character perfect aim with whatever he touches? And, the main characters wife who *ahem* "face 2 face brokers diplomatic treaties *ahem* aka bangs anyone/anywhere/anytime to further her husbands career, with high court fashion being pre-Fall polyester jumpsuits?

Yes? I don't think he has perfect aim though I think that was from the other Belisarius book, the computer/oracle thing in the General's series doesn't travel around in his pocket like the crystal in the alt-history one although again this is hazy I haven't read these books in like 8 years.

Like I said I think it is one of the better military sci-fi books, but that isn't exactly saying it is a masterpiece of literature.

PupsOfWar posted:

i also remember the General series (stirling/drake belisarius) having a gay couple i thought was decent representation at the time

like, in terms of being actual important-type characters as opposed to the blink-and-you-miss-em background gay couples you see in most books of this genre, when you see em at all

Yeah I think his second in command is gay, and has a relationship with another officer who I think is actually bisexual. In general I think the book did better than others in the people they were fighting weren't portrayed as sub-human monsters. Like compared to Ringo/Kratman stuff the opposing factions seem to have a little bit of depth and aren't utterly incompetent. Especially the Muslim faction, where they aren't cackling evil caricatures like I expected, I can't say its a good representation but it cleared some low standards I expected. Admittedly that might be a product of the times since these were written in the early 90's pre 9/11.

------------

The absolute worst mil sci-fi book I think I have read was Centurion by John Ringo...

I loving hate that book so much... there is maybe like 100 pages of action, sandwiched between hundreds of pages of how democrats are bad, and president Not Hilary! was on tranquilizers and got coup'd by the generals. Also the Nation of Islam took over Detroit and created a Caliphate??? and also pages on global warming is a myth and hippies can't farm!

This book was so terrible.

Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jun 26, 2019

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
I actually don't have as much experience with the mil sf genre because so many of the books make me uncomfortable with their unironic endorsement of horrific violence and state nationalism. The fact that people in real life fall for this stuff is troubling enough that I don't really enjoy books where the author is wholeheartedly jerking off to his totally justified totalitarian military state apparatus where hard men make hard decisions that require action while pussy rear end governments try to "negotiate" like a bunch of women at a social club.

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013

PupsOfWar posted:

i also remember the General series (stirling/drake belisarius) having a gay couple i thought was decent representation at the time

like, in terms of being actual important-type characters as opposed to the blink-and-you-miss-em background gay couples you see in most books of this genre, when you see em at all

Or they're actively eeeevile just by virtue of being gay, which is what you mostly get from the Ringo crowd.

In the Hammer's Slammers books my main takeaway was that Steuben isn't a horrible monster because he's gay, but because he's a sociopathic murderer.

I read a shorter novel from the late 80s/early 90s a while back called "A Small Colonial War" that was a very Hammer's Slammers style story about some (mostly) Finnish light infantry putting down a Boer uprising on a colony planet. The Finnish commander's best friend/confidant is a lesbian but at another point in the story he goes off on a tear about how another officer under a rival commander is a incompetent catamite. The rest of the book didn't really seem homophobic so I figured it was just the character really hating the other guy.

There's also a amusing scene in the book where a smaller group of American colonists on the planet hear that "General R. E. Lee" is coming for a visit and some of them turn out to meet him in their Confederate reenactment uniforms, only to find a Korean guy. As I recall it was a oddly humorous book for one that has descriptions of people getting hit by white phosphorus.

Arcsquad12 posted:

I actually don't have as much experience with the mil sf genre because so many of the books make me uncomfortable with their unironic endorsement of horrific violence and state nationalism. The fact that people in real life fall for this stuff is troubling enough that I don't really enjoy books where the author is wholeheartedly jerking off to his totally justified totalitarian military state apparatus where hard men make hard decisions that require action while pussy rear end governments try to "negotiate" like a bunch of women at a social club.

Clearly there's a untapped market of military science fiction for lefties about the heroic Space Red Army doing orbital bombardments on breakaway anarchist/left SR colonies.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:
I'd read tankie kratman.

edit: actually, I wouldn't. he's just that bad.

Aerdan
Apr 14, 2012

Not Dennis NEDry

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Honor Harrington can't commit a war crime because any war crime she committed would be retroactively discovered to have been Actually Good and Cool the Whole Time afterwards.

But can you point to any situations where she unambiguously commits one before post-hoc justifications are made?

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Honor Harrington can't commit a war crime because any war crime she committed would be retroactively discovered to have been Actually Good and Cool the Whole Time afterwards.

