Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Kchama, begging you just for sanity's sake, to read some Asher or Banks or Drake or Vinge or Scalzi's Old mans War or even :shudder: some Brust to start blocking out the Weber total-recall you have going on at a genetic level.


Personally I just cracked the lid on "behold a pale horse" and it is 350% more insane than I went in expecting. And I expected some pretty insane meandering conspiracy theories.

e: also, C.M. Kruger you kind of scare me now. And also, *cough* can I use you as a search tool for other things?

C.M. Kruger posted:

Messing around with keywords in Google and site:goodreads.com and it looks like that's probably Orphanage by Robert Buettner.

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jul 7, 2019

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Kchama, begging you just for sanity's sake, to read some Asher or Banks or Drake or Vinge or Scalzi's Old mans War or even :shudder: some Brust to start blocking out the Weber total-recall you have going on at a genetic level.


Personally I just cracked the lid on "behold a pale horse" and it is 350% more insane than I went in expecting. And I expected some pretty insane meandering conspiracy theories.

e: also, C.M. Kruger you kind of scare me now. And also, *cough* can I use you as a search tool for [i]other things[i/]?

Sorry, I am forever lost. Not even good books can save my soul.

Cuz there's also the Kratman and Rothfuss and other terrible ilk who have already claimed it.

I am damned.

EDIT: This thread is where I vent all my damnation.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jul 7, 2019

Space Butler
Dec 3, 2010

Lipstick Apathy
Isn't there a bit in one of the Honour books where Manticore straight up annexes several of their neighbours?


Also is this the thread for Gavin Smith's books, or should they go in the other one. I like them, but I don't think they're actually good. I mean, turning a prison ship full of murderers into a mercenary company of slaves as a part of a CIA deep cover mission to do something I honestly can't remember is a bit...much.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

Space Butler posted:

Isn't there a bit in one of the Honour books where Manticore straight up annexes several of their neighbours?


Also is this the thread for Gavin Smith's books, or should they go in the other one. I like them, but I don't think they're actually good. I mean, turning a prison ship full of murderers into a mercenary company of slaves as a part of a CIA deep cover mission to do something I honestly can't remember is a bit...much.

It's why they're the Empire of Manticore now. And IIRC all the annexations were all voted for in mass by the annexed.


Of course there's a bit in the book where Manticore more or less rigged the vote so they'd win it (and they forced the vote in the first place with their spies) but this was Actually Good, You Guys and we were suppose to hate the locals for trying to stop this.

TheGreatEvilKing
Mar 28, 2016





Some Terry Goodkind right there.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Some Terry Goodkind right there.

No kidding. Like this was suppose to be good as otherwise they'd be Solarian League members and thus VILLIANOUS SCUM so it was for their own good that Manticore subverted their democratic process to make sure they were actually members of the good guy empire!!

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Space Butler posted:

Also is this the thread for Gavin Smith's books, or should they go in the other one. I like them, but I don't think they're actually good. I mean, turning a prison ship full of murderers into a mercenary company of slaves as a part of a CIA deep cover mission to do something I honestly can't remember is a bit...much.

Welcome friend.
I have no idea who Gavin Smith the author is, or anything about their books. The description you gave is definitely seems quasi-military fiction, so feel free to talk about them in this thread, at length.
Sort of got a W40k gaunts ghost vibe re-reading that description, also got smaller vibes of SuicideSquad the DC comics property.

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

Space Butler posted:

Isn't there a bit in one of the Honour books where Manticore straight up annexes several of their neighbours?


that whole subplot is basically weber going "well, neo-imperialism is bad...should have never moved abandoned regular imperialism"

we're meant to root for the Talbot cluster being seized away from the League because these regions outlying the League are economically and politically exploited by the Office of Frontier Security in a host of different ways...which is fine right up until we're expected to assume Manticore would never do any such thing.

it reflects surprisingly well on Weber at first, since most of his peers at Baen don't recognize those methods of neocolonial control to begin with, but this doesn't last very long once he starts rationalizing that we should want this other expansionist imperial powerhouse to take over instead

like intrinsically we're supposed to think that imperial power is bad when exercised by unelected bureaucrats, but fine when exercised by (also unelected) aristocrats. Why we're supposed to think that is never established, other than Elizabeth as an individual being presented favorably and every dead historical Winton being presented favorably

democracy or indigenous self-rule are never on the table in either scenario

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

that whole subplot is basically weber going "well, neo-imperialism is bad...should have never moved abandoned regular imperialism"

we're meant to root for the Talbot cluster being seized away from the League because these regions outlying the League are economically and politically exploited by the Office of Frontier Security in a host of different ways...which is fine right up until we're expected to assume Manticore would never do any such thing.

