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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. Going to add this quoted post to the OP, along with some quotes from 20 or so pages back from from the SF+ Fantasy thread tomorrow or so that cover a broader range of Military Fiction genre posts (napoleonic wars stuff). Glad to hear you are feeling better/are out of that mental slump. Trash-Talking terrible Mil-SciFi + Military Fiction is the primary point of this thread, at least for me. Reason #2 for this thread existing is to get more people posting in the book barn threads, bonus points if the new posters start aggressively defending their favorite book series/author. Speaking of which.... Aerdan posted:... 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. Welcome back, friend. Didn't Honor Harrington + friends do the same hidden military vessel/illegal Q-ship bullshit that the first book(On Basilisk Station) raged about a book or two later? Only it was more Q-ships (filled to the brims with missile pods) when Manticore/Harrington did it? Regardless, what Mil-SciFi authors besides David Weber obviously, do you enjoy reading or talking poo poo about? 90s Cringe Rock posted: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. That is horrifying.....and Hugo nominated too, ugh. Just goes to show how terrible + insular the Mil-SciFi genre can be if THAT story got nominated. The original Bolo stories by Keith Laumer were ok to decent, then Baen Books got involved with Bolo-universe anthology stories(thinking Jim Baen bought the Bolo IP rights from Keith Laumer post-Laumer heart attack). The Bolo-universe anthology stories that came out after Baen Books owned the Bolo IP rights were 90% bad/100% not worth reading by modern 2018/2019 era readers/150% wastes of paper pulp that could have been better used as napkins or bathroom sanitary products. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jun 28, 2019 |
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Jun 28, 2019 03:30
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thinking about hack Baen writers always makes me mad that theres no leftist war novels, just various levels of anti-war novels set in a war or anti-MIC novels. Meanwhile theres about a billion John Ringo style bullshit ones
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Jun 28, 2019 05:28
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Going to add this quoted post to the OP, along with some quotes from 20 or so pages back from from the SF+ Fantasy thread tomorrow or so that cover a broader range of Military Fiction genre posts (napoleonic wars stuff). quote:Didn't Honor Harrington + friends do the same hidden military vessel/illegal Q-ship bullshit that the first book(On Basilisk Station) raged about a book or two later? Only it was more Q-ships (filled to the brims with missile pods) when Manticore/Harrington did it? quote:That is horrifying.....and Hugo nominated too, ugh. Just goes to show how terrible + insular the Mil-SciFi genre can be if THAT story got nominated. It's actually not Hugo-nominated for the reason why you think. It's just that Kratman ran with a group who did their best to rig the nominations in their favor. So they got them and their buddies nominated which would result in the Hugo voters just not picking any winner.
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Jun 28, 2019 05:33
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Larry Parrish posted:thinking about hack Baen writers always makes me mad that theres no leftist war novels, just various levels of anti-war novels set in a war or anti-MIC novels. Meanwhile theres about a billion John Ringo style bullshit ones Marko Kloos might qualify IMO. The main character is some random guy from the slums who joins the military and ends up in a urban pacification unit and then ends up in the space marines. The US Government in the books is portrayed like your typical corrupt and incompetent milSF badguys more concerned with saving their own skins, and eventually gets overthrown by a popular uprising partway through the series. On the other hand Myke Cole is apparently a lefty, but you wouldn't know it from his books where the EU is now the European Caliphate or how he writes female characters.
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Jun 28, 2019 07:02
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C.M. Kruger posted:Marko Kloos might qualify IMO. The main character is some random guy from the slums who joins the military and ends up in a urban pacification unit and then ends up in the space marines. The US Government in the books is portrayed like your typical corrupt and incompetent milSF badguys more concerned with saving their own skins, and eventually gets overthrown by a popular uprising partway through the series. Eh... Kloos is good but it's kind of just antiwar stuff imo. Theres never any kind of solution presented to these systemic problems
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Jun 28, 2019 08:33
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C.M. Kruger posted:Marko Kloos might qualify IMO. The main character is some random guy from the slums who joins the military and ends up in a urban pacification unit and then ends up in the space marines. The US Government in the books is portrayed like your typical corrupt and incompetent milSF badguys more concerned with saving their own skins, and eventually gets overthrown by a popular uprising partway through the series. The Sten! series has a similar setup, only the benevolent The biggest plot twist of the exceptionally terrible Sten! series involves the Eternal Emperor, who suppressed all knowledge of Earth culture from the Renaissance eras to 20th century eras so that he could devote the entire resources of the Milky Way Galaxy to allow him (and only him) to live his 1980's executive yuppie lifestyle until the universe reached heat death.... because the Eternal Emperors origin story is that he really was a 1980's yuppie executive that lucked out/monopoly'd/murdered his way to Eternal Emperor of Mankind-hood. There, I spoiler-ed the Sten! series ending + plot twist so no-one else has to read that garbage.