If Harrington firebombed Dresden, it would turn out later that either Dresden was uninhabited at the time OR was inhabited only by vacationing Auschwitz guards.

Aerdan posted:

But can you point to any situations where she unambiguously commits one before post-hoc justifications are made?

[IRONY] Did you bitches not read the 2nd sentence of the OP, which covers this exact situation. [/IRONY] :razzy:

quote:

Mil-SciFi + Mililtary Fiction genres are defined by lovely to mediocre writing, main characters doing horrific WarCrimes, cartoonishly evil villains/threats, and near immediate plot justification for any WarCrimes the main characters have done or about to do in the books.





To Honor Harrington, every action she has taken was in defense of Manticore's State legitimated monopoly on violence.
Anyone not associated with the Star Kingdom of Manticore sees a string of WarCrimes, with Harrington evading galactic justice via "as honorary head of state/actual nobility status in 2+ kingdoms i have diplomatic immunity" or/and the old tried-and-true Nazi "I was acting under orders at the time" defense strategy.

It's that 2-for-1 deal that in addition to Honor Harrington's other textbook attributes as a Mary Sue character, which makes David Weber's Honor Harrington so goddamn frustrating and annoying.

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jun 27, 2019

Aerdan
Apr 14, 2012

Not Dennis NEDry

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Did you bitches not read the 2nd sentence of the OP, which covers this exact situation.

What I'm reading is "I can't actually provide proof for my claim, so I'm going to put up chaff to try and avoid having to do so", which is not a good look for something that is literally part of the thread's title.

I'm not going to pretend that David Weber doesn't have terrible politics (because he does), or that there aren't other valid criticisms (because there are), but come on.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Aerdan posted:

What I'm reading is "I can't actually provide proof for my claim, so I'm going to put up chaff to try and avoid having to do so", which is not a good look for something that is literally part of the thread's title.

I'm not going to pretend that David Weber doesn't have terrible politics (because he does), or that there aren't other valid criticisms (because there are), but come on.

Honestly should have used IRONY tags or a smilie in my post, a joking tone is hard to convey otherwise via pure text. Added both a Irony tag + a smilie, thanks man.

Part of the reason why i generalized in the OP is because 50% I openly half-assed the OP and 50% me truly trying to block-out most of the bad Mil-SciFi + Military fiction that I've read.
This thread was created so we can discuss all the crap in Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction that annoys us without drowning out posts in other more active Book barn threads , so what "chaff" did I put up that annoyed you...

...the half-assed generalized statement in the OP regarding main characters of Mil-SciFi series doing WarCrimes that are immediately justified/pre-justified by the authors?

or
....the "State legitimated monopoly on violence" thing I said?

That re-re-re-quote originally came from a 2nd party's summarization of Max Weber's political economic work in a book about Dark Web systems(??). That phrasing got me thinking of the other Weber author, David Weber, and Honor Harrington, which was the genesis of the thread title. Overall, that Dark Web systems book was a weird read.
ISBN: 9780262038263, Weaving the dark web : legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P, if you feel like checking it out.

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jun 27, 2019

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

So in what book did Honor commit the warcrime? Quit evading the question.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

StrixNebulosa posted:

So in what book did Honor commit the warcrime? Quit evading the question.

There was at least one occasion when Honor was going to shoot a POW out of hand. Now, the guy was miserable scum, but still protected under space law etc. One of her subordinates knocked her gun aside--so she almost did, but the plot saved her. I can't remember any of the other details like which book, who the guy was specifically, or who prevented her from shooting, but having a murderous temper is one of her major character traits.

That said, since she's the protagonist and we're supposed to like her, she doesn't generally go around bombing civilians or any of the other atrocities her enemies routinely commit to convince us of their evilness. I guess that's something I have trouble with in a lot of MilSF, is that there can't just be a war that nobody really wants but can't quite be avoided (a la WWI) and where there may be individually exceptional or despicable individuals but mostly it's just people. I think the closest I've seen that I can remember offhand was actually that weird trilogy by Timothy Zahn where humans and aliens were fighting and the war was caused because radio communications caused psychic damage to the aliens. It wasn't a very good series but at least it didn't present things as black and white.

Ninurta
Sep 19, 2007
What the HELL? That's my cutting board.