it reflects surprisingly well on Weber at first, since most of his peers at Baen don't recognize those methods of neocolonial control to begin with, but this doesn't last very long once he starts rationalizing that we should want this other expansionist imperial powerhouse to take over instead

like intrinsically we're supposed to think that imperial power is bad when exercised by unelected bureaucrats, but fine when exercised by (also unelected) aristocrats. Why we're supposed to think that is never established, other than Elizabeth as an individual being presented favorably and every dead historical Winton being presented favorably

democracy or indigenous self-rule are never on the table in either scenario

This is just a whole big 'yep'. It's funny that I was expecting someone to come in and explain that I remembered it wrong, it didn't happen like that. Though I didn't have too much hope. But no, I'm not wrong am I. And yeah it's super hosed up because we're suppose to just go "Oh those silly locals don't know what they're thinking, which is why they deserve to die for going against this country literally subverting their democracy and freedom".

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

tbf the cowboy freedom-fighters on the Rugged Individualist Planet flip and become good royalists in the end

it's only the nasty socialist revolutionary woman on the other planet who remains bad

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

tbf the cowboy freedom-fighters on the Rugged Individualist Planet flip and become good royalists in the end

it's only the nasty socialist revolutionary woman on the other planet who remains bad

lol I nearly entirely forgot about literally Space Montana being the home of good royalists. Whereas the French Artists Planet has all the EVIL DEMOCRACY LOVERS.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Starting to suspect that Kchama + PupsOfWar are both former Baen Book interns driven mad by their proofreading duties.

Small Wars Manual 1940 is dated but covers a staggering amount of details from rules of engagement to patrol sizes to recommended cooking ware to setting up actual loving governments + constabulary units. If not a goldmine resource for an mil-fiction/mil-scifi writer doing a guerrilla warfare story, Small Wars Manual 1940 would be a excellent blueprint for designing a unique survival forever-war MMO.

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice
I don't know that this applies, exactly, because it's less about war than the lead up to war, but Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books are about a future society that, after a really terrible war that brought the end of nation states, has been at at peace for three centuries. The society, though, is breaking down, and war is coming, in spite of attempts by a bunch of people to stop it.

Three books have come out, with one more coming, and at the end of the third book, the war has just started

It might not be strictly military science fiction. The heroes aren't some plucky squad holding the line against alien invaders or whatever, but it is a series about war, and how war happens, and the whole set of choices, and compromises, and refusal to compromise that makes it seem like stuff is just steamrolling to war no matter how much you may try to stop it.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Starting to suspect that Kchama + PupsOfWar are both former Baen Book interns driven mad by their proofreading duties.

Small Wars Manual 1940 is dated but covers a staggering amount of details from rules of engagement to patrol sizes to recommended cooking ware to setting up actual loving governments + constabulary units. If not a goldmine resource for an mil-fiction/mil-scifi writer doing a guerrilla warfare story, Small Wars Manual 1940 would be a excellent blueprint for designing a unique survival forever-war MMO.

I'm not sure I could be paid enough for that job, and I get paid very little to read very bad fiction.

EDIT: Also I'm tempted to mine that for my terrible fiction I'm writing, as that sounds like very useful information to have some understanding of, even if you need to adapt it.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jul 8, 2019

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

it amuses me that they tried making a wargame out of honorverse

like

for wargames people a lot of the appeal is collecting all the different dudes and painting them to look cool (if supplied unpainted) or at least displaying them (if supplied painted)

40k is a bad game and a lot of the sculpts of the models are bad, designed to be slammed out in vast bulk by terrible injection molding equipment from the mid 90s. But the dudes who do it enjoy getting to paint up all the different bits and heraldry. This works very well with a gonzo setting where you can have mecha, exosuits, tanks, artillery, werewolves, dragons, and several different types of flamboyant space knights and space ninja, all in the same battle. This fundamentally is why all of the main wargaming settings are wild and colorful and anachronistic - people want a wide variety of things to paint and display.