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Jun 28, 2019 13:47
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Larry Parrish posted:thinking about hack Baen writers always makes me mad that theres no leftist war novels, just various levels of anti-war novels set in a war or anti-MIC novels. Meanwhile theres about a billion John Ringo style bullshit ones i guess nominally the left-wing version of ringo would be someone like the self-identified socialist eric flint the idea of flint being ideologically opposed to the ringo/kratman/weber/williamson/etc axis is Dubious at best however as, if he were, he would probably not be able to collaborate with such people so frequently there's no proper tankie war-porn that i can think of, and the more anarchist left ain't gonna write war porn since they recognize war bad PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Jun 28, 2019 |
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Jun 28, 2019 14:13
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make PigPissGrandad write a sci-fi novel
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Jun 28, 2019 14:17
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Kind of want to discuss C. J. Cherryh's 3 or 4 Mil-Scifi books, or Stephen Donaldson's quasi-Mil-Sci-Fi Gap Cycle next. Or even Mike Resnick's Starship! Mil-SciFi series which is so very bootstrappy perfect hero decisions, and Teddy Roosevelt worship-laden I am shocked nobody, except me, ever bitched about them in the main SF+Fantasy thread. PupsOfWar posted:make PigPissGrandad write a sci-fi novel I immediately thought "...But how would ED GREENWOOD be able to adapt his one character into a sci-fi setting?" Then I thought NANOMACHINES SON!. Word replace nano-machines for "spells, spellbooks, etc" and jumble around the hyphens in his Forgotten Realms character/location names with apostrophes + Scriptio continua and Greenwood could churn out content like mad.
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Jun 28, 2019 14:43
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Welcome back, friend. In Honor Among Enemies, she does lead a squadron of Q-ships, but in anti-pirate activity. (Grav lances only feature twice in the whole franchise, in On Basilisk Station and in a Rafe Cardones short story, since Weber felt they were too much of a god-weapon and they kind of negated his goal of 'Horatio Hornblower in spaaaace', at least in the early books.) NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Regardless, what Mil-SciFi authors besides David Weber obviously, do you enjoy reading or talking poo poo about? Only other scifi author I really read regularly is Bujold, honestly. I keep trying to get in to The Expanse, but the writing just doesn't 'click' for me, unfortunately. (I do occasionally read Elizabeth Moon, though.)
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Jun 28, 2019 14:57
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Larry Parrish posted:thinking about hack Baen writers always makes me mad that theres no leftist war novels, just various levels of anti-war novels set in a war or anti-MIC novels. Meanwhile theres about a billion John Ringo style bullshit ones The books aren't all that lefty but Tanya huff Trin Kerr novels are scifi adventure/space opera in a space military. Linda nagata's near future scifi red series is not 'lefty' but is certainly not a paen to facism.
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Jun 28, 2019 15:21
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Aerdan posted:
is that the same short story (written by someone else for an anthology) where the grav lance had been improved to negate all the weaknesses of the original design i recall this grav-lance variant having a range of like a million kilometers (twice normal energy range!) and being able to strip off the full impeller wedge rather than just the sidewalls
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Jun 28, 2019 15:44
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I guess the Red Rising series sort of counts, although it's more space opera than mil-SF. Certainly, the out-and-out socialists in it are the most consistently wise and heroic characters.
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Jun 28, 2019 15:49
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Kind of want to discuss C. J. Cherryh's 3 or 4 Mil-Scifi books Wait, she wrote more than one Mil Sci-fi novel? I only knew about Hellburner! Please, tell me more!
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Jun 28, 2019 15:49
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if hellburners counts as mil-SF then a good chunk of alliance-union counts as mil-SF,
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Jun 28, 2019 15:54
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I immediately thought "...But how would ED GREENWOOD be able to adapt his one character into a sci-fi setting?"