If you want Mi-SciFi war crimes you have alot more of Baen's library to choose from. There's the aforementioned John Ringo, Tom Kratman, and of course Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold where they justifiably kill billions of people on Earth while the protagonist writes off rape as an after thought. This really should be the Baen and things like it thread.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:
I am wearing black cloth now, no armor. Twin lightning bolts decorate my collar. My body rocks with the motion of the vehicle I ride. I know what it is. My memory, more memories I did not know I possessed, tells me it is called a “Panzer VI, Ausfuerung A”… a “Tiger I,” some would call it.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

occamsnailfile posted:

There was at least one occasion when Honor was going to shoot a POW out of hand. Now, the guy was miserable scum, but still protected under space law etc. One of her subordinates knocked her gun aside--so she almost did, but the plot saved her. I can't remember any of the other details like which book, who the guy was specifically, or who prevented her from shooting, but having a murderous temper is one of her major character traits.

That said, since she's the protagonist and we're supposed to like her, she doesn't generally go around bombing civilians or any of the other atrocities her enemies routinely commit to convince us of their evilness. I guess that's something I have trouble with in a lot of MilSF, is that there can't just be a war that nobody really wants but can't quite be avoided (a la WWI) and where there may be individually exceptional or despicable individuals but mostly it's just people. I think the closest I've seen that I can remember offhand was actually that weird trilogy by Timothy Zahn where humans and aliens were fighting and the war was caused because radio communications caused psychic damage to the aliens. It wasn't a very good series but at least it didn't present things as black and white.

Okay, thank you for answering the question.

Regarding a war neither side wants to fight I'd point you to the Lost Fleet series. As the series proceeds it becomes clear that no one remembers how the war started...and while the protagonist whoops a whole lot of Syndic rear end he is instrumental in making peace happen and finding out why they went to war in the first place.

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I'd just like to say that in an interview on a podcast Haldemann put the IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE GAY thing in there to piss people off and also help drive home that the main character in Forever War is completely alienated from the rest of humanity, not because he thinks being gay is bad or that everyone being gay is scary

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

90s Cringe Rock posted:

I am wearing black cloth now, no armor. Twin lightning bolts decorate my collar. My body rocks with the motion of the vehicle I ride. I know what it is. My memory, more memories I did not know I possessed, tells me it is called a “Panzer VI, Ausfuerung A”… a “Tiger I,” some would call it.

Undecided whether this is parodying late-era Michael Moorcocks Eternal Champion stories or just pure Tom Kratman parody.
Either way, totally plausible.

Honor Harrington Warcrimes: want to say the WarCrime-ing started in the 2nd Honor Harrington book or if not there whatever the Q-ship/disguised-battleships-on-patrol book was. As Hieronymous said, the universe(David Weber) shifts to accommodate whatever decisions Harrington makes into perfect(ly justified) decisions.

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
And drake gets mentioned a few times in the OP's quotes but to those who might not know, much like Haldemann he's a Vietnam vet and so a little old and out of touch compared to young folks but hes definitely not a protofascist. Like the Hammer's Slammers stories are all about how awful people can be when their only identity is tied in with being a soldier, not that they're good and cool for being utterly detached from their humanity

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Larry Parrish posted:

And drake gets mentioned a few times in the OP's quotes but to those who might not know, much like Haldemann he's a Vietnam vet and so a little old and out of touch compared to young folks but hes definitely not a protofascist. Like the Hammer's Slammers stories are all about how awful people can be when their only identity is tied in with being a soldier, not that they're good and cool for being utterly detached from their humanity

Read his Redliners, it's great

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Larry Parrish posted:

I'd just like to say that in an interview on a podcast Haldemann put the IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE GAY thing in there to piss people off and also help drive home that the main character in Forever War is completely alienated from the rest of humanity, not because he thinks being gay is bad or that everyone being gay is scary

This was the take that I got from Forever War--I mean the story started out with a "military unit" in the loosest possible sense of the term which was co-ed and spent most of their time smoking weed and doing other drugs, which at the time he wrote the book was almost as scandalous as gay stuff. The narrator stated his dislike for homosexuality but he still let his gay soldiers have their last goodbyes before they were sent off; it did work to drive home something of the Vietnam vet experience of how everything was just alien upon coming back--not just because the country had changed (it had) but their normal had gotten so weird. There was also the way that civilian life had devolved into a UBI purposelessness that the narrator's military brain just couldn't handle. What, sit around and get money for free with no job, just...do what you want? Do these kids even know what's out there? Which was another interesting portrayal of military personnel trying to transition out. Obviously he fails, repeatedly, to rejoin society. I never read the sequel(s) but I did wonder if the neo-American utopia he was promised worked any better for him than any other time he tried to get out.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Larry Parrish posted:

And drake gets mentioned a few times in the OP's quotes but to those who might not know, much like Haldemann he's a Vietnam vet and so a little old and out of touch compared to young folks but hes definitely not a protofascist. Like the Hammer's Slammers stories are all about how awful people can be when their only identity is tied in with being a soldier, not that they're good and cool for being utterly detached from their humanity

Totally agree.
David Drake's Mil-SciFi stories always illustrate the dehumanizing effects of warfare, same with Haldemann. John Ringo, Tom Kratman, Harry Turtledove...uh lets just say the bulk of Baen Books "authors" on the other hand leave out the dehumanizing effects of war, and instead go for overblown spectacle and how amazing the tactics and weapons used are.