you can't do this with honorverse since in honorverse all ships share the same fundamental shape

it is hard to imagine that people who like to paint & display models would enjoy this

what are they gonna do with fleets that are all just incrementally varying sizes of the same thing



NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Starting to suspect that Kchama + PupsOfWar are both former Baen Book interns driven mad by their proofreading duties.


i think its just a matter of being at the right age (around 12-13) in a physically and socially isolated space at the time when a lot of this stuff was coming out

there was a point when i was slamming down like 3 of these bad boys per week

it wasn't even that long a phase, but this type of book goes down so fast that a huge amount of content could be consumed during that time

PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jul 8, 2019

Aerdan
Apr 14, 2012

Not Dennis NEDry

PupsOfWar posted:

it amuses me that they tried making a wargame out of honorverse

like

for wargames people a lot of the appeal is collecting all the different dudes and painting them to look cool (if supplied unpainted) or at least displaying them (if supplied painted)

40k is a bad game and a lot of the sculpts of the models are bad, designed to be slammed out in vast bulk by terrible injection molding equipment from the mid 90s. But the dudes who do it enjoy getting to paint up all the different bits and heraldry. This works very well with a gonzo setting where you can have mecha, exosuits, tanks, artillery, werewolves, dragons, and several different types of flamboyant space knights and space ninja, all in the same battle. This fundamentally is why all of the main wargaming settings are wild and colorful and anachronistic - people want a wide variety of things to paint and display.

you can't do this with honorverse since in honorverse all ships share the same fundamental shape

it is hard to imagine that people who like to paint & display models would enjoy this

what are they gonna do with fleets that are all just incrementally varying sizes of the same thing

At least the Andermani navy paints the ships' names on to their hulls; everyone else just puts the ship's catalog number on.

Kchama posted:

It's why they're the Empire of Manticore now. And IIRC all the annexations were all voted for in mass by the annexed.


Of course there's a bit in the book where Manticore more or less rigged the vote so they'd win it (and they forced the vote in the first place with their spies) but this was Actually Good, You Guys and we were suppose to hate the locals for trying to stop this.

As I recall, that's the Solarian bureaucrats' interpretation of the plebiscites, not what actually happened.

Because obviously it's okay to be imperialist if they asked to join. /s

On the other hand, there's that whole 'split Silesia up between Manticore and the Anderman Empire' bit; the Silesians didn't get a say in that one.

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009

Space Butler posted:

Isn't there a bit in one of the Honour books where Manticore straight up annexes several of their neighbours?


Also is this the thread for Gavin Smith's books, or should they go in the other one. I like them, but I don't think they're actually good. I mean, turning a prison ship full of murderers into a mercenary company of slaves as a part of a CIA deep cover mission to do something I honestly can't remember is a bit...much.

he has two series on amazon - which is better, Veterans or Bastard Legion?

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

PupsOfWar posted:

it amuses me that they tried making a wargame out of honorverse

like

for wargames people a lot of the appeal is collecting all the different dudes and painting them to look cool (if supplied unpainted) or at least displaying them (if supplied painted)

40k is a bad game and a lot of the sculpts of the models are bad, designed to be slammed out in vast bulk by terrible injection molding equipment from the mid 90s. But the dudes who do it enjoy getting to paint up all the different bits and heraldry. This works very well with a gonzo setting where you can have mecha, exosuits, tanks, artillery, werewolves, dragons, and several different types of flamboyant space knights and space ninja, all in the same battle. This fundamentally is why all of the main wargaming settings are wild and colorful and anachronistic - people want a wide variety of things to paint and display.

you can't do this with honorverse since in honorverse all ships share the same fundamental shape

it is hard to imagine that people who like to paint & display models would enjoy this

what are they gonna do with fleets that are all just incrementally varying sizes of the same thing




i think its just a matter of being at the right age (around 12-13) in a physically and socially isolated space at the time when a lot of this stuff was coming out

there was a point when i was slamming down like 3 of these bad boys per week

it wasn't even that long a phase, but this type of book goes down so fast that a huge amount of content could be consumed during that time

Your picture doesn't work but I assume it's suppose to be the giant double-headed dildos that Weber calls ships.

Also I don't think the game had any real collecting at all. It was more tabletop along the lines of D&D IIRC. It's also where, I mentioned, the devs discovered that the ships were made of Styrofoam and like, a ship's description often had zero to do with reality, so you'd have a described lightly armed ship out-gunning a described heavily armed ship of the same type by a lot.