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Jun 28, 2019 15:54
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PupsOfWar posted:is that the same short story (written by someone else for an anthology) where the grav lance had been improved to negate all the weaknesses of the original design I think that's the one, yes. Super-secret project?
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Jun 28, 2019 16:10
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Aerdan posted:In Honor Among Enemies, she does lead a squadron of Q-ships, but in anti-pirate activity. I never really got how piracy could be everywhere in the Honorverse. Or at least, everywhere enough where it seems like anti-piracy was the combat everyone was expected to get. And like, there was wayyyy more piracy than in real life despite how much harder it would have to be than in real life, and none of it was even state sponsored. Also as far as i can tell, I don't think you're correct that Weber thought they were that at all, as from his very own words it seems like the actual reason for their existence in the first book was of a dual-use of showing Admiral Hemphill to be bad because she invented bad, impractical things, and also to show Honor as super good for being able to use a bad, impractical weapon with super effectiveness.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:17
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it always struck me as bizarre how most of the jerk evil Manticoran characters are commoners or landed gentry and not honorable aristocrats like Honor lol. My man desperately wants noble priviledge to come back for some reason
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Jun 28, 2019 18:37
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Larry Parrish posted:it always struck me as bizarre how most of the jerk evil Manticoran characters are commoners or landed gentry and not honorable aristocrats like Honor lol. My man desperately wants noble priviledge to come back for some reason Also Liberals! Naturally they're secret slavers conspiring against Manticore. The only good one is the one who says she's a Liberal but agrees with Weber on everything.
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Jun 28, 2019 20:08
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Larry Parrish posted:it always struck me as bizarre how most of the jerk evil Manticoran characters are commoners or landed gentry and not honorable aristocrats like Honor lol. i dont know about that the guy that had honor's boyfriend murdered was the heir of some big dick aristocrat family, and so was the liberal strawman diplomat she was enemies with. Then of course there was the sinister strawman government that took over at the end of the Havenite war whose leaders were aristos the solarian villains are essentially the same since weber conceives of entrenched bureaucracy as decadent byzantine feudalism (unlike the comparatively virtuous manticoran feudalism (dont ask me how they're different)) come to think of it i can't think of a single weber villain of commoner origins, or even one who was mere minor gentry i think this is not because he thinks commoners are more virtuous than aristos, but because he can't conceive of a universe where someone from the working class can accumulate enough power to become a threat
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Jun 28, 2019 23:48
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PupsOfWar posted:come to think of it i can't think of a single weber villain of commoner origins, or even one who was mere minor gentry How could you possibly have forgotten the legendary Rob S. Pierre
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Jun 29, 2019 00:47
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blackmongoose posted:How could you possibly have forgotten the legendary Rob S. Pierre hadn't my boy Rob S. Pierre been a prominent Legislaturist prior to space bastille day
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Jun 29, 2019 01:14
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According to the Honorverse wiki (curse you for making me look this up): "Pierre's family had been Dolists for some generations. He was a successful politician under the Legislaturalists, and his immediate family had more oportunities[sic]." So I think he is technically a commoner.
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Jun 29, 2019 01:19
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PupsOfWar posted:i dont know about that It depends on the faction, really. But Manticorean ones do tend to be aristocrats thinking about it because, well, the amount of lower-class civilians from Manticore number in... not a lot. And yeah my memory is returning a little. I get the impression that aristocrats were the only villains for Manticore because pretty much anything below that is basically not worth Honor's time, as you said. Especially since deulling is a thing. Wow, the dueling was dumb. So dumb so dumb soooo----- Like you can tell it's just in the story so Honor can murder her domestic foes without getting in trouble. Which reminds me of the she killed that guy who tried to cheat. Which was such a Mary Sue moment because she gets shot in the back and she instantly turns around and shoots him three times in the time it takes the referee to shoot the guy once and he didn't get shot and have to turn around completely. Also the dueling is just dumb and awful ugh.