Mostly have forgotten/blocked out Haldemann's work*, but will always remember David Drake's work and the sheer anger of his writing. As I said in the main SF+Fantasy thread, it's like David Drake is writing out his Vietnam War issues on paper, every story since he started writing Mil-SciFi.

*Haldeman's non-Forever War work kinda sucks, and the Forever War follow stories were not good.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
There's also Scalzi, who basically started out with "I will write Heinlein knockoffs for money" and then gradually deconstructed the genre over the course of several sequels as his "I need money" vs "I have political beliefs" curves respectively fell and rose.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007
Oh. I'm very sorry NoNostalgia4Grover for not making this myself. I've been in a slump and was finally feeling okay enough to even look at SomethingAwful and was like "Okay let's see what the Scifi thread has to say before I make this" and it turns out you did it. So thanks.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Kchama posted:

Oh. I'm very sorry NoNostalgia4Grover for not making this myself. I've been in a slump and was finally feeling okay enough to even look at SomethingAwful and was like "Okay let's see what the Scifi thread has to say before I make this" and it turns out you did it. So thanks.

Did you write up anything? I wanna see it if so.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Undecided whether this is parodying late-era Michael Moorcocks Eternal Champion stories or just pure Tom Kratman parody.
Either way, totally plausible.
You can believe that if it helps you sleep at night.

the tank orgasms as it kills russians

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

90s Cringe Rock posted:

You can believe that if it helps you sleep at night.

the tank orgasms as it kills russians

What the gently caress is that from

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

StrixNebulosa posted:

What the gently caress is that from
I command, “Halt,” then, “Fire,” and my Tiger’s cannon blooms in flame and smoke. Half-stunned by my own vehicle’s concussion, I see a T-34 come to a stop, its turret askew and the first licks of flame sprouting from its violated hull.

My pleasure center tingles very strongly. I shiver in the command hatch. Again our gun belches and the pleasure I feel at seeing another hit grows accordingly. With our first five shots, three of the enemy vehicles are destroyed. The pleasure is overpowering, indescribable. I search my data banks for a word for what I am feeling. It is “orgasm.” I want more. I never want it to stop.

Big Boys Don't Cry, Tom Kratman's Hugo-nominated Bolo knock-off novella.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20882829-big-boys-don-t-cry

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

Did you write up anything? I wanna see it if so.

I didn't really have anything of value. The OP actually got all the good stuff I was gonna quote and a few more besides.

I did have a Manticorean War Crime that Honor wasn't involved with, but I haven't read the Honorverse in forever so my memory isn't great. I just remember this because it made me throw away the book and quit Honorverse forever.

It was in... Storm From the Shadows subseries. Honor's friend is in command of a fleet that gets attacked by a Haven fleet and is defeated and signals surrender and evacuating the ships. When the Haven fleet closed in to pick up the lifeboats, she suddenly changes her mind on surrendering and orders an all-out attack on the Haven ships and catches them off-guard, destroying a bunch of them. The Haven ships return fire and wipe out what's left of the Manticorean fleet. It then cuts to Honor's friend waking up (as the Haven admiral stopped the counterattack immediately and STILL picked up all the survivors) in a prestigious position in Haven and it turning out that they deemed their admiral to be a War Criminal and punished them and absolved Honor's friend of all crimes.

After this I threw my book away and was freed from my curse of needing to finish a series so I can rightfully trash-talk it.

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Aerdan
Apr 14, 2012

Not Dennis NEDry

occamsnailfile posted:

There was at least one occasion when Honor was going to shoot a POW out of hand. Now, the guy was miserable scum, but still protected under space law etc. One of her subordinates knocked her gun aside--so she almost did, but the plot saved her. I can't remember any of the other details like which book, who the guy was specifically, or who prevented her from shooting, but having a murderous temper is one of her major character traits.

... Which not only comes up in later books, but is one of the incidents that flavour how her enemies perceive her, so it's not like it's something that's just brushed off. Nor does it happen again.

As for the Q-ship, it being a military vessel was telegraphed before she went after it, and telegraphed again before she fired upon it beyond the warning shot.

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