Aerdan posted:

At least the Andermani navy paints the ships' names on to their hulls; everyone else just puts the ship's catalog number on.


As I recall, that's the Solarian bureaucrats' interpretation of the plebiscites, not what actually happened.

Because obviously it's okay to be imperialist if they asked to join. /s

On the other hand, there's that whole 'split Silesia up between Manticore and the Anderman Empire' bit; the Silesians didn't get a say in that one.

I mean it's possible, though as you pointed out, Manticore really has no issue in forcing issues.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


PupsOfWar posted:

i think its just a matter of being at the right age (around 12-13) in a physically and socially isolated space at the time when a lot of this stuff was coming out

Also, Baen gives out huge amounts of free ebooks for their various authors so I read a whole drat lot of them. Sure, they're loving terrible, but I was broke and they were free. Their "Baen Free Library" has the first book for free from a lot of their authors series, and you can still go download the rips of their old promotional CDs and legally get 20+ free ebooks each by Drake, Fling, Ringo, and Weber, which covers several of their smaller series in their entirety and the first handful of books from their longer series. And they started this back in 2002, well before the advent of the e-reader. I remember reading several lovely Weber books in RTF format on my laptop, because they gave me free books and I was bored and broke.

They sell a lot of lovely books because they go out of their way to make it really easy to read their lovely books.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

Khizan posted:

Also, Baen gives out huge amounts of free ebooks for their various authors so I read a whole drat lot of them. Sure, they're loving terrible, but I was broke and they were free. Their "Baen Free Library" has the first book for free from a lot of their authors series, and you can still go download the rips of their old promotional CDs and legally get 20+ free ebooks each by Drake, Fling, Ringo, and Weber, which covers several of their smaller series in their entirety and the first handful of books from their longer series. And they started this back in 2002, well before the advent of the e-reader. I remember reading several lovely Weber books in RTF format on my laptop, because they gave me free books and I was bored and broke.

They sell a lot of lovely books because they go out of their way to make it really easy to read their lovely books.

This is actually how I got a ton of the Honor books. I lucked out as I never spent a dime on them as a result. Which would have been too much money. I saw a recommendation for the books because Honor was suppose to be a good female protagonist and then I read it and discovered that Weber literally only has two voices for his characters: Hero and villian.

Space Butler
Dec 3, 2010

Lipstick Apathy

branedotorg posted:

he has two series on amazon - which is better, Veterans or Bastard Legion?

Veteran is 'humans at war with nanomachine aliens, but humans were the real bad guys all along'. I prefer it to Bastard legion, which is the mercenary slave company one. Which is in the same universe but 100 years later starring the veteran protagonist's great granddaughter for no adequately explained reason.

There's a third, Age of Scorpio, which Amazon doesn't list as a series that involves three protagonists in three different times fighting the same war which tries to be a lot ore clever than it is.

I reads too much trash.

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009

Space Butler posted:

Veteran is 'humans at war with nanomachine aliens, but humans were the real bad guys all along'. I prefer it to Bastard legion, which is the mercenary slave company one. Which is in the same universe but 100 years later starring the veteran protagonist's great granddaughter for no adequately explained reason.

There's a third, Age of Scorpio, which Amazon doesn't list as a series that involves three protagonists in three different times fighting the same war which tries to be a lot ore clever than it is.

I reads too much trash.

You and me (and 90% of this thread) both

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009
I'm reading Janet Morris' Outpassage. It's about alien conspiracies and space troopers. It's not really milsci fi though. Oddly she apparently is a military contractor

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Khizan posted:

Also, Baen gives out huge amounts of free ebooks for their various authors so I read a whole drat lot of them. Sure, they're loving terrible, but I was broke and they were free. Their "Baen Free Library" has the first book for free from a lot of their authors series, and you can still go download the rips of their old promotional CDs and legally get 20+ free ebooks each by Drake, Fling, Ringo, and Weber, which covers several of their smaller series in their entirety and the first handful of books from their longer series. And they started this back in 2002, well before the advent of the e-reader. I remember reading several lovely Weber books in RTF format on my laptop, because they gave me free books and I was bored and broke.

They sell a lot of lovely books because they go out of their way to make it really easy to read their lovely books.