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Jun 29, 2019 01:22
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if u want to duel, u should at least have to get in a gladiator pit and fight with tridents
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Jun 29, 2019 01:24
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anyway that reminds me of another honor harrington war crime - that time her ship's marine complement staged a raid on the hired duelist's hunting cabin and tortured him into giving up his employer
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Jun 29, 2019 01:33
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I'd like to throw out a recommendation for "The Prince" by S.M. Stirling and Jerry Pournelle. It takes place in the same universe as Stirling and Larry Niven's later novels "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand." It mostly follows the career of one man as he moves up through the Navy and eventually leads his own mercenary legion as the central government on Earth struggles to maintain control of its colonies. Many of the stories are set on colony worlds with various problems (corrupt governors, transporation of criminals, overbearing policies from Earth - basically the whole colonial playbook from actual history). There's an interesting cadre of side characters that develop over time and an overarching background plot where the central government is slowly collapsing. From a mil-SF angle, there's a lot of interesting small-unit actions, and situations explored where they realistically work around the limits of technology and logistics on backwater worlds (e.g. limited satellite coverage, area denial for aircraft, supply chain issues). It's been a few years since I've re-read it but I don't recall any strong overtones of crazy political leanings or worldviews unlike some of the other stuff mentioned in this thread (correct me if I'm wrong). There is some imperialism going on (they declare an Empire of Man towards the end, based on a planet founded by American constitutional scholars) but it's nowhere near as fetishistic as Weber's stuff. If you've read "The Mote in God's Eye," these stories happen in the distant past of that book and there are some connections. Pournelle created a whole CoDominium universe with backstory and a timeline, not unlike Niven's Known Space series, and similarly there are a whole host of short stories by other authors that take place in this universe (the WarWorld books). (Way more details here)
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Jun 29, 2019 01:42
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PupsOfWar posted:anyway that reminds me of another honor harrington war crime - that time her ship's marine complement staged a raid on the hired duelist's hunting cabin and tortured him into giving up his employer Nah it's cool. Subverting the law and all that is good is the correct thing to do when it comes to Honor. Also hired duelists are only bad and wrong when they're capable to winning against Honor and her boyfriend of the book.
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Jun 29, 2019 01:45
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No else in this thread apparently read Mike Resnick's Starship! Mil-SciFi series apparently, which makes them smarter than me in some ways and dumber in others (never touched a Tom Kratman book). Mike Resnick's Starship! series was really bad, but in not in the usual expected way. Yes, Mike Resnick wrote his usual bullshit main character specialized in making Pragmatic Hard Choices (That Were Always Right in the Long Run). Only this time the main character of the Starship! series had a marvel comics kilgrave style ability to convince/brainwash people into doing whatever he wanted them to. And also, the usual overt Teddy Roosevelt references Mike Resnick includes in his stories were dialed up to 22 in the Starship! books. Mike Resnick Starship series main character highlights: Gets wrongfully accused of committing WarCrimes while commanding the military spaceship Theodore Roosevelt: convinces the ENTIRE loving CREW of the spaceship to mutiny along with him. In command of the now 100% mutineer military warship: convinces the entire crew that going pirate is the only logical and sane choice now. Once started on the future space-pirate lifstyle magically picks targets with the best insurance and/or highest value cargo without fail with zero losses of life on either side. Convinces a neutral third party space station/smuggling hub to sponsor him and somehow ends up in control of a gaggle of space pirate ships based out of that neutral space station. Convinces the gaggle of space pirates to work together and forms a 10x larger confederacy of shakedown/protection racket space-pirates because he's so good at talking Somewhere in the middle of the series he starts deep dicking the gently caress out of his loyal female subordinate and is anime-crush admired by all the now-reformed former space pirate captains. Detects and thwarts a incoming invasion by a totally new alien race aimed at the Space Kingdom/Republic that originally pinned fake Warcrimes on him Leads the armada of now-reformed space pirates and regretful hero-worshipping Space Kingdom/Republic forces to the alien races home-world and brokers a peace treaty after doing a notPearl-Harbour strike on the alien home-world. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jun 29, 2019 |
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Jun 29, 2019 01:50
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:No else in this thread apparently read Mike Resnick's Starship! Mil-SciFi series apparently, which makes them smarter than me in some ways and dumber in others (never touched a Tom Kratman book). i think mike resnick is not that widely read around SA in general like ive read santiago, kirinyaga and a couple of short stories but i wouldn't say i am that familiar with his oeuvre overall, other than knowing a lot of it falls into that inelcutable category of "deliberately kitsch retropunk pulp throwback of the type people say they want, but which they actually don't"
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Jun 29, 2019 02:17
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PupsOfWar posted:anyway that reminds me of another honor harrington war crime - that time her ship's marine complement staged a raid on the hired duelist's hunting cabin and tortured him into giving up his employer Wouldn't that just be a normal crime since iirc he was also Manticoran? Although there doesn't seem to be much in the way of interstellar law in general in the series, if I recall correctly the main war related treaty is basically "don't bombard planets or else the Earth fleet will squish you" and there doesn't really seem to be any international court along the lines of the Hague.
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Jun 29, 2019 02:23
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blackmongoose posted:Wouldn't that just be a normal crime since iirc he was also Manticoran? Although there doesn't seem to be much in the way of interstellar law in general in the series, if I recall correctly the main war related treaty is basically "don't bombard planets or else the Earth fleet will squish you" and there doesn't really seem to be any international court along the lines of the Hague. i think there is no international law in honorverse because the solarian league was such a dominant hegemon for such a long time like, it's easy to forget since the last arc of the series has all these extended sequences where 1 manticoran pinnace destroys 5,000 solarian superdreadnoughts, but the status quo prior to the manticoran-havenite wars was meant to be even more mono-polar than the real world was circa like 1995 basically all of these international institutions don't exist since the solarian league just holds de-facto control over those functions why do i know so much about these terrible books
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Jun 29, 2019 02:29
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Larry Parrish posted:Eh... Kloos is good but it's kind of just antiwar stuff imo. Theres never any kind of solution presented to these systemic problems Nah the solution is "military coup," since this is milSF we're talking about after all. IIRC like when the uprising/coup happens it ends up with a former general as president, Starship Troopers style, and the new government increasing the rations going to the proles and ending the war with Russo-China, and after it there's a steady roll-out of new weapons/tactics/alliances with the rest of Earth and so on. IIRC there are a couple bits where the protag gets back to earth for R&R and is all like "things were bad but they're getting better now that the fat cats are gone!" branedotorg posted:The books aren't all that lefty but Tanya huff Trin Kerr novels are scifi adventure/space opera in a space military. I thought the whole Red series was pretty good. Felt like Metal Gear but more "defense contractors try to nuke the internet and the heroes need to stop them" than Kojima's megaweapon obsession and general lunacy. (vagina bomb) Anyways I went over to r/printSF to skim threads and see what the current zeitgeist is and saw a post praising the "Castle Federation" series by Glynn Stewart as being "incredible", "Honor Harrington without all the politics" and "the heir to David Weber's style" and I'm like gee, no need to insult the guy like that.
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Jun 29, 2019 02:50
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PupsOfWar posted:i think mike resnick is not that widely read around SA in general Oh I wish Resnick's stuff was "deliberately kitsch retropunk pulp throwback". Nope, Resnick is garbage tier, but he's been a professional writer/magazine editor since forever and never really changed up his writing style. Aka the Brian Aldiss/Damon Knight poo poo-tier elder scifi writer venerated because he could have ended your writing career easily pre-Internet. Now Resnick is rightfully forgotten and ignored, just like Silverberg. Pournelle and Niven. Debating whether to discuss Dean Ing survivalist sci-fi stories here because they always included military warcrimes and futuristic weapons were peak mil-scifi at the time. 'Cold-gas' recoil-less firearms, solar powered Reaper style drones but written using 1980s futuretech, nanomachines, Russian boar penises, rape, military plagues, the Red Menace invasions, new Wasteland texas rangers, Heinlein style Libertarian freeholds, etc. PupsOfWar posted:if hellburners counts as mil-SF then a good chunk of alliance-union counts as mil-SF, Oh most definitely,. Cherryh's Alliance-Union and Company Wars series= Mil-SciFi adjacent at the very least. One of the things that bothered me was 'Stockholm Syndrome > inter-personal conflicts' resolution cropping up repeatedly in C. J. Cherryh's Company Wars stories. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Jun 29, 2019 |
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Jun 29, 2019 03:00
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I kind of like Glynn Stewart but hes not a good author. Like I love the concept of the Duchy of Terra series but its yet another 'humans are the best at everything so once they beg, borrow, and steal some technology from the elder races they become nearly unstoppable except we dont have the population or territory to just dominate the rest of the universe'
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Jun 29, 2019 05:16
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Oh I wish Resnick's stuff was "deliberately kitsch retropunk pulp throwback". Nope, Resnick is garbage tier, but he's been a professional writer/magazine editor since forever and never really changed up his writing style. Aka the Brian Aldiss/Damon Knight poo poo-tier elder scifi writer venerated because he could have ended your writing career easily pre-Internet. Now Resnick is rightfully forgotten and ignored, just like Silverberg. Pournelle and Niven. I will always like Mike Resnick simply for his Birthright: The Book of Man. I entered into it with low expectations and found it to be a relatively enjoyable read, almost an anti-Foundation. Mankind rises, falls, rises again, shits on the rest of the polity and gets their just desserts. I've only read a few of his other books, including Santiago, some short stories and his Fortress in Orion which is set in the same universe. Oh, and Dean Ing, oof. Militant Mormonism triumphant and Assassin EMT's.