Yeah, I know the Baen Free Library exists, it was/is mentioned in the first re-quote of the OP since OP creation.
I was just staggered at the levels of recall Kchama + PupsOfWar HAVE regarding Weber, and their explanations..."came across it in preteens, devoured the offerings"...make sense now. Didn't get into reading mil-fiction or mil-scifi fiction until I was already in halfway through my time in the armed forces, and just viewed the offerings of Weber/Ringo/Flint/Turtledove/Drake as extreme fantasy fiction of the kayfabe genre.

Small Wars Manual 1940 is a legitimate US Marines publication featuring all the wisdom/stupidity acquired during the "banana wars" phase of the US Marines history.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Yeah, I know the Baen Free Library exists, it was/is mentioned in the first re-quote of the OP since OP creation.
I was just staggered at the levels of recall Kchama + PupsOfWar HAVE regarding Weber, and their explanations..."came across it in preteens, devoured the offerings"...make sense now. Didn't get into reading mil-fiction or mil-scifi fiction until I was already in halfway through my time in the armed forces, and just viewed the offerings of Weber/Ringo/Flint/Turtledove/Drake as extreme fantasy fiction of the kayfabe genre.

Small Wars Manual 1940 is a legitimate US Marines publication featuring all the wisdom/stupidity acquired during the "banana wars" phase of the US Marines history.

In my defense I try to read everything of something before passing judgement but Honor finally broke me of that I hate these books so much.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

I think 1632 is becoming my favorite thing out of Baen next to Vorko stuff. It's so optimistic and happy. :kimchi:

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

I think 1632 is becoming my favorite thing out of Baen next to Vorko stuff. It's so optimistic and happy. :kimchi:

I still stress don't read any of the collabs he does with, say, Weber. As they were extructiatingly bad. Like, Weber touching a topic like slavery is bad, but Eric Flint somehow made it even worse.

EDIT: Also I still can't get over how transparently duelling was set up in the Honorverse to make it legal for Honor to kill her domestic foes and not get in trouble with it.

EDIT2: I mean, yeah, Horatio Hornblower was in duels too, but the context was completely different. Hell the first one is when Horatio was a midshipman and set it up so he'd be killed, but the people who were suppose to do the set up sabotaged it so neither would die.

Hell, looking it up, I'm now 100% sure that Weber just watched the adaptations to make his Hornblower ripoff.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 8, 2019

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
David Drake has an Aubery/Marturin In Space series and its honestly 1000x better than Weber's attempt. It's not one of his 'working out PTSD' novels so it's not very bleak, and the space England the main characters are from is presented positively most of the time, but it's mostly seen from the captains perspective, who like Aubery is kind of a loving idiot and blindly patriotic so of course annexing these colonies is fine and good. It otherwise seems to come off as bad

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice
I hate 1632. Its just so....I dont even know how to describe it. Mike Stearns is always inevitably right, anybody who disagrees with him is an idiot or evil, and every early modern person inevitably sees how much more awesome Grantville values are than theirs.

It also just gets a lot of the early modern personalities wrong....it makes the Sazon dukes opponents of the Emperor when they were moderate Lutherans who were Imperial loyalists, it has Oxertina betray Gustafus Adolphus as part of a plot to preserve the traditional nobility when the real guy was fanatically loyal to the king and did a lot to open up the Swedish government to non-nobles, and so on.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

Larry Parrish posted:

David Drake has an Aubery/Marturin In Space series and its honestly 1000x better than Weber's attempt. It's not one of his 'working out PTSD' novels so it's not very bleak, and the space England the main characters are from is presented positively most of the time, but it's mostly seen from the captains perspective, who like Aubery is kind of a loving idiot and blindly patriotic so of course annexing these colonies is fine and good. It otherwise seems to come off as bad

I mean the problem is probably that Weber doesn't think it's actually bad to undemocratically seize other nations.

As long as you're a proper monarchy doing it anyways.

Relatedly, I'm honestly not surprised that the Solarian League only took a full book or so to fall because they were the paperest tiger to ever paper a tiger. It was a lot like the Safehold books where he wouldn't ever shut up about how Merlin is invincible and thus everything is more or less an inevitability, in Honorverse he wouldn't ever shut up about how the Solarian League was like, hundreds of years behind technologically and such, and one of his Pearls of Webers talk about how one of their 'modernization' efforts actually involved downgrading all of their ships to perform worse in every way so they can make them look cooler for the news cameras.

And of course they immediately break the Eridani Edict, which was like the only thing keeping them in power.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

Epicurius posted:

I don't know that this applies, exactly, because it's less about war than the lead up to war, but Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books are about a future society that, after a really terrible war that brought the end of nation states, has been at at peace for three centuries. The society, though, is breaking down, and war is coming, in spite of attempts by a bunch of people to stop it.

Three books have come out, with one more coming, and at the end of the third book, the war has just started

It might not be strictly military science fiction. The heroes aren't some plucky squad holding the line against alien invaders or whatever, but it is a series about war, and how war happens, and the whole set of choices, and compromises, and refusal to compromise that makes it seem like stuff is just steamrolling to war no matter how much you may try to stop it.

This is a really good point - I'd never considered these as MilSF, but they're an interesting counterpoint to the dominant MilSF style that focuses on operational and tactical issues and Hard Men. The Terra Ignota series is explicitly about the strategic and structural tensions that lead to war, and how social and political structures affect the individual perception of these tensions. It's really good, and the dialogue between that series and even good MilSF is an interesting idea.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Larry Parrish posted:

David Drake has an Aubery/Marturin In Space series and its honestly 1000x better than Weber's attempt. It's not one of his 'working out PTSD' novels so it's not very bleak, and the space England the main characters are from is presented positively most of the time, but it's mostly seen from the captains perspective, who like Aubery is kind of a loving idiot and blindly patriotic so of course annexing these colonies is fine and good. It otherwise seems to come off as bad

What's that....David Drake not working out his PTSD issues on paper? First thought to 6th and now 7th thought on this take were "Lies or maybe Larry Parrish just has a sweet spot for non-DavidWeber Aubery/Marturin stuff". Even Drake's Lacey stories, nominally about a Future detective-cop doing his job in FuturisticBigCity, were dark with an extremely, let me repeat that EXTREMELY hosed up main character in Futuristic-NotSaigon.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

Epicurius posted:

I hate 1632. Its just so....I dont even know how to describe it. Mike Stearns is always inevitably right, anybody who disagrees with him is an idiot or evil, and every early modern person inevitably sees how much more awesome Grantville values are than theirs.

It also just gets a lot of the early modern personalities wrong....it makes the Sazon dukes opponents of the Emperor when they were moderate Lutherans who were Imperial loyalists, it has Oxertina betray Gustafus Adolphus as part of a plot to preserve the traditional nobility when the real guy was fanatically loyal to the king and did a lot to open up the Swedish government to non-nobles, and so on.

It's so optimistic it becomes saccharine, yeah. It's just about the sweetest, most wholesome alternate history thing I've ever read, and I don't even care that Flint got some facts wrong. Give me more of good people being right and good, thank you, it's such a breath of fresh air after reading so much Warhammer stuff.

Also I would disagree that "every early modern person sees how awesome Grantville is" is true - a large chunk of this novel has been spent on the germans going "what the gently caress are they doing, they're insane. but they've got booze and guns so they can be insane" which isn't the same as "democracy is the best hell yeah" that I went in expecting.

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

It's so optimistic it becomes saccharine, yeah. It's just about the sweetest, most wholesome alternate history thing I've ever read, and I don't even care that Flint got some facts wrong. Give me more of good people being right and good, thank you, it's such a breath of fresh air after reading so much Warhammer stuff.

Also I would disagree that "every early modern person sees how awesome Grantville is" is true - a large chunk of this novel has been spent on the germans going "what the gently caress are they doing, they're insane. but they've got booze and guns so they can be insane" which isn't the same as "democracy is the best hell yeah" that I went in expecting.

I think the keyword was 'inevitably'.

Though I'm pretty sure there's like a dozen sequels. Can't say if any of them are good as I abandoned Flint after Crown of Slaves.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

Kchama posted:

I think the keyword was 'inevitably'.

Though I'm pretty sure there's like a dozen sequels. Can't say if any of them are good as I abandoned Flint after Crown of Slaves.