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Jun 29, 2019 06:55
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Oh gently caress Mike Resnick or his publisher, maybe because I'm in Australia but the Kindle editions of the starship books are us$15 each ... Walter Jon Williams for example has rewrites and release all his old stuff for $0-4
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Jun 29, 2019 07:53
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branedotorg posted:Oh gently caress Mike Resnick or his publisher, maybe because I'm in Australia but the Kindle editions of the starship books are us$15 each ... Walter Jon Williams for example has rewrites and release all his old stuff for $0-4 A good rule of thumb for Military-Fiction + Mil-SciFi is to track down public library copies of the first book of a series/closest to first book by whatever New2You Mil-Fiction/Mil-SciFi author. This has saved me lots of money, and as a bonus, librarians tend to toss out the overtly pro Nazi/fascism Military-fiction/Mil-SciFi books fast. Even Australia must have public libraries. Ninurta posted:IOh, and Dean Ing, oof. Militant Mormonism triumphant and Assassin EMT's. Mostly forgot about the militant mormonism in Dean Ing's stuff because the thirsty as gently caress rescued child-bride + that obsession with the mutated Russian boar were just so WTF? Wasn't there multiple versions of the Assassin EMT's as well? Like I remember the main character of Ing's Quantrill series cycling through: wartime covert SpecOps Assassins. MicroBomb in Heads deep cover Assassins Assassin EMT's (aka Search & Rescue, GliderSquad Division) New Texas Rangers Assassins US Marshall Assassins And ramping up the insanity, all those variations on Assassin Death-Squads happened within 3 books.
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Jun 29, 2019 14:50
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Also in terrible Weber milscifi... Safehold! If you don't know, the premise of Safehold is that a technologically unchanging alien race wiping out all other technologically advanced people in the universe have been doing the same to humanity. Humanity sends out a last-ditch colony to work under the radar literally to improve and advance past the Gbaba and defeat them. Sounds possibly interesting huh? Here's where it gets SO bad. The ship gets hijacked by two of the ship's crew, including an evilll psychologist named Adoree who uses a 'mind control matrix' and brainwashes all of the colonists and ship crew into actually abandoning all of the ship's technology and starting from near scratch, and also worshipping the two hijackers as Archangels and vilify the few crew who tried to fight back as demons. A long time later, a cyborg/android called a PICA that been hidden away wakes up with the memories of a military officer from the fleet that died in the final battles of the Gbaba War, with the mission to help put the colony back on its path to defeating the Gbaba. And the only thing stopping her... now him, as she quickly changes her gender to being am an with PICA Powers, is the evilll but also uselessly corrupt church that controls much of the world. Okay, maybe this is just the first book so they don't get to Gbaba War II too quickly. Right? You'd be wrong. For the entire massive TEN BOOK SERIES, they never even get to Gbaba War II. They spend it all on just the stupid Plucky Manticore Vs Solarian League retread from Honorverse. And these are not short books either. Even if you cut out the like 300 page glossary every book has, it's still loving massive. And you might need that glossary too as everyone has an awfully spelled name that is just Weber having taken a regular American name and then spelled it as wrongly as possible to represent 'linguistic drift' when it's only people's names that get this treatment and it also ends up nigh incomprehensible. Oh surely there must be a lot of dramatic tension and stuff to keep you reading? Haha, nope! Weber doesn't seem to like the idea, as the first book goes out of its way to outright tell you that the protagonist Nimue, (or renamed Merlin almost immediately) is more or less invincible and also has a network of invisible perfect spy drones and satellites so he knows literally everything that's going on in the world and so its impossible to scheme against him and that's all the Church really has going for them is schemes. In short, gently caress Safehold.
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Jun 29, 2019 15:21
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