Fair point. Democracy is the best and they'll come around once the Americans have beaten it into them, obvs :v:

And yes: the very next sequel is co-written with Weber, so, uh, we'll see if my enjoyment of this book overcomes my desire to follow your warning to avoid Weber. There are also new sequels coming out - Flint keeps finding co-authors.

e: Oh and while the romances are sweet, they're also frustrating as hell because it's like the second a good man spots a good woman they fall instantly in love and are the perfect couple forever. Flint, please do not write romances again please please

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

What's that....David Drake not working out his PTSD issues on paper? First thought to 6th and now 7th thought on this take were "Lies or maybe Larry Parrish just has a sweet spot for non-DavidWeber Aubery/Marturin stuff". Even Drake's Lacey stories, nominally about a Future detective-cop doing his job in FuturisticBigCity, were dark with an extremely, let me repeat that EXTREMELY hosed up main character in Futuristic-NotSaigon.

It's the least bleak book hes ever written by a country mile man I'm not exaggerating. The universe still has a lot of lovely places, like a planet ruled by a pirate warlord where theres slavery, but it's not like Hammer's Slammers where everyone has nothing in front of them but pain and death

Like the short story from Slammer's where the psychopath XO has himself assassinated because he knows hes going to forever taint Hammer's government after he seizes control of his homeworld is probably the happiest ending of one of those I've read and it's probably equally as low as most of the novels from the space sailing series get

Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jul 8, 2019

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

Fair point. Democracy is the best and they'll come around once the Americans have beaten it into them, obvs :v:

And yes: the very next sequel is co-written with Weber, so, uh, we'll see if my enjoyment of this book overcomes my desire to follow your warning to avoid Weber. There are also new sequels coming out - Flint keeps finding co-authors.

e: Oh and while the romances are sweet, they're also frustrating as hell because it's like the second a good man spots a good woman they fall instantly in love and are the perfect couple forever. Flint, please do not write romances again please please

Yeah Weber's not gonna help there. Honor's boyfriend in... book 3 was it? Literally had all of their relationship be before the start of the book so they start off already in love. And as far as I remember he was a very minor character in the first book whose only on-screen anything was sabotaging the Domestic Foe Of The Book so Honor could steal his position.

He dies in the very same book he becomes Honor's boyfriend.

EDIT: Correcting self, he dies in the very NEXT book, but honestly I don't remember anything about him in book 3 then.

Kchama fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jul 8, 2019

PupsOfWar
Dec 6, 2013

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

What's that....David Drake not working out his PTSD issues on paper? First thought to 6th and now 7th thought on this take were "Lies or maybe Larry Parrish just has a sweet spot for non-DavidWeber Aubery/Marturin stuff". Even Drake's Lacey stories, nominally about a Future detective-cop doing his job in FuturisticBigCity, were dark with an extremely, let me repeat that EXTREMELY hosed up main character in Futuristic-NotSaigon.

there were a few years between drake finishing up the main line of Slammers stories and him starting Lt Leary

i think time, therapy, and the catharsis of writing Slammers and his horror fiction basically allowed him to get some of his issues curtailed enough to write something fun and lighthearted

both of his belisarius series (with stirling and with flint) are relatively lighthearted too, as war fiction goes (at least up until they endorse genociding pashtun tribes)
basically drake stopped being a turbo grimdark guy sometime around the mid 1990s

Kchama posted:

Yeah Weber's not gonna help there. Honor's boyfriend in... book 3 was it? Literally had all of their relationship be before the start of the book so they start off already in love. And as far as I remember he was a very minor character in the first book whose only on-screen anything was sabotaging the Domestic Foe Of The Book so Honor could steal his position.

He dies in the very same book he becomes Honor's boyfriend.

not quite accurate

that relationship happens mostly in The Short Victorious War (book 3) and the boyfriend is killed in Field of Dishonor (book 4)

honestly i feel that first boyfriend comes off fairly well relative to the subsequent weirdness of the honor/hamish romance subplot
low bar though
olympic-grade limbo bar

e: didn't see your edit

PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jul 8, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


PupsOfWar posted:

we're meant to root for the Talbot cluster being seized away from the League because these regions outlying the League are economically and politically exploited by the Office of Frontier Security in a host of different ways...which is fine right up until we're expected to assume Manticore would never do any such thing.

I think he was setting up Talbott to be the Space Philippines so Honor's friend Michelle could be Space MacArthur, before someone told him to wrap the story the gently caress up

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

1632: an American cheerleader/crackshot demonstrating her sniping skills for the King of Sweden with Tilly's officers as targets is the most unashamed nonsense I have ever read. God I love it!

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply